A half-deaf, half-lame, and fully retired private detective, at work on a memoir entitled Naked Girls and Machine Guns, is sucked back into a world of plentiful corpses when his former partner turns up at his door, drooling blood. This type of elegy to the obsolete gumshoe is a pretty tiresome extension of the genre (over-the-hill detectives are not as integral to the mystery story as over-the-hill cowboys are to the Western). Art Carney, however, appears to entertain some fairly deep feelings for his character -- that is, he appears to find nothing particularly quaint or comical about him. On the other hand, Lily Tomlin, as the mouthpiece of the Now Generation, seems to regard her character as just another kooky persona to add to her already sizable repertoire; and Robert Benton, the writer-director, evinces a campy delight in Tinsel Town tackiness and B-movie clichés. The muddily photographed and sketchily plotted mystery that Benton has contrived for this occasion speeds along in a blur; it conjures up few of the meanings of the highest-grade private-eye tales, while it dredges up many of the absurdities of the lowest-grade (the cadaver in the refrigerator, for instance). (1977) — Duncan Shepherd
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