A decent comedy on pulp/noir style. Mickey Rooney is a little too broad for my taste, but Lionel Stander is perfect.

vastly superior to it's fellow noir spoof-er "gumshoe", making it an easily solid watch. the writing is spectacularly hilarious, and caine fits the role well, but the real stand out is rooney who happens to be awesome. give it a watch if you come across it, not many people have heard of it.

Includes many noir/pulp clichés in a peculiar way, including a guy who looks exactly like Bogart. And you gotta love quotes like: "All that reading had gone to his stomach. He was constipated with pulp and now it was coming out. All over me."

This is the sort of revamped noir that could be found with some regularity in the rule-breaking cinema of the seventies. Caine's drowsy take on detective work has some corollary with Elliot Gould's ambling private eye in the following year's The Long Goodbye. Unfortunately, the whole thing made me pretty drowsy, too. Director Mike Hodges brings a steady restraint to the film that is probably intended to be sternly grounded, but winds up just numbing.