Ira Wells (Art Carney) was a hotshot private detective, but now he's an aging man renting a room in an elderly widow's home, when his old partner shows up, gutshot. At said friend's funeral, Ira's approached by an old acquaintance. With him is a Margo (Lily Tomlin), who wants to hire Ira to rescue her cat from a guy who is threatening to kill it if she doesn't pay him the $500 she owes.
She offers Ira $25, though he's more annoyed she's hitting him up for this at a funeral. Ira's more interested in digging into what his pal was investigating when he was shot, but finds that thread leads, at least partially, to the cat-murderer. Which means he keeps having to interact with Tomlin.
Carney would have been near 60 when the film came out, but Ira looks a lot older, the result of three decades' worth of shamusing. Essentially, he's supposed to be what your typical '40s noir private dick becomes if he lives into the 1970s. Myriad of health issues. Still able to take a punch or give one, but not for nearly as long. Still calls women, "doll," to Margo's annoyance. Most of his old contacts on the police or his snitches have died or moved away.
There's an element of frailty to the performance, but Carney plays Ira as someone who hides weakness beneath annoyance or anger. When Margo asks why he doesn't chase a guy who shot at them that's fleeing on foot, Ira barks at her that it'd be a good way for him to fall over dead, and how far did she think he'd get with this leg? He limps, presumably from a old wound or injury, but tries to use it as a weapon to keep people at bay.
Tomlin plays Margo as flighty, focus shifting from one thing to another in a heartbeat. She says she didn't get anywhere as an actress because she's not good a pushing herself out there, but I think it's meant to be more she didn't really want to be an actress. It didn't mean enough to her to really try. Neither does the dressmaking and designing, or selling weed, or delivering goods that are probably stolen but she doesn't care because they're just material possessions.
But for as freaked out as she gets about all the shooting and the dead bodies that start cropping up, she seems to get into digging into this case with Ira. Even after she gets her cat back, she wants to stick with it, and him. I don't really see the chemistry, and even Margo points out at the end Ira rarely says anything to her (though it might be hard to get a word in edgewise around her.)
I was grateful Ira explains everything in the last few minutes, because I had very little sense of why all these people were turning up dead. It doesn't help that most of them die before we ever see them. You don't get to see what these people were doing previously, what their personalities were like, which made it difficult for me to have a sense of how they might connect to one another. Most everything is Ira finding another corpse and making guesses, but I don't think the mystery was the important part, even to Ira. He's only really pursuing it at the start to learn why his pal got killed.
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