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Private eye movies have even more gore

by Joseph Gelmis The private eye movie has always been about as subtle as a punch in the mouth. It's getting rougher.

mob helicopter. But at the ing and murdering-in fairly end of the movie, stars Bill Cosby and Robert Culp know

The plot, which Director boring, just unpleasant. The version of Raymond Chanexplicit scenes. Culp chooses to describe as a alternative? Black comedy, dler's "The Long Goodbye," Bogart may have needed a puzzle in which he gives the I suppose. starring Elliott Gould as a like cowboys in those shave or a woman's smile. audience one piece and they The movie I'm looking misfit-commentator who films about the dying fronBut Cosby and Culp are the have to supply two others, forward to is Robert Altdoesn't understand what's In the Sherlock Holmes tier-that their profession seedies, least attractive deals with the pursuit of man's ("M.A.S.H., happening. I sympathize school of sleuthing, the in"isn't about anyprivate eyes in any recent $500,000 from an old bank "McCabe and Mrs. Miller") with the character. vestigator was urbane, sarthing. .. there's nothing movie. Neither can hold robbery. The Dynamic Duo donic about the frailties of left." California legislation, marriages or relationships (they're not very lightheartmen, more cerebral than they say, will soon demote together. Cosby plays an exed and funny, incidentally, physical. The genre flour them to the status of process cop and Culp plays a heavy unlike their "I Spy” TV seished in America before servers. boozer who seems to be ries) are hired by a deviate World War II in an increassomewhat homosexual. to find a girl. The mob, ingly violent and sexual which has been cheated of context. the robbery money, is also looking for the girl. Dead bodies are strewn all over Los Angeles-from The Coliseum to the beaches-and the cops are always late, in the time-honored tradition.

con.

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For most of us, the high point of the private eye cine ma was Bogart as Sam Space in "The Maltese FalHe was cynical, an anti-hero, self-serving. Yet even with the few outbursts of (non-graphic) shootings and head-busting, the film wasn't really brutal.

Though "The Big Sleep" again capitalized on Bogie's perverse charms after World War II, the real success story of the era was Mickey Spillane's witless bruiser, Mike Hammer.

Whether it was the desensitizing effect of the war or just jaded sensibilities looking for thrills, the sadistic and macho private eye became the embodiment of all sorts of antisocial fantasies. James Bond was just an evolutionary step away-the international investigator with a license to kill.

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There have been in the 1960s a few private eye flicks-such as "Harper, with Paul Newman-that still tried to treat the genre seriously. But the private eye is out of his depth in the current scene of random mayhem, urban guerrillas, organized crime and supercops like "The French Connection" team, or the heroes of "Bullitt" and "Dirty Harry."

The present renewal of interest in the private eye basically has been a nostalgic tribute to Bogart (as in the absurdist "Gumshoe," in which Albert Finney pretends to be Bogart playing Sam Spade) or an adaptation of the genre for black audiences. But John Shaft, the black private eye, is at best merely a cartoon figure in the tradition of Mike Hammer and James Bond.

When filmmakers try to deal with the private eye in any kind of serious manner these days, he almost inevitably becomes a comic personality, a loser. an outsider and misfit whose time is nearly past. In “Mirag," for instance, Walter Matthau played, as I recall, an exrepairman who took a correspondence course to get his private investigator's license. He was earnest, inept and soon he was dead on his own rented desk, a telephone wire wrapped around his throat.

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The private-eye partners in Hickey and Boggs" which opened recently in New York manage to survive shootout's "and

even chine gun strafing from

"Hickey and Boggs" is a shoot'-em-up, not unlike the In his first film as directwo "Shaft" films. But it tor, Culp gets all those nittydoesn't glamorize its private gritty details-the hot dog eyes. The mob chief in Los meals wolfed down during a Angeles is the same stereohectic work schedule, with typed nouveau rich man of mustard left to be licked in power and supposed taste closeup off the corner of the that each of the films of this mouth-that suggest sordid sort romanticizes (though or street realism on the sunever persuasively). He is perficial level. But the acthe employer of "soldiers" tion itself is still farfetched who enjoy torturing, maimand crude.

"Hickey and Boggs" is depressing both as a thriller and as an example of a genre in decline. It's not

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