Auf leisen Sohlen

A Liverpool bingo caller of the 70's enlivens his dull life by taking on an old style private detective alter-ego. Complete with raincoat and accent!

This is one of my favourite cult movies and this might be a good chance to try and look inside my own mind and find out why. Leading with the negatives, this film has a few ideas, but not enough to make a full film out of them. If you feel that some of the scenes are padding (quite a lot actually) then you are right!

Finney fancies himself as a kind of Sam Spade let loose on a Liverpool of the 1970's (interesting to see it like it was in the 60's) and we enter the slightly seedy world of the working man's club. Something that those outside of the UK will find hard to grasp -- a kind of cheap private drinking hole meets low rent cabaret.

The real problem is that the thing is weakened by non of the parties (especially the lead) seeming to be taking the case seriously, which means that while he is in limited danger we are more yawning than sitting on the edge of our seats.

What makes it for me is the fast word play of Finney and the general irony of the script in going in to places that fashion says we shouldn't be going. It leads up to a giant feeling of so-what -- but I like to see movies that are a bit different and it always holds me in its strange faded and seedy grip. Maybe it has something to do with having been to these sorts of places myself.

Produced early in Stephen Frears's nearly forty-year career, "Gumshoe" is an affectionate take on the Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler film adaptations that were popular in the 1940's. The movie is great fun, and Bogie aficionados will be especially pleased, if they can decipher the often-impenetrable British accents. Like "The Big Sleep" and other films of the private-eye genre, the plot is a series of seemingly unconnected events that, in this case, almost literally come together at the denouement. The smart banter between Bogart and Bacall echoes in the breathless quips that Albert Finney and Billie Whitelaw trade in some of the film's best moments. A Sydney Greenstreet wannabe is known simply as the fat man, and a dangerous beauty in the persona of Janice Rule is the requisite duplicitous fatale.

As handsome as he was in "Two for the Road" a few years earlier, Finney appears to be having fun as Eddie Ginley, an English Sam Spade. He has the appropriately rumpled demeanor and looks good in a trench coat. His deadpan film-noir-style narration enhances the 1940's feel, although, despite the gritty color, the film cries out for the velvety light and shadows of black-and-white photography. Short, entertaining, and well made on all counts, "Gumshoe" is a minor gem that merits more attention. The film predates "Prick Up Your Ears" and "My Beautiful Laundrette," the director's two breakout films from the mid-1980s, and, after the success of "The Queen" in 2006, viewers owe themselves the pleasure of discovering the talent on display in Stephen Frears's early efforts.

Eddie Ginley is a Liverpudlian who works as an announcer and caller at the local bingo hall. However he has tired of his current profession and decides to take out a small ad marketing himself as a private eye. Almost immediately Ginley finds work coming his way in the form of a packaging containing £1000, a gun and a photograph of a young woman. Unsure quite what is being asked of him, Ginley tries to get answers but just finds himself getting in over his head very quickly.

An interesting concept is not really that well delivered in this erratic and inconsistent film. The story lifts the genre traditions of the Sam Spade style detective novel and places it down in early 1970's Liverpool. This culture clash offered an interesting film but sadly it is the lack of certainty about what it is trying to achieve that ultimately lets it down. At times it is quite engaging in regards the mystery but then at other times it seems to be not taking it seriously and happy to have it as a canvas for making genre gags. It gets stronger in the final third but up till then it doesn't engage in the way as true detective story of the genre should do. The chance to see Liverpool as it was back in the late sixties/early seventies is welcome but I didn't think that the two cultures were worked into one another that well – it seemed the film was content to leave the juxtaposition as a gag and nothing more.

The cast work surprisingly well with this and they try and play it for what it is the best they can. Finney leads the cast well but is weak when the material is weak; his changing accent bugged me to some degree but playing the case hard saw him becoming more what the genre requires. His support is mostly good because they fit in with the sectioned tone well – really it is Finney that suffers more than anyone else because he has to try and fit in with each scene.

Overall this is more a curio than a good film in its own right. Not till the final third does it decide how it wants to play it for sure and as a result it is mostly uneven and hard to get into. I did enjoy the pace and grit of the final third but I did wonder why it was left so late in the game to pull it all together and get moving.

The 70s. You had to be there.

The cheap production standards of the 50s were an attempt to mass produce films the way you would would mass produce shoes. The 60s was an experimental era the same way the children of the 60s were experimenting with everything they could get their hands on.

By the 70s films had become more contemplative. The folks behind this little gem decided it was time somebody wrote a script that captured the very essence of the film noires from the 40s.

Notice I emphasized the script first, because the rest seems almost an afterthought. Make no mistake. Finney is brilliant as the protagonist comic who wants to be a shamus, a gumshoe, but without that magical script there would be no movie.

