WARNING: SPOILERS 

After watching the Steve Martin doc a few months back, I wanted to revisit some of his movies and this seemed a good place to start. With the deep dive I’ve been doing into old films, I assumed I’d recognize more of the clips than I did back in the early 1980s when I first saw it. And I do … it’s just fewer than expected. It doesn’t help that the movie is a spoof of the 1940s hardboiled detective genre rather than ’30s gangster, and that it’s Universal rather than Warner Bros. But we still get Cagney and Bogie. Several Bogies, actually. 

Martin plays a private detective named Rigby Reardon. At first glance, that seems an odd spoof on the Sam Spades and Philip Marlowes of the world, but there’s a method to it. In “The Bribe,” Robert Taylor played a man named Rigby, and in “The Killers” Edmond O’Brien played an insurance investigator named Reardon, and both movies keep showing up here—particularly “The Bribe,” which includes the island of Carlotta, which is key to everything. So: Rigby Reardon.

But Martin is kind of wrong for the role, isn’t he? At the time, he was known as a wild-and-crazy guy, but subsequent roles, not to mention time, have revealed him to be its opposite: more lonely guy than anything. He’s a man who yearns to be in love. He's not hard-boiled at all. He's soft-boiled. He's runny inside. 

He’s also very, very right for the role. Because he’s very, very funny.

Tie-less
Example: When Alan Ladd shoots at him, Martin contorts his body, over-dramatically, to dodge the bullet, and I burst out laughing. I don't see anyone else doing it that way.

Some of my favorite moments are interactions Martin has with the classic movie stars—where he needles them in by-the-way fashion: telling Bogart to put on a tie rather than that “dumb way of wearing your shirt buttoned”; offering Alan Ladd a cookie and then seeing him nibble one in the clip: “Good, aren’t they?” Or this exchange with Charles Laughton at a tropical bar:

Laughton: We know who you are, Mr. Rigby.
Martin: I'm interested. Who am I?
Laughton: You could be a guy who collects 10,000 dollars just to leave this stinking town.
Martin: I could, could I?
Laughton: You know who I could be?
Martin: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame?

The plot is as convoluted as any plot in the genre—just slightly sillier.

Juliet Forrest (Rachel Ward at her va-va-voomiest) shows up at Rigby’s office with a low-slung Ingrid Bergman hat and her low-slung voice. Her father, Dr. John Forrest (George Gaynes of “Tootsie”), “philanthropist and noted cheesemaker,” is dead, and she thinks it’s murder. In Dr. Forrest’s lab, Rigby finds two lists—Friends of Carlotta and Enemies of Carlotta—and an autographed photo of the singer Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner). But then Alan Ladd pulls a gun on him and takes the list. Ah, but some of the same names are scrawled on a dollar bill left on the underside of a cookie jar at “Lost Weekend” Ray Milland’s place.

The movie keeps doing that. At one point, Rigby tracks down Kitty Collins, and we get the brooch-in-the-soup bit from “The Killers,” as well as the death of Burt Lancaster’s Swede Anderson from same. There’s stuff about a cruise ship, Juliet keeps showing up, and after trying to get several blondes (including Veronica Lake) to meet Fred MacMurray at the “Double Indemnity” grocery store, Rigby goes in drag.

Recurring bits: Rigby keeps getting shot in the arm, and he goes nuts when he hears the words “cleaning woman.” It’s a bit tired, but winds up essential to the plot.

The deus-ex-machina comes from Rigby’s mentor, the tie-less Marlowe (Bogie), who tells him that Carlotta isn’t a woman but a place—an island off the coast of Peru. There, he finds Dr. Forrest alive but held captive by Field Marshall VonKluck (writer-director Carl Reiner) and his band of renegade Nazis, who want his top secret cheese mold for bomb-making. One bomb goes off, eliminating Terre Haute, Indiana, which made me flash on Steve Martin’s “feud” with the city; and just when all seems lost, Juliet gets VonKluck to say “cleaning woman” and Rigby cleans their clocks.

Kinda fun, kinda clever, kinda meh. 

Further removed
There’s some good lines: “I planned to kiss her with every lip on my face.” And I loved Ward’s parody of Lauren Bacall’s famous whistle line:

If you need me, just call. You know how to dial, don't you? You just put your finger in the hole and make tiny little circles.

You know who really made me laugh? Reni Santoni as Carlos Rodriguez, the police officer Rigby meets in Carlotta. That whole pyjamas thing. Maybe the movie needed fewer ’40s clips? Here’s what in it:

After this, Reiner and Martin would team up on a spoof of ’50s schlock-horror, “The Man With Two Brains,” and it kinda was meh, too, and I’m wondering if Reiner was attempting his own series of genre satires the way Mel Brooks did with westerns, horror, silent, etc. Either way, it was the next Reiner-Martin collaboration, “All of Me,” where Martin finally broke through with both critics and audience.

The most dated aspects of the film, interestingly, aren’t the classic clips but the Martin-Ward “present.” When Juliet first arrives in his office, for example, she faints, and wakes up to Rigby molesting her. He claims her breasts shifted out of whack and he was merely adjusting them. The funny part is when he holds up his hands, as if in anticipation of them tumbling again, and says “There,” but today we wouldn’t get to the funny part. None of it would fly. All of which underscores the fact that we are now further removed from “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” (42 years) than “Dead Men” was from the oldest film it used (41 years).

Va-va-voomiest