Bill Cosby is Hickey and Robert Culp is Boggs, two partners in a run-down Los Angeles private detective agency. They're swept up in a battle between two gangs over a stash of half a million dollars. The police hate the two private eyes because, as they investigate the case, dead bodies start turning up. A climactic shoot out on the beach involves two airplanes. The protagonists are the only survivors.
It's a confusing and twisted story, hard to follow, but the frustration is relieved by occasional minor that have some originality. Director Culp doesn't always give us a head-on shot of what's happening, but shows us the reaction of others so that we know anyway. And there is some humor, understated like the rest of the story.
Example of comic incident. Culp has been torturing himself by visiting the club where his divorced wife is a go-go dancer. He still loves her, while she enjoys seeing him in pain. "Eat your heart out," she sneers while uncoiling her hips towards him. Cosby drags him out, drunk, and takes him to a used car dealer to buy a car. The barely sober Culp reels to the nearest dented auto, clicks some switches on and off, and asked the smiling salesman, "How's it run?" Salesman: "Terrific." The salesman has his cigar almost back in his mouth but Culp instantly replies, "I'll take it," and the cigar is halted in mid-lift while the salesman gapes.
The two men pack .44 magnums in the last half of the movie, but, alas, they don't have the panache of Dirty Harry's Big Gun, which appeared a year earlier, nor do they make thunderous sounds or give any evidence of recoil when fired. They look like pea-shooters with extra-long barrels.
The fact that the story is almost too complicated to follow needn't be the kiss of death. Raymond Chandler was notorious and yet some of his work has been turned into winners. The thing is that Chandler usually had a narrator, Philip Marlowe, given to crude literary tropes: "Her hair was the color of gold in old paintings." Or, "My bank account could have crawled under a duck's belly." "Hickey and Boggs" has no narrator and, lacking a compelling plot, must be carried along by its performances and its atmosphere, a little like "Chinatown," but it doesn't pull it off. Both Hickey and Boggs seem exhausted and sweaty. Cosby and Culp work well together but their dialog lacks drama. They'd worked together for years on a TV series, "I Spy." There's nothing notable about the milieu either. The set dressings are no more than functional. The exteriors have only occasional scenes that hint at the summer heat and noise of Los Angeles -- the cars whizzing by on the freeways, the houses perched on cliffs, the ubiquitous Cal Worthington commercials on television.
In the end, after a nihilistic pronouncement, the two men walk away from the carnage with shoulders slumped. The viewer knows how they feel.
It's a confusing and twisted story, hard to follow, but the frustration is relieved by occasional minor that have some originality. Director Culp doesn't always give us a head-on shot of what's happening, but shows us the reaction of others so that we know anyway. And there is some humor, understated like the rest of the story.
Example of comic incident. Culp has been torturing himself by visiting the club where his divorced wife is a go-go dancer. He still loves her, while she enjoys seeing him in pain. "Eat your heart out," she sneers while uncoiling her hips towards him. Cosby drags him out, drunk, and takes him to a used car dealer to buy a car. The barely sober Culp reels to the nearest dented auto, clicks some switches on and off, and asked the smiling salesman, "How's it run?" Salesman: "Terrific." The salesman has his cigar almost back in his mouth but Culp instantly replies, "I'll take it," and the cigar is halted in mid-lift while the salesman gapes.
The two men pack .44 magnums in the last half of the movie, but, alas, they don't have the panache of Dirty Harry's Big Gun, which appeared a year earlier, nor do they make thunderous sounds or give any evidence of recoil when fired. They look like pea-shooters with extra-long barrels.
The fact that the story is almost too complicated to follow needn't be the kiss of death. Raymond Chandler was notorious and yet some of his work has been turned into winners. The thing is that Chandler usually had a narrator, Philip Marlowe, given to crude literary tropes: "Her hair was the color of gold in old paintings." Or, "My bank account could have crawled under a duck's belly." "Hickey and Boggs" has no narrator and, lacking a compelling plot, must be carried along by its performances and its atmosphere, a little like "Chinatown," but it doesn't pull it off. Both Hickey and Boggs seem exhausted and sweaty. Cosby and Culp work well together but their dialog lacks drama. They'd worked together for years on a TV series, "I Spy." There's nothing notable about the milieu either. The set dressings are no more than functional. The exteriors have only occasional scenes that hint at the summer heat and noise of Los Angeles -- the cars whizzing by on the freeways, the houses perched on cliffs, the ubiquitous Cal Worthington commercials on television.
In the end, after a nihilistic pronouncement, the two men walk away from the carnage with shoulders slumped. The viewer knows how they feel.