Word: spading
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...hard-boiled masterpiece on his first feature assignment for Warner Brothers. Like Welles, Huston grew up around the greasepaint. And like Welles, Huston came to films with a gleeful yet prodigiously discriminating eye for characature and atmosphere-creating jargon. He handles Humphrey Bogart perfectly in the role of Sam Spade--by letting Bogart do Bogart, but without the "sentimantalist" soft spots of Rick in Casablanca or the nervousness of the hunted criminal in Petrified Forest. Bogart is nothing more nor less than leather-skinned in this role: cool, jaded, manipulative. Dashiell Hammit included a last scene in his book during...
...Wells (Art Carney), who has outlived his day. He is discovered existing in a rented room on Social Security, watching old movies on TV while his attempt at an autobiography languishes in the typewriter, just one paragraph written. Then his old partner (played by Howard Duff, who was Sam Spade on the radio in the old days) arrives gut-shot at his door, dies in his arms, and Wells takes over the case his friend was working on. On its face, it is not much: Duff had been trying to recover a kidnaped cat for Lily Tomlin, who plays...
...slow, believable way she al lows Carney's realism, his low-keyed contempt for such nonsense, to win her over. It may be a trifle too much for the film to suggest at the end the blooming of, as we now say, "a relationship" be tween them. Spade or Marlowe would have let her go. It may be that Benton is occasionally a trifle too aware of his own cleverness. On the other hand, he has made a first-class entertainment out of material that has defied other modernizers...
...football fan who doesn't call a spade a concave instrument for delving or flensing whale blubber knows that the New York Giants and Jets are sleep-walking through the NFL season and show little sign of regaining consciousness...
Drawing freely from the classic characters of the whodunnit genre, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Miss Marples, Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles, and Earl Derr Biggers's Charlie Chan are refurbished by Simon and his all-star cast, and introduced as Miss Marples (Elsa Lanchester), Milo Perrier (James Coco), Sam Diamond (Peter Falk), Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie Smith) and Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers). These, "the world's greatest detectives" have been brought together under one roof at the invitation of Mr. Lionel Twain, a fiendishly eccentric, rich, and rather repulsive...