The script is brilliant. You could turn the picture off and simply listen to the soundtrack and not miss much. ITS THAT GOOD.

One scene in particular where Eddie has to seduce an office girl to get an address seems a riff off Bogey in BIG SLEEP. But with better and faster dialog.

The fact that even the IMDb tag for the film says "comedy" -- WHICH IT WAS NOT -- tells you how lost this gem is in the annals of film.

Whitelaw is great. Janice Rule steals her few scenes.

Recommended.

I recently saw this film again for the first time since it came out, on a big screen, and had an opportunity to chat a bit with Steve Frears about it. It stands up very well to the passage of time, but the whiff of sixties Britain coming from the screen is very strong. I think we had all forgotten quite how grotty things were back then. People were still putting coins in gas meters and thinking that chow mein was Chinese food. So GUMSHOE has now become period. Why, I never. But there it is, it has joined Powell and Loy in the cabinet of yesteryear. And so it is all the more appropriate that in this film, Albert Finney sits reading a propped up paperback copy of Dash Hammett's THE THIN MAN as he eats his breakfast cereal. Where is Asta the dog? Well, now, down to cases, and I mean criminal cases. Albert Finney is a Walter Mitty fantasist who refuses to work in his brother's prosperous export business and instead lives on the dole, having forfeited the love of a good (?) woman played by Billie Whitelaw, who married his brother instead (an insidious Frank Finlay who is up to no good). But wait. Whitelaw keeps coming around and professing undying love for Albert. What is going on? She wants to stay overnight but asks where could she sleep, as Albert sleeps in a narrow cot. He says she could always sleep in the bath tub. Perhaps she was one of those gals of whom a chap could say: 'She'd scrub up nicely.' Meanwhile, Albert, under the influence of Humphrey Bogart (of whom he does imitations), and frenzied with love for THE MALTESE FALCON, puts an ad in the Liverpool paper (yes, he is a Liverpudlian) saying his name is Sam Spade and he is a private eye but will not accept divorce work. He is immediately contacted by 'the Fat Man', given a thousand pounds (a lot of money in those days), a photo of a woman, and a gun. It is a curious sort of gun, a .38 calibre revolver with only five chambers. There may be some numerological significance in this lack of a sixth chamber, especially as later in the film Aleister Crowley's face stares at us from the wall of the Atlantis Bookshop in London as if he knows what happened to the missing chamber. And for those of you who know Museum Street, you will be aware that there not only was a real Atlantis Bookshop, but it is still there. I don't like it because I don't like black magic. Albert, being a very kind-hearted person, does not understand that he is meant to kill the girl in the photo, who is a scholar at the University of Liverpool (a sinister place, home of Ian Shaw, who only leaves his coffin after midnight). So he looks her up and chats her up. Albert Finney plays this weird, innocent and intrepid character to perfection. His ability to pull it off means that the film works. It would have been so easy for a film like this walking the tightrope of comedy and murder to fail. Albert could have gone plop as he fell off the wire. But no, he is too sure-footed for that. It is a miracle that a first-time director could succeed in such a hazardous enterprise. But then Frears was well apprenticed under Karel Reisz on MORGAN: A SUITABLE CASE FOR TREATMENT, which was an even more bizarre mixture of comedy and tragedy, starring David Warner (who once pushed my friend Lucy Saroyan down the stairs, for which I have never forgiven him). There is a really serious criminal enterprise going on, of which Albert becomes dimly aware, assisted by the fact that people keep getting killed, so as one would notice. His brother is shipping guns in crates marked 'gardening tools' to Mozambique. Now, who would do a thing like that? Mozambique is so yesterday. But then, this is a period film, and there were different rebels then. The ice maiden Janice Rule (who six years later would be the ominous non-speaking third woman in Altman's 3 WOMEN) sends a chill down Albert's spine as she tries to deal with him. But even the most evil schemers can get nowhere with a Liverpool Prince Myshkin. Albert decides to find out what is going on, as it becomes clear that heroin is the game. His encounter with a young and sensual Maureen Lipman at the Atlantis Bookshop is a treat, as she assures him that the best time to see her is just after closing time, as 'I blossom in the evenings.' But the best scene in the film is when Albert encounters the young Wendy Richard and they exchange machine-gun rapid one-liners, he doing his very best Bogart, and she maintaining the most perfect taunting insouciance. I praised this scene to Frears and he agreed that she was 'absolutely brilliant', and it became clear that he loved the result of it very dearly indeed. Frears is very self-effacing and finds it hard to be praised. He looked pretty dazed that everybody still liked GUMSHOE all these years and 22 feature films later. But it is a gem.