Burl reviews Call Northside 777! (1948)

 

Ring ring, it’s Burl, here with newspaper drama! Yes, ol’ Burl is a big fan of the newspaper genre – I really like All the President’s Men of course, and His Girl Friday, and Ace in the Hole, and I even found lots to like about The Paper – not least, ha ha, that it was a newspaper movie! And I’ve just watched one I’d never seen before, a little joint called Call Northside 777!

The title refers to a wee classified ad discovered in the paper by newshound P.J. McNeal! McNeal is played by James Stewart, well known from Thunder Bay and Rear Window, and, following up the ad, he discovers an old floor scrubber named Tillie Wiecek in despair because her son Frank has been in jail these last eleven years for killing a cop! Of course she claims he didn’t do it, and hopes her ad, and the $5000 in reward money she’s spent the past decade on her hands and knees earning, will help bring forth a witness who can clear Frank’s name!

McNeal is initially dismissive, not willing to give a cop killer the time of day! But as he digs into the case, and once he goes to the jail to meet Frank, who’s played very well by Richard Conte from Ocean’s Eleven and is an incredibly sympathetic character, he starts to think, hey, maybe this fella Frank is innocent after all! The great Lee J. Cobb from Gorilla At Large is McNeal’s editor, and, as the story starts to catch the public attention, he encourages his reporter to follow it up!

McNeal does so, occasionally going home to visit his wife, played by Helen Walker from Nightmare Alley and The Big Combo, where they sleep in separate beds as per bizarre Code rules and she makes him sandwiches when he has insomnia worrying about the Wiecek case! I guess he couldn’t make his own sandwich for some reason! McNeal gets on the trail of a witness called Wanda Skutnik, who proves to be just as unpleasant as her name, and he often returns to the Statesville prison, where an unbelievably accommodating warden accedes to his every request! Wiecek is at first justifiably angry about the negative attention the publicity is giving his wife and son, and demands that McNeal lay off! But this reporter is too dogged for that!

E.G. Marshall from Creepshow appears as the kindly (or as kindly as Marshall can manage) man whom Wiecek’s wife marries while he’s in prison so that their son can live a more normal life; and here’s where the movie really shines: in laying out the terrible difficulty of having a husband and father supposed by everyone to be a cop killer! You really feel for these Wieceks, and want Frank to get out of gaol and that post-haste, ha ha! But this movie is an occasionally long 112 minutes, so before that happens there’s plenty of time to watch all the details of how a polygraph test is administered, for example!

Because that’s the other thing: the movie is a gallery of all-new police techniques, like polygraph machines and forgery detection and photo enlargement processes, and a fantastic sort of proto-fax machine that whirls around like a lathe and sends pictures across the wire – but, ha ha, you have to develop them on the receiving end before you can see them! But they really wanted to keep it real for this movie, so when it comes to the lie detector scene, they got the guy who invented the gosh darn machine to play the fellow administering the test, and they take care to depict every intricacy! And McNeal, the newsman, is all the while asking the sort of questions any layman would, and getting detailed explanations of the technologies!

So there’s occasionally the feeling of watching an educational film or a sponsored documentary, but the olde-tyme tech aspect is really interesting, to me anyway! And, as I say, you get really caught up in the family’s situation, so by the time the boy is running toward his freed father, shouting “Daddy! That’s my daddy!” you may shed a happy tear! I don’t think I’m giving anything away to reveal that Wiecek is in fact proved innocent, but another thing about the conclusion, foregone as it may be, is that it doesn’t really follow up the hints of conspiracy and cover-up that are teased in the first half! I suppose we’re meant to take the railroad job done on Wiecek as just one of those things, and the subsequent cover-up as just what any sensible authority figure would do after committing a horrible blunder! Ha ha, some of the sensibilities are a little out of date, I guess, and this fealty toward authority is among them! But the movie has lots to recommend it, and Stewart is always good, so I give Call Northside 777 three linotype slugs!

