GUMSHOE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Stephen Frears Debut Hardboiled Brit Kitchen Sink

Finney great as hardboiled schlub

Gumshoe (1971)
dir. Stephen Frears
Starring: Albert Finney, Frank Finlay, Billie Whitelaw, Janice Rule

Review By Greg Klymkiw

One of the most infuriating things is when a picture throws in everything, including the kitchen sink, and resembles a ratty patchwork quilt designed to comfort the posteriors of smelly hippies sitting on a cold, rain-soaked, mosquito-breeding patch of earth during some loathsome folk festival. On the other hand, there are patchwork quilts like Stephen Frears’s first feature Gumshoe which, like the work of a serious folk artist, is designed specifically for aesthetic scrutiny.

Frears’s long-form debut wanders between loving parodistic homage and straightforward detective drama – a picture that succeeds winningly in spite (or perhaps even because) of its desire to both comment on the form of detective fiction whilst being the thing itself. In this sense, Gumshoe comes close to satire, but because it doesn’t have a mean bone in its celluloid body (save for some of the roughing-up the genre demands) and never quite comes close to roasting the folly of humanity over an open fire in the Swift-like fashion we’ve become accustomed to, it doesn’t really earn the right to be called satire either. It earns the right, however, to be called a kick-ass picture that stays with you long after it’s unspooled.

Spinning the tale of clinically depressed schlub Eddie Ginley (Albert Finney) and his obsession to parlay a photographic memory of hardboiled detective movies into his own reality, Gumshoe uses every cliché in the Warner-Brothers-RKO book. Of course, so does Eddie, and he’s the one driving the narrative – a narrative where dream gives way to reality.

When we first meet Eddie, he’s undergoing therapy and working in a seedy working class Liverpool nightclub as an emcee, bingo caller and standup comedian. Longing to be part of the world of rumpled Humphrey Bogarts where he can merrily be dispensing wisecracks, justice and indulging in kisses and repartee with a bevy of femme fatales (and potential victims of the evils of higher powers), he’s a man in search of something, anything that can help him escape what a miserable drudge his life has become. Turning 31 years of age, Eddie treats himself to a want ad in the newspaper announcing his services as a gumshoe – a private eye for whom no job is too big, too small or too dangerous. Quicker than he can spit out a hard-boiled quip, he’s offered a seemingly routine job on a case that eventually extends well beyond its simple surface intrigue.

The convoluted mystery that follows is, like most mysteries, secondary to the world and style of the genre itself. What really sets Gumshoeapart is that Eddie’s just a regular Joe and most importantly, his stylized patter and adventures are set against a kitchen sink British backdrop that would definitely be more at home in the "Angry Young Man" genre of the early 60s where the likes of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Tom Courtenay and Laurence Harvey railed against the injustices of working class life, but seldom found a way to crawl completely out of the muck. Eddie’s character is certainly not unlike those abovementioned anti-heroes. His ex-wife Ellen (Billie Whitelaw), a woman he will always love, left him for his own brother William (Frank Finlay), a shipping magnate who offered the sort of stability Eddie could never provide and, even to the end, has no intention of ever providing.

And, of course, in any great crime drama, betrayal always cuts deeper than anyone involved in the proceedings could ever imagine and in Gumshoe, betrayal is laid on thickly indeed, pistol-whipping Eddie constantly in the face.

This is an incredibly strange, beautiful and compelling picture. I’ve avoided detailing too much of the mystery, not so much for the continual surprises it offers, but because there is a political backdrop that, while dated, seems to have as much, if not more resonance in our contemporary world of strife and the gradual discovery of this makes for extremely engaging viewing. Also, Eddie’s family situation is one that figures very prominently in the proceedings and this is an especially poignant touch.

Save for a clunker of a performance from Janice Rule (though she looks great) as a femme fatale, the movie explodes with great acting. Finney fits his role like a glove and frankly, it might be one of his best performances in a very stellar career. As his brother Willie, Frank Finlay is the icy epitome of familial meanness.

Neville Smith’s screenplay bristles with crisp hardboiled narration and dialogue and the characters are full of delightful eccentricities and subtexts that always add to the forward movement of the convoluted, but always compelling narrative. The cinematography by Chris Menges (The Killing Fields, The Mission) dazzles with its stunning virtuosity. Blending film noir stylings with garish kitchen sink realism, this is perhaps one of the picture’s greatest achievements. The lighting and compositions are in perfect tandem with the strangeness of the screenplay and the two worlds that are often separate, but occasionally blend together, is always a visual wonder to behold. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s weird-ass score that veers from parody to homage to out and out straight up romantic old-Hollywood stylings is occasionally jarring in the wrong ways, but more often than not, hits the notes it needs to.

