“Not a single tidy whitey, Paul?”
The Cheap Detective (1978) is a parody of a cross of two famous detective stories, The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1942), peppered with riffs on classic tropes, and laden generously with stars of the period, led by Peter Falk.
And that’s about it. The riffs carry the show, yet they don’t really reveal much more about the genre and its shared mythos. You laugh, but so quickly you forget.