Burl reviews Foreign Correspondent! (1940)

 

By the turning of the windmill, it’s Burl, here with a bit of Hitchcockery for you! Ha ha, this is Hitch in actionman mode, making a big old wartime crowd-pleaser with plenty of derring-do and get-‘er-done sentiment! It’s not the most finely-crafted picture old Alfred ever made, nor his most suspenseful, nor his most rollicking, but there’s a case to be made that, alongside North By Northwest, it’s the one that most effectively combines all these qualities! Ha ha, and the name of the movie is Foreign Correspondent!

It’s set in a very specific period of time, which I always appreciate in a movie! The thunderclouds of war have spread across Europe, and just about everybody knows it’s coming – and there are some shadowy figures, it seems, who want to hurry it along! But before we meet them, we are introduced to Johnny Jones, the putative hero of the picture, a Big Apple newsman who is the right guy to go find out what’s up in Europe, figures his editor, because (and the cop-phobic Hitch loved this no doubt) he once beat up a policeman!

It seems Hitch wanted Gary Cooper for the role, but he got Joel McCrea from Sullivan’s Travels and Ride the High Country! This disappointed the director, who found McCrea too affable; and you can certainly see why he’d want Coop for a two-fisted role like this! Maybe the fact that they were each known by nicknames made up of the first half of their surnames was an extra attraction to Cooper for the portly filmmaker, but who knows! Anyway, I like McCrea – his affability gives a lightness to the picture that helps keep it aloft, and he’s able to get serious when he needs to, as in the Thing From Another World-style coda!

It’s late August of 1939, and you know what that means - Nazis are about to make their move! When Johnny Jones arrives in England, he finds a dyspeptic colleague played by the great Robert Benchley (who also wrote some of the dialogue, or at least his own); the leader of some kind of peace party, Stephen Fisher, played by Herbert Marshall from The Fly; and Fisher’s beautiful daughter Carol, essayed by Laraine Day from The Story of Dr. Wassell! Malarkey of some kind is going on, and things only get weirder after a diplomat called Van Meer, who is instrumental in whatever chance there may be to stave off the Germans and whom Johnny is supposed to interview, gets himself shot in the face in a surprisingly brutal moment!

Johnny also meets the real hero of the picture, or at least I thought so, a debonair newshound called Scott ffolliott (and yes, ha ha, they address the lower-case double Fs), played by the marvelous George Sanders, whom we recall from Doomwatch and Endless Night, and from his own pithy suicide note! ffolliett is a real cool customer, an adventuresman who, it seemed to me, had as much of Hitchcock’s attention as the hero! After the famous windmill scene – well, relatively famous, probably cracking the top ten or twelve of famous Hitch scenes – and Van Meer has mysteriously returned, still played by Albert Bassermann from Alraune, Johnny is hot on the trail of the story, and so naturally it’s time for the movie to hang with ffolliett for a while! Yes, ha ha, it seems for a while that ffolliett (a relation to ffolkes, no doubt!) is the new hero of the movie, and one is not unhappy to have him!

There’s some great stuff here! Edmund Gwenn from Them! and The Trouble With Harry pops up as a hitman who maybe was a bit past his prime! And there are some terrific mugs in the margins, like Mr. Krug, played by Eduardo Cianelli from Strange Cargo, who tortures poor Van Meer with hot jazz music! The special effects and sets are simply top notch, and the plane-crash climax is a corker!

You can tell Hitch wasn’t too interested in the specifics of the peace process or the ginned up McGuffin here – ha ha, as McGuffins go, this is one of the director’s most transparently immaterial! It’s a weird mix of ripped-from-the-headlines reality and the sort of picture they were making in the lead-up to the war, where the evil country would remain pointedly unnamed, perhaps in the hopes of avoiding any kind of intercontinental rile-up! I suppose that’s because history marched on as the picture was being written and prepared, and all of Fisher’s mournful references to “his country” were left over from prewar days!

