dimplet
If this is what some reviewers consider great writing and acting, my cat has a script you should read. A seventh grader with spell check coulda written this script. There wasn't a single funny line in it.Hey, I love Peter Falk, and when you put him together with Sid Caesar and the rest, it shoulda been a blockbuster. Maybe in 1968 this would have been considered funny, in 1958 it would have been considered daring, but by 1978 it seems hopelessly hackneyed.Yeah, I get it, I get it, it's a spoof of all those Bogey films, but with all the subtlety of a rubber sledgehammer. How about something clever, like vamping on Peter Lorre's walking stick, or getting caught in the rain, or what Bogey really wanted to do in that used book store with the clerk? If you insist on watching this, I suggest you put on a pot of strong, black coffee. You're going to need it.
D_Burke
The idea of "The Cheap Detective" was to be a spoof of the Humphrey Bogart classic movies "Casablanca" (1942) and "The Maltese Falcone" (1941), both of which were arguably Bogart's most famous movies (if, perhaps, you don't count "The African Queen" (1951)). It showed a lot of promise with it being written by the brilliant Neil Simon, who wrote such great plays as "The Odd Couple", "The Sunshine Boys", and "The Goodbye Girl" to name a few. The aforementioned plays also went on to become great movies as well. However, despite the accomplished team behind the also funny "Murder By Death" (1976) (including Simon, director Robert Moore, and some members of the cast), "The Cheap Detective" felt flat and uninspired as a comedy.I could not find any information about how this film did when it was originally released in 1978, although I'm sure "Murder By Death" did better. However, there was another famous big-budget movie with an all star cast that was also released in 1978 which failed miserably. That movie was "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", and I think (although I don't know for sure) that "The Cheap Detective" failed for similar reasons."The Cheap Detective", like "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", had a noticeably large budget, an all-star cast, and all stars working behind the scene too. The problem for me with "The Cheap Detective" was not the writing so much as the delivery of the lines from the main actors. I love Peter Falk, and I think he's usually great in whatever movie he's in, even if it's "Corky Romano" (2001). However, half of the time I couldn't understand what he was saying, almost as if he took it upon himself to impersonate Humphrey Bogart instead of just playing a hard-boiled detective. This spoof movie is very dialogue-heavy, and relies very little on physical gags, and there's nothing wrong with that. After all, recent spoof movies like "Meet The Spartans" and "Disaster Movie" was almost all physical gags, and those movies were just rotten! That being said, if your laughs come solely, or mostly, from dialogue, you have to make sure the audience can actually understand what you're saying.While the rest of the cast was not as difficult to understand, many of the lines failed miserably upon delivery mostly due to poor timing. It's surprising too, because there were comic actors in this movie who are still considered comic legends, such as Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers, Dom DeLuise, and Madeline Kahn. Although these actors shined in other classic comedy films (especially DeLuise and Kahn, who were great in Mel Brooks movies of the time), their attempts at comedy here felt weak.Another big problem with the movie was the supporting women in it; the vixens if you will. With Madeline Kahn, Stockard Channing, and (especially) Ann-Margret being the primary exceptions, the other women in this movie weren't especially attractive. It sounds very pig-headed of me to say this, but attractive women as vixens create a necessary tension which makes more room for comedy in these kinds of situations. It's difficult to explain entirely, but regardless, these other women seemed wooden and delivered their funny lines with even less accurate timing than the comic legends. Eileen Brennan seemed very out of place in this movie, and came out looking like Jessica Rabbit's grandmother. This movie seemed to try to deny her age entirely, and try way too hard to make her a convincing leading lady. Needless to say, she failed.Above all, spoof movie or not, movies work best when a story is being told, and when you care about the characters portrayed. Bogart's movies worked well because of those elements. This movie did not. There was just too much going on, too many cheap gags, and bad timing on the lines. My guess was that Neil Simon was surrounded by a bunch of "yes" men during the writing of this film, as was the rest of the cast. Someone should have been the objective person on the set and said, "This is not really as funny as it should be. Let's try it this way instead". I'd be willing to bet that if Simon and Moore collaborated with Mel Brooks on this film, it would be considered as timeless as "High Anxiety" and "History of the World Part I" is today. I'm not a big Hitchcock fan or history buff personally, but I still found both of those movies very funny and very enjoyable even after multiple viewings. Not this movie, though. I can't quite recommend it.
Daniel Kincaid
"The Cheap Detective" is a hardboiled detective comedy film written by Neil Simon. Specifically, it borrows a lot of its plot from "Casablanca" (1942) and "The Maltese Falcon" (1941). There are a few references to "Chinatown" (1974) as well and most importantly a lot of humor injected in.Peter Falk effectively plays Lou Peckinpaugh as a humorous send-up of Sam Spade and Rick Blaine. I enjoyed the other performances as well, particularly Nicol Williamson as a character parodying Major Strasser from "Casablanca" and John Houseman playing a character very similar to Kasper Gutman from "The Maltese Falcon". The only character that could have been better was Pepe Damascus, in a Peter Lorre type role, played by Dom DeLuise.This film is funny in several respects. The dialogue is amusing and often emulates and parodies the snappy dialogue of "Casablanca" and "The Maltese Falcon". Since the plot is cobbled together largely from those movies, there are a number of scenes like a humorous modification of the "La Marseillaise" scene from "Casablanca". Simon added a number of amusing complexities, sometimes nonsensical, into the script as a parody of the complexities in "The Maltese Falcon". Overall this film was consistently funny from start to finish. I recommend "The Cheap Detective" as a satire for people that enjoyed "Casablanca" and "The Maltese Falcon".
