The Cheap Detective

Spoofing the entire 1940s detective genre, and his own performances as a bumbling private detective, Peter Falk plays Lou Pekinpaugh, a San Francisco private detective accused of murdering his partner at the instigation of his mistress, the partner's wife, Georgia Merkle (Marsha Mason). Police ...more

Most of Neil Simon's work is in what might be termed traditional comedy, but in the mid-'70s, he made a couple of detours into parody, as in The Cheap Detective. Though not a classic film, it's a nice change of pace for Simon, and played into the then-current trend toward spoofing film genres (e.g., Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, and Simon's own Murder By Death). The plot is extremely convoluted, as befits a spoof of the hard-boiled private eye picture. Simon can't quite maintain the rapid ...more