Word: simonize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Cheap Detective--Neil Simon keeps those pots boiling with another patently bogus ploy to unite famous detectives and get them to satirize themselves. Peter Falk is no Bogey, however, and nobody else is who he is supposed to be either. The plot is some clone of the Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep and whatever else. Puffed up with hocks and the usual empty calories that Neil Simon spoons out so handily this might better have been titled The Big Turkey or The Maltese Sleep. Go see the originals...
...main ingredients, Neil Simon has boldly blended The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, adding some finely chopped bits from The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. He was shrewd enough to realize that it was not the story lines of his sources that gave them their hold on our affections. Bogart's incisive, ironic characterization of the urban loner, the Hemingwayish dialogue and the film noir look that gave Warner Bros, films their unique quality in the '40s, the forcefulness of the studio's stable of character actors-all of these elements combined to create...
Alas, the picture does not come off because execution does not match conception. Simon's literary palette is as lacking in delicate hues as Director Moore's visual one. It is bold to plunk Rick's cafe down in Sam Spade's San Francisco. It is even mildly funny to have Victor Laszlo require his wife's old lover to help him get not letters of transit so he can escape the Nazis but a liquor license so he can open a French restaurant in Oakland. But when the song that reminds Rick...
Director Moore tries to disguise the laziness of Simon's effort with a quick step pace, but Peter Falk, although he does a good imitation of Bogart's snarly lisp, tends to give the game away by resting on that modest achievement. Few of the other "all-stars" do much more than trace a broad Crayola line around fa miliar types. The Cheap Detective offers a few snorts of recognition and a basically good-natured air. But frankly, they did this sort of thing just as well, and a lot more quickly, on the Carol Burnett Show...
...Time for Truth, Simon...