And last, but certainly not least, threading this altogether is Frears’ bold, yet controlled direction. He clearly loves these characters and this world. And frankly, so do we.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ Three and a half stars

Gumshoe is currently available on the Columbia Pictures Home Entertainment DVD label as part of their “Martini Movies” brand, which seems like a convenient way to lump a grab bag of catalogue titles under one banner. Alas, the banner makes no sense whatsoever with respect to the vast majority of films contained under it.

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VIBES - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Sickeningly Unfunny Comedy w/sickening leading lady

Vibes (1988) *
dir. Ken Kwapis
Starring: Cyndi Lauper, Jeff Goldblum, Peter Falk, Julian Sands, Michael Lerner

Review By Greg Klymkiw

At some point in the development of this property, there might have actually been something resembling a good movie waiting to get made, but this dull, clumsy romantic comedy without laughs and dollops of Indiana Jones and Romancing The Stone is one of the most painful experiences I’ve ever had to endure in my many long years of slavish devotion to ingesting as many movies as humanly possible.

The movie that should have been good involves two psychics – one male and one female, with very different and ultra complimentary extra sensory skills who meet cute in a parapsychology lab and find themselves thrust together on a dangerous journey/mission and in the process, solve a mystery, nail the bad guys and fall in love. On the surface, this is, indeed, what happens, but alas the journey as rendered by director Ken Kwapis and the overrated screenwriting team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (Night Shift), requires the audience to nail its collective feet to the floor in order to actually sit through the picture in order to live to tell about it. The aforementioned simple storyline is a solid enough narrative coat hanger, but one needs a bit more than that to make a good movie.

First of all, one needs some cool shit to actually adorn the coat hanger with and the famed screenwriting duo do little more than dress it with the most dire, hackneyed events as the couple journey to a Latin American hell hole in order to help a crusty old rascal locate his missing son and find instead that they’re being used for more nefarious purposes.

An even greater sin is that the characters do little but exist beyond the status of cardboard cutouts. The male psychic has the ability to touch inanimate objects and both feel and see the people and events that have also touched the same objects. Not a bad idea, but the writers do little beyond using it as a mere and rather clunky device to move the story ever so conveniently forward. The female psychic is saddled with something far less interesting – she is endowed with a living voice in her head that imparts sage advice for her to impart, in turn, to others. This particular ability kind of renders the character as relatively passive and even the relationship between her and the voice in her head is not explored/exploited beyond being the most rudimentary of storytelling devices.

The less said about Kwapis’ lame, unexciting direction the better. He does little more than cover the action in the most basic manner. It’s vaguely conceivable that a director with some visual style might have rendered this tedious script with enough life to keep it at least watchable, but Kwapis, being a TV hack, is unable to do even this. Not that it’s surprising. One need only turn to the sort of feature work Kwapis did long after this film was made (The Beautician and the Beast, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and He’s Just Not That Into You) and realize that he’s only as good as the material he gets and even then, like a Garry Marshall and others of that loathsome lack-of-style ilk, he can’t turn excrement to gold and he most certainly has it in him to turn gold into excrement. Worst of all, he basically makes mediocre television for the big screen and there’s nothing more annoying than that.

Finally, there is the matter of casting. Jeff Goldblum as the male psychic is ALWAYS worth watching. His handsome, yet geeky facial features, his lanky physique and those magnificent bright eyes come close to carrying him unscathed through the mess that is Vibes. Alas, Goldblum must share screen time with one of the most loathsome leading ladies ever to find her way onto a movie set.

Pop star Cyndi Lauper, five years after she recorded the hit girlie anthem "Girls Just Wanna’ Have Fun”, was shoehorned into this film and she attacks her role with all the grace of a hippopotamus. In what possible world did anyone think that she was going to be even remotely palatable on a big screen? Needless to say, when a romantic comedy displays absolutely no chemistry between the leads, not even an eminently watchable figure like Jeff Goldblum can remain untarnished.

Finally, while it’s always fun to watch Peter Falk at his trademark crusty and crotchety best, he’s not in his finest form here and he really does seem to be sleepwalking through this picture, dreaming no doubt about his pay cheque.

Vibes is a perfectly abhorrent affair. I dare you to watch it without clutching, for dear life, to an airsickness bag.

Vibes is currently available on the Sony Pictures Home Entertainment DVD label as part of their “Martini Movies” brand, which seems like a convenient way to lump a grab bag of catalogue titles under one banner. Alas, the banner makes no sense whatsoever with respect to the vast majority of films contained under it.