Dead Men Can Wear Whatever They Like. They're Dead

I received Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid in the same batch of movies as Dark Star and The American. I asked for it for the same reason: It sounded interesting, but not interesting enough for me to spend my own cash.

I feel I miss something with Steve Martin. Outside of very limited circumstances, I rarely find him funny. I'd generally settled on the idea that I missed his prime, that by the time I regularly saw things he was in, he wasn't making his best stuff anymore. Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid is from 1982, so I figured it might be more representative of his best. I'm thinking that was an error in judgment on my part.

The movie is a play off old detective movies, with Martin in the role of the private investigator hired to look into the death of the beautiful dame's father, a noted scientist who perished in a car accident. Or was it? So it's not an imaginative plot, but that's hardly a deal breaker. There's certainly comedy that could be mined from it.

This film's approach though, is to have Martin's character interacting with character's from much older detective films. So he calls Marlowe on the phone, and it cuts to footage from a Bogart film. Or he's trying to interrogate a woman, and his questions are set up to match dialogue Barbara Stanwyck had in some other film. I didn't find it funny, and it mostly seemed like a crutch. They couldn't come up with enough one-liners, gags, or fake character development to fill 85 minutes, so we got this. Huge disappointment.