Peter Falk reteams with writer Neil Simon and director Robert Moore following their triumphant whodunit "Murder By Death", playing the Humphrey Bogart role in a satire of 1940s film-noirs, surrounded by wharf-front broads, Nazi villains and low-rent killers. The large cast is filled with game players, but Simon's screenplay just doesn't have enough snap--and too few laughs to make the plot more involving. Falk is effortlessly hard-boiled, but the surrounding situations are lackluster. Eileen Brennan gets a good chuckle as a chanteuse and Ann-Margret is very funny as a sultry double-crosser, but Louise Fletcher (in the Ingrid Bergman/good gal role) doesn't have the chops for comedy and Marsha Mason seems a little confused as to how seriously she should play her role as the widow of Falk's dead partner. If the filmmakers really wanted to emulate the movies from the past, perhaps they felt too much lowdown, vulgar comedy might cheapen the nostalgia; if so, they forgot that comedies are generally supposed to be laugh-getters and not just lightweight affairs. ** from ****
Review of The Cheap Detective