It’s a chaotic movie, but all of a setpiece by the end, ha ha! I’ve seen it a couple of times now, and it sure does hold up! The plotting is maybe not completely thought through everywhere, but it’s got it where it counts! I give Foreign Correspondent three and a half phonographs!

Burl reviews The French Dispatch! (2021)

 

Eh bonjour friends! Yes, Burl has returned to review another picture, and this is yet one more movie I saw on the big screen, to my great joy! I’ve been hitting matinees mostly, so there’s nobody around and things feel pretty safe, pestilence-wise! Ha ha, and for this particular matinee I went with an old pal, one of my very oldest in fact, and he’s probably a fellow I haven’t been to a movie with since the 80s or early 90s! That’s a long time! The picture was of course the newest Wes Anderson joint, the one generally known as The French Dispatch!

Like The Life Aquatic, it has an actual title that’s longer than I care to write out in full, ha ha, and like The Grand Budapest Hotel, it takes place mostly in the mid-Century Europe with which Anderson is evidently obsessed! Ha ha, I recognize a fellow enthusiast! And we know the picture tells the tale of the magazine after which the picture is named, which is of course based on the New Yorker and the staff and writers of that venerable publication!

Bill Murray, famous from Ghostbusters and of course many other Anderson pictures, from Rushmore on up, is every writer’s fantasy editor, indulging his scribes to a degree never seen in reality! (Though he’s not, it should be noted, the ideal employer if you’re a mere copy boy!) As a former newspaper editor myself, I appreciate the near-deification such a character is accorded simply by casting Murray to play him!

Life around the French Dispatch office, located in “Ennui-en-Blasé, France” (which name, thank goodness gets the bad French jokes out of the way quickly) provides the picture’s exoskeleton, and the meat of it is the three feature stories printed in the magazine’s final issue! First up is a jailhouse tale featuring Benicio Del Toro from Inherent Vice as Moses Rosenthaler, a near-feral prisoner accused of the gruesome attack-murders of three bartenders, who proves to be an accomplished painter once he finds a subject, muse, and lover in guard Simone, played by Léa Seydoux from No Time to Die! Adrien Brody from Midnight in Paris is the art dealer Cadazio, who champions the artist while ignoring his wolfman-like growls; this tale is related by correspondent J.K.L. Berenson, played by Tilda Swinton from The Dead Don’t Die!

Another writer, this one called Mrs. Krementz and played by Frances McDormand from Darkman, tells the next story! This one is set during a fictionalized take on the student uprisings of the late 60s, with Timothée Chalamet from Dune Part One leading the intellectual faction, meanwhile having his first affair with Mrs. Krementz and then his second with a pretty fellow radical!

The author of the third story is played by Jeffrey Wright from Only Lovers Left Alive, here affecting a Roscoe Lee Browne accent to play Roebuck Wright! His tale involves a kidnapping and the involvement of an accomplished police chef, and features Mathieu Amalric from The Forbidden Room as the police chief and Steve Park from Fargo as Nescaffier, the police chef! Ha ha!

Owen Wilson from Anaconda, Bob Balaban from Moonrise Kingdom, Henry Winkler from Night Shift, Christoph Waltz from Django Unchained, Fisher Stevens from The Burning, Liev Schreiber from The Daytrippers, Willem Dafoe from Streets of Fire, Edward Norton from Fight Club, and Griffin Dunne from An American Werewolf in London all appear in smaller roles, so it must be noted that the cast is a pretty thrilling one! More thrilling still is the wealth of detail woven into each of the stories as well as the wraparound business, and the pictorial amusements with which the picture is well stuffed! There’s some great model work, marvelous gags, and an animated sequence that perhaps goes on a little long! Ha ha, and if you’re at all a student of the New Yorker, its history, and its writers, you’ll get that much more out of the whole thing!

I must admit I thoroughly enjoyed myself at this movie, and do you know what? My childhood friend, Rob by name, did too, notwithstanding the lumpenproletarian that he is! Whether it all comes together in the end is more of a personal decision than a critical one, I think, but I myself had a terrific time, and so I give The French Dispatch three and a half pop stars named Tip-Top!

