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The private dick and the snatch case, as Chandler would have it, "it might grow up to be a dirty story." The opening credits roll over satin sheets and there tastefulness ends, the camera pans across a dingy office to find the roly-poly shamus (Allen Garfield, like a missing link between Edgar Kennedy and Ron Jeremy) riding the first of many bombshells. (He's called away for the new investigation, she finishes herself off with a stars-and-stripes vibrator.) The Big Sleep's blackmailed general is here a moneyed reprobate (David Kirk) off the Brooklyn waterfront, the incriminating snapshots become a stag reel of a zesty foursome. The mystery dame (Madeleine Le Roux) is gangling, toothy, and bawls watching The Bride of Frankenstein, she deflowers the hero's nephew as the national anthem blares on a flickering telly. "Whaddya call that—is that fucking, or getting fucked?" A merrily scuzzy New York variant of concurrent British noir parodies (Frears' Gumshoe, Hodges' Pulp), John G. Avildsen's shaggy joke on "a rotten, dangerous, stinking profession." (The Joe scene is visible, acid-heads and hippies and silver-haired preverts in the hotel room while a bullet-riddled whodunit unfolds next door.) The missing Green Beret, the coughing cop, the dead lay. "Will somebody please get this prick out of me?" Bulbous and scraggly nudes in a detailed study, just a soupçon of grime on Wesselmann spreads, Lloyd Kaufman in the corner takes notes. The straw fedora comes off the slob's dome for the happy ending, "it's enough to make you wanna wear a bra!" With Devin Goldenberg, Debbi Morgan, Pamela Gruen, Marcia Jean, Mel Stewart, and Paul Sorvino.
--- Fernando F. Croce |