REVIEWED BY WALTER ALBERT:         


DEAD MEN DON’T WEAR PLAID. Universal Pictures, 1982. Steve Martin, Rachel Ward, Carl Reiner. Archive footage: Alan Ladd, Barbara Stanwyck, Ray Milland, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Veronica Lake, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Edward Arnold, Kirk Douglas, Fred MacMurray, James Cagney, Joan Crawford, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price, William Conrad, Charles McGraw, Jeff Corey, John Miljan, Brian Donlevy, Norma Varden, Edmond O’Brien. Co-written and directed by Carl Reiner.

   [The most disappointing film of the summer of 1982] for me has been Carl Reiner’s 1940s pastiche, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. I thought the opening, as Rachel Ward, looking smashing, faints on private eye Steve Martin’s office stoop, was a perfect beginning to what I fully expected to be a delightful ninety minutes, but expectations have seldom been as cruelly dashed as they were for me on that unhappy Wednesday afternoon.

   After experiencing some momentary pleasure at the sometimes skillful blending of cuts from classic and not-so-classic forties film with the narrative, I began to feel hostility toward the tricksters who had hoked up some splendid film clips and was downright angry with Carl Reiner’s outrageously bad and unfunny Nazi impersonation that closes the film.

   Or almost closes it. The end credits in which the familiar faces and films from the past were identified was fun and suggested to me that this might have been a good idea for a very short film but was a very bad idea for a feature-length one.

   Both Martin and Ward were fetching, Miklos Rosza had written a good pastiche of his own style, and the black-and-white photography was refreshing.

   I think that part of my dissatisfaction with Dead Men was the fact that within the last month I had seen a batch of films noir. I saw them under the best and worst of circumstances: with a small group of film people in a University Media Center screening room where we sat on what felt like stone seats.

   I had either not seen many of the films or had not seen them in thirty years, and for several of the other viewers it was a first viewing of what is just a sampling from it very rich period, 1945-1955. I am not going to review all of the eight films in detail, but I want to list them and re-port on some of my impressions.

— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 6, No. 4, July-August 1982.

Editorial Comment:   Coming Soon!