Peeper

A movie that recently showed up in the FXM rotation is one I hadn't heard of before, Peeper. It's going to be on again tomorrow, twice, at 3:00 AM and at 1:30 PM.

Michael Caine plays the titular "peeper", which is just 40s slang for a private detective, named Leslie Tucker. He's working in Los Angeles circa 1947, when in walks a man named Anglich (Michael Constantine). Anglich says that he fathered a daughter 30 years ago, but that the mother gave the daughter up for adoption, while he moved off to Florida to try to make a living. It turns out that Anglich was quite successful, which is why he's come back to Los Angeles. He wants to find that daughter he gave up, so that he can write her into his will or give her some of the fortune outright. All Anglich has to go on is a picture outside a house.

It looks like a pretty big house, and Tucker quickly figures out that the house is in Beverly Hills, owned by the Prendergast family. The family has two daughters who seem to be about the right age, Ellen (Natalie Wood) and Mianne (Kitty Winn), along with their uncle Frank (Thayer David). Tucker visits to figure out whether either daughter actually is the one in question, and along the way he falls in love with Ellen.

But not so fast. Tucker returns to his office one evening, and finds that Anglich has been killed. And then he gets a package as well as a visit from Ellen. They are then visited by a pair of thugs, Sid (Timothy Carey) and Rosie (Don Calfa), who are obviously trying to kill Tucker for whatever is in that package. Tucker and Ellen escape, and then some time later they both make their separate ways to an ocean liner for the movie's ultimate climax.

Peeper was designed as a comic homage to the noirs of the 1940s, and in some ways it doesn't do too badly. Caine and Wood are both unsurprisingly good at this sort of comedy, and the movie is visually quite stylish. There's also on odd openin credits, which are spoken by a Humphrey Bogart impersonator rather than the more traditional opening credits. However, I found the plot to be incredibly convoluted to the point that it was tough to figure out exactly what was going on. Perhaps I needed to be paying better attention instead of watching it at night.

I would, however, give Peeper a recommendation in spite of its flaws. The movie doesn't seem to be on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the FXM showings, which also include a couple showings next Monday.