Burl reviews The Hudsucker Proxy! (1994)

Hi! My name’s Burl with my hair in a curl! I write the reviews that make you unfurl! Ha ha! I realize that doesn’t make any sense - no, I don’t even have curly hair! - but I’m trying to usher you all into the spirit of today’s review, which is for the Coen Brothers’ big-budget curio The Hudsucker Proxy!

Ha ha, it’s one of those movies a studio spent a lot of money on, but which is so out of the current of popular moviedom that you can’t imagine it ever making a penny at the box office! I certainly went to see it, you can bet your nellie, but the weekend it opened, March 11, 1994, Guarding Tess and Lightning Jack also opened, and both of those skunked Hudsucker, if you can believe it! But who remembers those pictures? Ha ha, nobody!

The story is laid in December of 1958, but its heart is further back, in the 30s! Inspiration is taken from screwball comedies and newspaper pictures with fast-talkin’ dames, and Frank Capra hovers over the production like a portly man in an angel costume, dispensing some It Happened One Night here and some Meet John Doe there!

Tim Robbins, the well-known presence from Tapeheads and Fraternity Vacation, plays Norville Barnes, fresh off the bus from Muncie and ready to conquer the New York City business world! And ha ha, there’s no bigger business on the street than Hudsucker Industries! He starts in the mail room, of course, where everybody starts; meanwhile, to the consternation of the Board of Directors, Hudsucker prexy Waring Hudsucker takes a dive out of the 44^th floor boardroom window - 45^th floor if you count the mezzanine!

For reasons, the board must find a dim-witted proxy to take over for the prexy until the close of the year, and naturally they find Norville, and events unfold from there! Cynical newshound Amy Archer, played with a Hepburn accent by Jennifer Jason Leigh from Grandview U.S.A., gets involved, as does the Hudsucker second-in-command perfectly essayed by disaster king Paul Newman, from When Time Ran Out and The Towering Inferno! Sure sure, ha ha! Charles Durning from Stick plays old Waring Hudsucker, who returns from the grave in angel form; John Mahoney from The Manhattan Project is Amy’s blustery editor; none other than Bruce Campbell from Army of Darkness plays her snap-brim co-worker; and Bill Cobbs from Trading Places manfully wrestles with the picture’s weakest conceit, the Wise Old Black Janitor Who Can Stop Time If Need Be!

Much of the picture turns on Norville’s great brainwave: the hula hoop, which he has drawn out as a circle to show off to people! “Would an imbecile come up with this?” he demands! Ha ha! The picture has a centerpiece sequence in which the newly released plaything languishes on shelves until an amazing kid picks one up and starts doing tricks! Hula hoop madness sweeps the nation, but still the story brings us, like Meet John Doe, to the ledge of a building at midnight!

The picture is filled with verbal and visual invention, and with game actors who give off the artificial dialogue with joyful aplomb! It’s all very artificial, of course, which creates a distance between the viewer and the narrative, but it’s also a snap-brimmed good time! It’s not one of the Coen’s strongest works, but it was still a lot better than most of what got released in 1994, ha ha! Yes, it’s better than Clifford! I give The Hudsucker Proxy three extruded plastic dinguses!

Burl reviews The Mean Season! (1985)

Why, stop the presses, it’s Burl! Ha ha, yes, I’m here with another review for you, this time of a mostly forgotten mid-80s newspaper thriller called The Mean Season! It was the first step into the Hollywood machine for its director, Phillip Borsos, who’d earlier made that fine Richard “Into the Night” Farnsworth bandit movie The Grey Fox! Like William Girdler, the young fellow who made The Manitou, Borsos was struck down at an all-too-early age, leaving his career largely a matter of speculation!

We can certainly consider The Mean Season as a pretty fair consideration of his authorial stamp, if he had one! Ha ha, I always think it’s a good test of a director’s skills to do a completely generic middlebrow thriller script like this, just to see what they do with it! Mostly they end up making completely generic middlebrow thrillers, ha ha, but not always!

