Last summer during Summer Under the Stars, TCM had a day of the films of Goldie Hawn, of which I recorded several, which I've blogged about over the past year. I think the last of the films I recorded is Foul Play, which I recently watched.
The movie starts off with a killing, as a priest who's living pretty comfortably decides to sit down for an evening of relaxation, only to get stabbed to death. We then cut to a party someplace just outside San Francisco, where librarian Gloria Mundy (Goldie Hawn) is. She's going to be a bridesmaid to the woman giving the party, but she herself is divorced and not so certain about getting back into the dating scene. She's happier right now living alone in her apartment with kindly landlord Hennessey (Burgess Meredith) and his big snake Esme on the ground floor.
On the way home, Gloria passes by a man whose radiator has busted, and needs a ride back to San Francisco. It turns out that the man, Scott (Bruce Solomon), is being chased because he has some secret evidence that the people following him want. He slips the evidence into Gloria's purse, and asks her for a date at a revival movie house to get that evidence back, not that he told her about it. However, he shows up late to the movie, and when he's finally there, he gets stabbed to death! Gloria tries to tell the managment about it, but somebody was able to get the body out of the theater with nobody seeing it.
However, these people did see Gloria, and they, in the form of an albino and a man called the Turk, start chasing her. Gloria is again able to escape, this time with some help from kinky Stanley Tibbets (Dudley Moore). But that's not good enough, as she gets back to her apartment where she's assaulted again, stabbing her assailant with a knitting needle although she doesn't kill him the way she thinks she does. Instead the albino does and takes the body away.
This time, however, Gloria has called the police, who show up in the form of Lt. Carlson (Chevy Chase), whom she had already met back at that engagement party, and his partner Fergie (Brian Dennehy). You'd think they'd find some strange blood as well as the evidence that Scottie had passed to her, but apparently not. Finally, after getting kidnapped, Gloria is able to convince the police that something bad is really happening.
This all ties back to the murder that we saw at the beginning of the movie. The victim was the Archbishop of San Francisco, who just happens to have an identical twin brother, Thorncrest (Eugene Roche). He and his partner-in-crime, Gerda (Rachel Roberts), are radicals who believe that organized religion shouldn't have tax-exempt status. Their ultimate plan is to assassinate Pope Pius XIII as he's sitting at the opera as part of his state visit to America. But can Gloria and Lt. Carlson stop this fiendish plot in time?
If you've been reading carefully, and as you watch, you'll probably notice a whole bunch of things that look a lot like homages to various Alfred Hitchcock movies, although this was done after Hitch's retirement. The more obvious relationships are to both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much, as well as Grace Kelly using a pair of scissors to kill her assailant in Dial M For Murder. But there's a lot more going on in Foul Play.
Most of the first two-thirds of Foul Play are serious in the same vein as Hitchcock, with some comic relief in the form of the Dudley Moore character (and the dark humor of a game of Scrabble). But the final third turns into something that's over-the-top zany and comic, and not just Hitchcockian dark humor. That having been said, this sort of zany humor works in Foul Play, in no small part thanks to the comic talents of Hawn and Chase. Using the hills of San Francisco for a car chase has been done to death and is done again here, but works well, helped out by some Japanese tourists who, well, you have to see for yourself.
Foul Play, while taking its inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock, isn't quite as good as the master's work. But taken on its own, it's a hell of a lot of fun.
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