I blogged about Foul Play back in July. Around the same time I wrote that blog post, TCM ran The Late Show, which I hadn't seen before. The cast and synopsis, however, made me think of Foul Play, so I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it to do the obligatory post on here.
Art Carney plays the private detective, or a retired one named Ira Wells. He's old and has a litany of health problems he'd be happy to tell you about, so he's now reduced to renting a room in a house owned by Mrs. Schmidt (Ruth Nelson). One evening, who comes knocking on the door but Ira's old partner from the detective agency, Harry Regan (Howard Duff in a very brief cameo). Unfortunately for all involved, Harry has just been shot, fatlly, in fact.
Ira goes to the funeral, and at the cemetery, who should show up by Margo Sterling (Lily Tomlin). She's a failed actress who now does dress design to make ends meet, although she's not making ends meet very well. She owes $500 to some guy and was unable to pay, so the guy kidnapped her cat Winston and is holding the cat hostage until Margo repays her debt. Margo had hired Harry to help find the cat; with him dead, could Ira possibly take the case in Harry's stead?
Ira does take it, as it will give him a chance to be young again. But of course the missing cat isn't really what's going on here; Margo could just as easily have had her macguffin kidnapped instead. When Ira presses Margo for details, it turns out that Margo has been making extra money as a courier, delivering stuff from one part of California to another. That "stuff" is actually stolen goods that are being fenced, and Margo took more than her fair share of the proceeds. No wonder the bad guys want their money back.
Ira gets the address of the head fence, Ron Birdwell (Eugene Roche), from tipster Charlie (Bill Macy), and goes to see Birdwell. He's got a particularly vicious bodyguard, and for good reason. Birdwell claims not to know anything about Harry's killing, and may well not. But he's also got a lot more happening under the surface that we don't know about. One is that his estranged wife Laura (Joanna Cassidy) has been stepping out on him. There's also a robbery of rare postage stamps that Birdwell doesn't want anything to do with because that's the sort of stuff that's really difficult to fence considering how few people would want to buy it.
With Ira being in poor health, and Margo really wanting her cat found, she decides to team up with him and accompany him on some of the parts of his investigation, which bugs Ira at times because she's not a professional and she's way too quirky for her own good. But, unsurprisingly, the two become friends along the way and she does have some help in solving the mystery.
To be honest, however, it's not really the mystery that matters here as much as it is the relationship between Ira and Margo. And that will probably color how you think of The Late Show. With someone like Lily Tomlin in the Margo role, the natuaral assumption is that this is going to be a comic mystery like Foul Play. And, to be fair, there are certainly parts that are straight up comedy, such as the running joke of Birdwell constantly trying to give Ira a good deal on fenced goods. Some of Tomlin's dialogue is also certainly written with laughs in mind. But the overall tone of The Late Show is a surprisingly dark mystery with some comic elements.
This may not work for everybody. Indeed, it took a long time for it to grow on me as I felt Tomlin's character veered too far at times into the "quirky" end of the spectrum. Eventually, though, everything did come together, so I can certainly recommend The Late Show. Just set your preconceptions aside before you watch it.
No comments:
Post a Comment