Here we have Kurt Russell, well known from his role in Big Trouble in Little China, playing a newspaper reporter fairly characterized by his editor (played by Russell’s compatriot in The Thing, Richard Masur) as not having done the job long enough to be as burnt out as he thinks he is! At any rate, he and his ladyfriend, Mariel Hemingway, are about to pull up stakes and move to Colorado when, what do you know, a crazyman begins a program of murder and pulls Russell into his scheme by enlisting him as his “conduit to the public!” This means plenty of waiting around for the phone to ring and a great many laden phone conversations once it does! Meanwhile, shutterbug Joe Pantoliano snaps photos of everything he sees!

The cops, represented by Richard Bradford and a young Andy Garcia, seem engaged but at the same time curiously aloof! Eventually, after some help from none other than William Smith of Action U.S.A. fame, the killer is identified as Richard “The Hunt For Red October” Jordan, delivering a fine performance as the cunning but pathetic psychopath! There’s a kidnapping and a chase and a small twist later borrowed by The Silence of the Lambs!

On the whole it’s a story we’ve seen before! Helping it stand out a little bit are the many shots of heavy skies and swaying palms which presage the climactic hurricane; the accurate-feeling newsroom atmosphere (it seems closer to reality than The Paper, anyway!) and a pretty solid cast! There’s also a barely-seen Special Makeup Effect near the end, courtesy of cosmetician Craig “Dreamscape” Reardon! Ha ha, gruesome!

But it mostly stays doggedly within the framework of the Generic 80s Thriller! It never really takes advantage of the opportunities for suspense, and though it wrestles manfully with the ethical problems faced by Russell’s character, and isn’t afraid to show him being a jerk, there’s not much more to him than that, along with his much remarked-upon newspaper writing acumen, of course! It’s an okay picture and you could do a lot worse – ha ha, I certainly liked it better than other 80s pflugulens like Someone To Watch Over Me or Black Widow, for example – but on balance I think I’ll have to award The Mean Season two marvelous green Mustangs!

Burl reviews The Paper! (1994)

Extry, extry, it’s Burl, here to review a newspaper picture for you! Ha ha, yes, newspaper pictures are another subgenre I’ve always liked, and this one, Ron Howard’s The Paper, might well be the last contemporary broadsheet film that was ever or ever will be made! So that’s why I watched it – though it knew it not at the time, it’s a little piece of history!

It’s got a bit of an ensemble feel to it, ha ha, and also comes off like a workplace sit-com! The main character is Henry, played by well-known funnyman Michael “Gung Ho” Keaton, and he’s the editor of a tabloid paper in New York! Yes, it’s the type of paper that uses words like “straphanger,” “torso” and “slayfest” in the headlines, just the sort David Letterman warned us about! Somehow Glenn Close is working with him, carrying herself like she’s Anna Wintour, and the whole enterprise is bossed by good old Robert Duvall, famed for his role in Jack Reacher!

There’s a bother involving two businessmen murdered in Brooklyn, and the two innocent black kids who are scapegoated for the crime! Henry gets information hinting at their inculpability even as his paper is preparing to crucify the kids in the court of public opinion, ha ha! Then it’s a Race Against Time, as the proof must be confirmed before the true story can be run, and all the while various minidramas are popping like fireworks around the main plot!

The picture’s value lies in its magnificent temporal placement, which locates it as probably the most modern newspaper story that ever will be made! Just a couple of years before the Internet really became a thing, this is a movie where a truck drives past and hurls out a stack of the morning paper to chipper newsboys, like Sweet Smell of Success, or The Speed Reporter for that matter! Ha ha, it’s marvelous! And The Net would come out less than a year later! I found it an altogether wonderful period piece, except for the boring domestic stuff!

