Word: shamuses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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BLACK EYE. Dim days on the private-investigator scene: a shamus named Stone, cashiered from the force for strangling a dope dealer with his bare hands, lights out after a kinky killer who has disposed of the whore upstairs. Stone (Fred Williamson), who is black, is helped along by a friendly detective (Richard X. Slattery) who is white, and tormented by thoughts of the slinky number on the first floor, who is bi. Stone is made to feel unduly stuffy because the sight of his girl (Teresa Graves) with another woman makes him queasy. She sets him straight, though, without...
...SHAMUS...
Burt Reynolds must be the first actor ever to have been influenced by a television star. In Shamus he often seems to be doing Johnny Carson impressions, as if too many appearances on the Tonight show have left him with a chronic case of mimesis. "Healthy devil, aren't you?" he murmurs to a top-heavy ingenue, who promptly melts at his wit. 'Thought we might do a little skindiving," he suggests to a hat-check girl, who replies, "Bring your snorkel...
...plays it straight enough of the time to keep kicking Shamus along at a reasonably swift rate. Reynolds is a randy private detective from Brooklyn named McCoy, who is hired by a rich businessman to recover some stolen diamonds. The whole business is pretty shady, and McCoy gets roughed up or punched out in every scene where he is not bantering with or bedding a society type (Dyan Cannon) from Sutton Place. The plot makes no sense, although it tries. It all ends with one of those tenuous solutions that raise more questions than they actually answer...
...movie was Reynolds' own deliverance. Overnight he became the Frog Prince of Hollywood. He made two more pictures in breathless succession, Fuzz and the forthcoming Shamus. Last week he was on location in Little Rock, Ark., shooting McKlusky with Director Joe Sargent. Sargent admires Reynolds' "ballsiness and talent" and says, "He has the same kind of craft as McQueen and Newman...