He Needs To Watch For Vengeful Cabbies

The Cheap Detective is a parody of a host of Bogart's '40s films, with Peter Falk in Bogart's role, as gumshoe Lou Peckinpah. It's mostly The Maltese Falcon, crossed with Casablanca, but there are elements of The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not in there, too.

Peckinpah's partner is one of several people found dead in a hotel, and when it turns out Peckinpah was fooling around with his partner's wife (which we learn when she calls Lou to remind him of the fact as the police stand around her), Lou has to start investigating that. Then Madeline Khan shows up as a woman with something like 15 aliases, with some story about trying to find her missing sister. But really, she's after some rare eggs with diamonds inside. And so are two other fellows.

Then Peckinpah's old flame shows up with her French husband, who is on the run from some Nazis determined to not let him open a 2-star French restaurant in Oakland for French forced to flee their country. And it just goes from there. With any film like this, it's hit and miss. John Houseman does a pretty decent Sydney Greenstreet voice, but the suit they game him to be Greenstreet's size is a little too awkward looking. Deluise's Peter Lorre impression is fairly poor (my dad said he was portraying Lorre near the end of his life, rather than how he was in the films they're playing off). But Madeline Khan's always good, and there's an amusing scene when Marlene DuChard visits Falk, and he's trying to deal with a lot of other surprise guests.

Falk's a good center for it, though. He knows when to be surprised, to get noticeably exasperated, and when to be unruffled.  There has to be a delicate balance to that, because the sometimes the joke needs to be what the other character said or did, and sometimes it needs to be Falk's reaction. For the most part, I'd say he nails it. He can't really do the mean edge Bogart's characters could have, not believably anyway, so he mostly doesn't try. He's not mocking or snide towards Khan's array of names, or her attempts to play on his sympathy. He's more like a patient parent, letting the kid wear herself out. It gives her the chance to go over the top.

I think the movie could have been streamlined a bit, it feels like it starts to drag as the cast starts to bloat in the last quarter, but otherwise The Cheap Detective was a good movie.