Ira Wells is spending his usual evening in a rented room in a house owned by a very pleasant old woman.
Wells himself is an elderly man. He drinks Alka seltzer not boilermakers and the most exciting thing in his life seems to be whatever is on TV.
His landlady says he has a visitor.
That's odd- he never has visitors. It turns out his old business partner Harry Regan.
In the hallway, Regan doesn't say anything at first. That's because the blood that then bubbles out of his mouth does all the talking.
Harry has been shot and despite Ira telling the landlady to call the police, Harry ends up dead.
At Harry’s funeral, a former associate Charlie Hatter shows up with a young woman, Margo Sperling.
It seems Ira used to be a private investigator . He’s essentially retired but Charlie is trying to interest Ira in taking Margo’s case.
So what’s the case? It seems Margo’s cat has been taken and she wants Ira to find her cat.
These are the opening scenes of Robert Benton’s wonderful 1977 Detective film The Late Show.
Written and directed by Benton and produced by the director of MASH and Nashville Robert Altman, The Late Show sees its main character Ira Wells opt to change his mind and take on Margo’s seemingly simple case.
In the course of the picture, Ira ends up getting beat up, shot at and led into a circle of deceit he probably would expected to see on TV and not experience in his normally boring everyday existence.
The Late Show is a dissection of the Detective genre not by trafficking in tropes and clichéd plot points but by creating an observant, thoughtful and at times touching story that at times has both fun with genre expectations and builds an effective and all too human drama.
The fun of The Late Show is in its ability to surprise an audience with characters that are the textbook definition of quirky such as the film's main antagonist Ron Birdwell, a modestly cheerful crook who sells a variety of stolen products- washing machines, shirts etc- from his pleasant home and always makes offers to Ira to give him free items. He sounds more like a TV commercial pitchman than a dishonest criminal.
Margo herself is a bit of a kook, a failed actress turned would be manager very much into astrological signs and omens who can talk as fast as an Olympic runner can finish a 50 yard dash.
The core of the film is Ira and Margo's relationship. It's the kind we rarely see in films even in the 21st century. It's a rather unlikely friendship between two loners, two outlier types. Two people who have been fine on their own but now form an unlikely duo.
Indeed both Art Carney who plays Ira and Lily Tomlin who fills out the role of Margo give superb performances here. Both were at the peak of their film careers when The Late Show was released in 1977. Carney had won an Oscar for Best Actor for Harry and Tonto more than a year prior and Tomlin had been nominated for an Oscar for her work in Nashville.
In The Late Show , Carney and Tomlin are at the top of their game as actors and take a terrific, sharp script by Benton and infuse it with life and a little gravitas.
Howard Duff makes the most of his tiny role as Harry Regan.
Bill Macy is very good as the slightly sleazy Charlie and Eugene Roche delivers scene stealing really scene chewing work as Ron Birdwell.
Even a pre-Blade Runner Joanna Cassidy is worth noting as Birdwell's cheating wife Laura.
The Late Show is the kind of film rarely made these days- a drama with comedic touches that focuses on the real flaws and foibles of people who normally would be minor characters serving bland, predictable heroes and heroines if this were any other movie.
It's a study of ordinary, uneventful lives touched briefly by the out of the ordinary but handled with a touch of style, a bit of wit and a lot of sympathy.
Retro Review consists of film criticism and reviews of Films from the distant and often not too distant past.
Retro Review is written by Albert Lanier who served as a film critic / reviewer for 8 years and was a contributor to the film site Ain't It Cool News. Lanier also freelanced for Hawaii Film & Video.
Lanier can be reached at imperiousreader@gmail.com