I just watched The Cheap Detective tonight. It's a whodunit parody written by Neil Simon, and Peter Falk plays a comedy amalgam of 2-3 Humphrey Bogart characters.
The plot concerns...Nah, I'm not gonna go into that. Anyway, I laughed a few times, but I'm not sure it's really a success. In the early scenes, it's an off-kilter parody of The Maltese Falcon, and that works pretty well. But then after about twenty minutes it decides to send up Casablanca as well, and somehow it never recovers. I can't say it gets too silly, because it was maximally silly to begin with. Which is a shame, because Falk is a great lead, and Louise Fletcher is a surprisingly game comic actress.
2 comments:
Considering the fact Neil Simon had a pretty long and active career as a writer it's no surprise not all of his productions was successful. The Cheap Detective was apparently written as a follow-up to Murder By Death, an all star cast of famous detectives from fiction in a locked mansion on a stormy night. Maybe you've seen it, maybe we should watch it again. Anyhow, it sounds as though Neil Simon had part of a good idea with this one that he didn't manage to carry out.
Since we've been re-watching Columbo these past months one thing we've noticed is that there was very likely a lot of drinking going on. Peter Falk was a good actor, but once he had the character of Columbo in hand he began having fun with the persona and definitely some of his costars were drinking buddies. It would appear that Neil Simon also had a tendency to think he was funnier than actually was the case.
I have a vague but definite memory of having seen Murder by Death decades ago. I probably didn't have much grounding in what they were trying to parody, which would dim my appreciation of the comedy. Still, with Peter Sellers as the Charlie Chan stand-in and Elsa "The Bride of Frankenstein" as the Miss Marple analog it could be kinda fun. I do remember Truman Capote played the victim (the murder victim, I mean.)
It would seem that the early years of Columbo were the last time when you could be massively drunk on the set of your TV show and no one would think it was a problem. Provided, of course, that you could actually get through your scenes and hit your marks. That kind of environment can sometimes keep people loose and creative but often leads to dissipation of energy. Maybe that's part of what happened here too.
Post a Comment