There are plenty of ringers and a few dingers in the supporting cast! Randy Quaid from The Wild Life and Christmas Vacation plays the most eccentric of the newspaper staff – he fires a gun in the office and receives only a mild reprimand – and familiar faces like Jack "D.O.A." Kehoe, Lynne “Streets of Fire” Thigpen, Jack “Inside Llewyn Davis” O’Connell, and of course Clint “Ticks” Howard and Howard pére, Rance, known for his bit part in Innerspace! The newspaper is of course owned by Jason Robards, enjoying a promotion from his All The President’s Men days! And Henry’s very pregnant wife is played by Marisa “The Toxic Avenger” Tomei, who in real life, I understand, loves traffic cones!

Ha ha, it got a few accolades on its release, but I found it rather cartoonish! Many of the situations and characters are stock, and it has a real Hollywood feel to it, without the grit of a true-blue newspaper movie, as I reckon them at least! Ha ha, but it’s professionally done, with some good moments sprinkled here and there; but mostly it’s the sort of thing that I suspect would play better today as a salty-tongued TV show! I give The Paper one and a half punchups in the print shop!

Burl reviews The Man From Planet X! (1951)

Attention Earthlings! It’s Burl here to review a movie about a most peculiar alien invasion! Ha ha, the picture is called The Man From Planet X, and it’s a production of that great dalyrimple Edgar Ulmer, director of Strange Illusion and of course the subject of Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen!

The Man From Planet X is mostly told from the perspective of a newspaperman sitting about the three-quarter mark in the story! Ha ha, do you understand what I mean? The picture begins with him writing his account of what happened on that fateful day (and never mind that he wasn’t around for a lot of it, ha ha!), and when he gets to the present moment of his narrative, the movie is still going!

The story is this: the newspaperman receives word from his friend, The Professor, that a rogue planet is going to come whizzing by the Earth, or maybe even hit it! The only place to be for this event is a remote Scottish island, which, according to The Professor’s calculations, is the nearest point on earth to where Planet X is going to whiz! Then an alien craft is sighted by The Professor’s daughter, and she also sees a crinkle-faced football alien, no taller than three bricks and a short refrigerator! The Professor’s nasty assistant, Dr. Mears (played by Joe Dante stock player William Schallert, known for his appearances in Gunslinger, Innerspace and Matinee, ha ha!), is interested in this, and would like to tear out every secret the spaceman has! And he does!

This is the kind of movie I like, with plenty of trudging around foggy, studio-bound moors, and a terrific model spaceship! The Man himself is a curious looking fellow: a homunculus with a giant oval head and squinty eyes! He doesn’t seem particularly threatening; and in fact this is the central question to the whole picture: what were his intentions? This is left up to the viewer to decide! We never find out, because the Man’s abuse at the hands of the nefarious Schallert gives the alien a pretty good excuse for acting hostile! His ultimate fate is therefore rather sad!

The great thing about the ending to the movie is the planetary swoop-by, rolling and tumbling over the astonished heads of the characters and causing a few rocks to be displaced! Sure, the special effects are of a rather low-budget nature and the falling rocks are stock, but that hardly matters because conceptually the scene is a genuine whiz-banger! It’s a terrific ending to a moody little bargain sci-fi pic, a picture about human nature as observed from without!

The movie is completely its own thing, which is a point much in its favour! The performances are strong, John “Psycho” Russell’s cinematography is low-budget luscious, and old Edgar gets his mild misanthropy plainly across! Altogether a fine little movie, and I give The Man From Planet X three too-easily-accessible breathing supply knobs!

Burl reviews The Speed Reporter! (1936)

Hi, Burl here with another dusty, creaky old B movie for you! This one is called The Speed Reporter, and it tells the story of a reporter so devoted to getting his story that he’ll face any danger at top speed and engage in almost any gymnastics you can think of to get it!

I’ll tell you this right up front: I love a good newspaper movie! This picture comes from the golden age of them, the same general era that produced The Front Page and His Girl Friday and even Citizen Kane! And even a bad newspaper movie has the power to entertain a broadsheet-minded fellow like ol’ Burl, ha ha!

