Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!
The Cheap Detective
Release Date: June 23, 1978
Cast: Peter Falk, Madeline Kahn, Ann-Margret, Eileen Brennan, Dom DeLuise
The Buzz: If you loved Murder by Death, perhaps you’ll tolerate The Cheap Detective.
Keywords: Sequel, Second Part, Detective
The Plot: Apparently The Cheap Detective doesn’t have much of a following, seeing as it only has three IMDb keywords and two of them are wrong. This is not actually a sequel to Murder by Death, in which Peter Falk played the Sam Spade-ish detective Sam Diamond. Here Falk plays the Sam Spade-ish detective Lou Peckinpaugh. See – totally different thing. It is true that both films were written by Neil Simon in his wacky mode (as opposed to his more popular treacly mode), and Detective is clearly intended to capitalize on the success of the earlier movie. A mash-up spoof of both The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, it’s set in San Francisco on the eve of World War II. Peckinpaugh is a private eye whose partner has been murdered, along with a bunch of innocent bystanders. Since Peckinpaugh had been carrying on an affair with his partner’s wife Georgia (Marsha Mason), he’s immediately a suspect. Georgia is only the first in a string of unlikely femmes fatale who get Peckinpaugh in and out of trouble through the course of the movie. There’s also Eileen Brennan as sultry saloon singer Betty DeBoop, Louise Fletcher as the stand-in for Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa from Casablanca, and Madeline Kahn as the ludicrously evasive Mrs. Montenegro. Somewhere in the convoluted tangle of events, Peckinpaugh also gets involved with John Houseman and Dom DeLuise as a Sydney Greenstreet/Peter Lorre pair looking for a dozen valuable diamond eggs.
The Test of Time: Compared to the typical zany comedy of today, The Cheap Detective is far less crude – but that’s not the same as saying it’s more sophisticated. What passed for a shocking sight gag in 1978 – like Kahn accidentally flushing her husband’s ashes down the toilet – wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in the age of the execrable The Love Guru, in which grown men do battle with urine-soaked mops. Simon is taking his own shot at his Your Show of Shows colleague Mel Brooks’s brand of lowbrow parody, but seems unwilling to really get down and dirty. He and director Robert Moore assembled a month’s worth of Hollywood Squares stars for the supporting cast, including Abe Vigoda, Vic Tayback, Paul Williams, Scatman Crothers, David Ogden Stiers and James Coco, but to no avail. The Cheap Detective settles for cheap laughs, from a Chinese character named “Won Fat Ching” to groaners like “Oh, Georgia, I had you on my mind.” Falk does his best Bogart impression, which sounds a lot like Columbo.
Quotable Quote: “I wasn't talking to you, Schnell, I was telling him to go faster.”
2008 Equivalent: A spoofy spy story that really did originate with Mel Brooks, Get Smart.
Previously on Summer of '78: Jaws 2