Year:  1977
Rating: 7.5

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This 1977 film is a tender (other than all the dead bodies) affectionate salute to two different genres - the obvious one to noir but also to the oddball buddy film. It lightly treads the same territory as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Ross MacDonald did in their books digging into the dirty underbelly of southern California where the desperate intersect with the wealthy who only have a sheen of newly purchased respectability about them. Like the protagonists of their books, the great Art Carney plays a retired private detective who is well past his prime with a gimpy leg, a perforated ulcer, a hearing aid and a general disdain for all things new. But he still has the same code as Marlowe, Spade and Archer did. When a friend shows up dying from a gunshot wound at your door, you find out who did it and pay retribution. Even if your feet hurt, you have to travel by public bus and you rent a bedroom in a little old lady's comfortable home.


The murder of his friend turns out to be tied up in another case that is brought to him by a kooky new age hippy middle aged airhead played with delightful vapidity by Lily Tomlin. She wants him to find her kidnapped cat. His friend had looked into this and got a bullet in his gut for his trouble. Carney goes down the same road (often with Tomlin at his side) full of cheating husbands, femme fatales, grifters, tough guys and killers because as Spade would have said that's what you do for a friend. Both Carney and Tomlin are great and the chemistry that slowly eases out between them is very sweet.