I guess The Speed Reporter would qualify as a bad movie, more or less! The star of the picture, Richard Talmadge, was originally a tumbler by profession, and the movie makes a lot of room to show off his athletic skills, of that there is no doubt! But he’s got a weedy voice, of the sort we hear from Neil Sedaka in Playgirl Killer if you remember that movie; and a decided inability to deliver the roguish charm with which his poorly-written lines are meant to be laden!

But Talmadge sure can jump around! In accordance with almost every other role he played in his career, his character here is named Dick, and he works at the city desk of a big-city newspaper! His designation as a speed reporter is unmentioned but nevertheless well-earned, for the instant he hears about a possible story, he’s jumping out a window and onto the top of a passing truck in hot pursuit!

The story in this case involves a morality squad set up to police the city’s gangsters, but the squad has been set up by the gangsters themselves, with a milquetoast puppet executive installed as the head of the organization! Somehow the gangsters figure this will allow them to operate with impunity, but they’re not counting on Dick’s speed reporting!

Ha ha, Talmadge does some pretty impressive stunts, and he’ll never leave a room by the door if there’s a window closer by! And the movie is filled with these crazy, flailing fistfights between the indomitable newshound and various thugs and nogoodniks! Ha ha, the speed reporter will throw wild roundhouses, then flip his opponents over desks and chairs! Eventually the bad guys are rounded up and the speed reporter gets his scoop and a special bonus from the crusty editor so he can marry his special gal!

As I mentioned, this is not an especially good movie, but it sure manages to entertain! I’ll give it two amazing futuristic phone booths and recommend you give it a look!   

Burl reviews Fletch! (1985)

Hi, Burl here with a review of a comedy picture from the mid-80s! Of course I’m talking about Fletch, the movie that was one of Chevy Chase’s biggest hits that didn’t have the words “Vacation” or “Caddyshack” in the title! It’s a little better than most of Chevy’s movies, because it had a real director (Michael Ritchie) and a script that was based on an actual book!

Chevy plays Irwin “Fletch” Fletcher, the sort of investigative reporter who never seems to do any actual writing, or much interviewing, or any of the things you might reasonably expect a reporter to do! Mainly he dresses up in different costumes and pretends to be a wide variety of people, such as a goofy salesman, a goofy actuary or a goofy airplane mechanic! At one point, for no particular reason, he makes himself up to look exactly like his editor, Richard Libertini, dons a kaftan and goes roller skating on the beach!

A quick aside: the beach Fletch spends so much time at (he’s supposedly doing a story on how mind drugs are sold at the beach, which strikes me as requiring about the same investigative prowess as would one about water tending to make you wet) looks just like the beach they used in that great movie Blood Beach! Ha ha, I think I’ll review that one soon!

Anyway, Fletch gets hired by a millionaire to, supposedly, shoot him dead as a service so the millionaire can avoid a slow death by bone cancer and not have to commit suicide! This story seems fishy on its face, and Fletch picks up on that nearly as quickly as we the viewers do! And wouldn’t you know it, the Case of the Millionaire who Wants to Die and the beach drug story are tied in together in some obscure way!

There are plenty of little comic detours and lots of familiar faces in the cast list to get through before the case can be solved, however! You get M. Emmet Walsh as a doctor, Geena Davis as a newsroom assistant, Joe Don Baker as a horrible cop and Norm himself as a portly guy on the beach! Ha ha, lots of fine performers there!

There are amusing moments throughout, and maybe my favorite is the weird gargling noise Fletch makes when he sees M. Emmet Walsh through a window! But a string of amusing moments do not a compelling mystery make, and it must be admitted that Fletch is not exactly Murder My Sweet! I imagine the book must give a bit more weight to the complexities of the plot and a bit less to nutty costumes and comedy gargling! (I think I might have read the book, but to tell you the truth I can’t really remember!)

So in the end I give Fletch only two and a half novelty teeth, with the extra half for that great gargle alone! As mystery movies set in L.A. go, it’s about on par with The Big Fix, starring Richard Dreyfuss, but not nearly so good as, say, The Long Goodbye!