There is an ongoing debate in film circles as to whether or not Casablanca is noir. I know I’m on the fence and unwilling to commit to either side. 1978’s The Cheap Detective is firmly on the side that it is, as that is one of the two films it primarily parodies. The other is The Maltese Falcon.
I don’t think it would be necessary to see either film before seeing this but, like a Mad Magazine movie parody, it would improve the experience. Viewers should be at least familiar with some of the conventions and cliches of the detective genre.
Peter Falk stars as a detective clearly in the mold of Sam Spade, complete with his partner dying before hardly any plot is advanced. His corpse had been found sitting upright and the telephone receiver in which he had been talking still in his hand. That sounds gruesome, and it is somewhat, though it is made even more ludicrous by the long line of other corpses in the hotel which also have bullet holes in their heads: a desk clerk who was also on a phone, the still-upright elevator operator, the elderly couple next door with their ears still pressed to the wall.
Spade’s partner, Archer, had died in Falcon and, like that movie, Falk’s Spade surrogate here has been having an affair with his partner’s wife. This makes Falk a suspect in the deaths, though I’d say widow Marsha Mason is a more likely culprit, as she is already in black mourning dress only an hour later. She explains she got this from an all-night widow shop.
Also like Falcon, a great many characters are searching for a prized object, in this case is a necklace composed of twelve preposterously large diamonds. As analogues for that movie’s chief characters, you have John Houseman for Sydney Greenstreet, Dom DeLuise for Peter Lorre and Madeline Kahn for Mary Astor. In an especially odd touch, Kahn’s character changes names with nearly each of her lines, and a couple of those are real noir actresses, such as Norma Shearer and Barbara Stanwyck. These references didn’t even make me chuckle, or even smile, but I found myself nodding in acknowledgement.
As for the Casablanca part of the film, you get Louise Fletcher and Fernando Lamas as surrogates for Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid. No knock on Fletcher, but she will forever be in the collective consciousness as Nurse Ratched, and is impossible to mistake for Bergman. You also have Nazis, which is pretty funny given the introductory text says this picture takes place “in the fictitious city named San Francisco”. Nicol Williamson is in the Conrad Veidt part, as the head of the “Cincinnati Gestapo”. I don’t know how that even begins to make sense, or why I found it so funny, but that is the hardest I laughed during the runtime.
There’s even a third major element in the plot, though it doesn’t parody any one particular noir, to the best I can tell. This is the mansion of a decrepit old man played by Sid Ceasar and his much younger wife, played by Ann-Margret. It was good to see the latter somehow completely dial back the “Vegas sexy” shtick from her earlier film work while taking a parody of the oversexed trophy wife trope to 11. Ceasar mostly just hams it up\, though he got a solid laugh from me when even he is unable to pronounce his deeply preposterous and lengthy name.
It isn’t surprising to see this cameo by Ceasar, as we had already seen by that point in the runtime Phil Silver, Abe Vigoda, Eileen Brennan, Scatman Crothers, Vic Tayback, Stockard Channing and Paul Williams, in addition to the many other faces audiences of the time would largely have known from cinema of many years earlier, as well as television.
And a lot of the humor is suited for television. A running gag fulfills the promise of the title, with Falk stiffing cab drivers for tips, with such excuses as “war veteran” and “relative just died”. In the opening credits, he even lifts a dollar bill from the tambourine of a blind beggar girl. Some moments are only remotely funny because they reference a famous bit in a classic film, yet I still didn’t so much as chuckle as Brennan parodied the most famous line in To Have and Have Not with “You know how to dial, don’t you?” I did, however, laugh at this exchange between her and Falk: “I missed my boat.” “It doesn’t sail until tomorrow.” “I decided to miss it a little early.” One decent conceptual gag throughout the runtime is just the sheer number of femme fatales. But the humor is largely such completely tossed-off attempts as an office being at the corner of Third and Bulldyke. That is just…that.
That this was written by the author of such works as The Goodbye Girl and Biloxi Blues may surprise some people. But Neil Simon was also behind Murder by Death from two years prior, which skewered several variations of the detective genre in one go. That picture is funnier than The Cheap Detective for a few reasons, largely because it had more genres from which it could skewer their tropes. That the 1978 picture has Falk as roughly the same character he played in 1976 makes this feel like a sequel, even if it truly isn’t. That the same type of humor is in 1985’s Clue (which also starred Brennan and Kahn) gives the loose impression of a bizarre kind of trilogy.
Dir: Robert Moore
Starring Peter Falk and…oh, good grief, there’s about a dozen names in alphabetical order. Let’s just say a bunch of people you’ll probably recognize
Watched as of Mill Creek’s blu-ray box set Peter Falk 4-Film Comedy Collection