Peeper

I like this film. It has a bit of the old 40s, late 30s private eye aspect to it but Michael Caine in his unmistakable London accent puts a new twist on the tale, which includes the very lovely Natalie Wood. the film never clicked and it's now relegated to the back of the pile, no video, no DVD and something that might show up on the late show. But, hey! I liked it and suggest you check it out if it comes across your viewing circumstances.

Michael Caine is a PI in Los Angeles just after the War. Michael Constantine comes to him and asks him to find his daughter. He had put her in an orphanage in 1918. When he had come back three years later, she had been adopted by a man in a photo. Now he wants Caine to track him down in a plot which mimis and spoofs every nourish movie Humphrey Bogart was in. Along the way he encounters Natalie Wood, who may be the object of his job.

To make the point, the credits are spoken at the beginning by impressionist Guy Marks. It's based on a story by Keith Laumer, a science fiction writer whose works tended to be.... pretty much all the same in his series, and adapted by W.D. Richter, who would write and direct the Doc Savage pastiche THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI the following decade. Director Peter Hyams keeps the dialogue moving as fast as he can, but the mannered snappy prose is most of what makes this a spoof...and sounding like the audience has heard it all before.

I don't think Peeper is a very good film, but I agree that it shouldn't have completely fallen off the map the way it did. It was given a belated if limited DVD release last year.

Timing was not on this film's side. Chinatown paid tribute to film noir in classic fashion only a year before it was released; Play It Again, Sam had spoofed it successfully only a year before that. Those two films, not to mention the films of the film noir era, leave Peeper looking very slight indeed.

Still, Caine has fun as an almost bumbling detective, and Natalie brings smarts and unparalleled sex appeal to her role as a shady lady. The supporting cast is pretty nigh flawless as well, and production values couldn't be better. The script, unfortunately, doesn't add add up to much.

Director Hyams, in a special feature interview, recalls telling Natalie to turn around at the end of a long tracking shot at the end of a long day. She asked what would motivate her to do that and he answered that the camera couldn't follow her if she didn't. She paused and said, "okay, I can feel that". It's too bad that at no point in her last decade did Natalie get to make a movie where character motivation was prioritized, but it's unsurprising to hear that she was a good sport about it.

"Peeper" is not a bad little film and it will fit the bill if you are looking for a time-passer. There are also parts of the film I really liked (such as the snappy dialog). But it's also a film that has problems. The plot seems derivative (very much like a reworking of "The Big Sleep"), the story is confusing and inconsistent and the actors seem to try their best with a plot that really seemed forced. Because of all this, I certainly will not heartily recommend it.

The film is set in the 1940s and is introduced by an actor pretending to be Humphrey Bogart. The story itself then begins. A nutty guy (Michael Constantine) gets a private eye (Michael Caine) to take a case. He wants Caine to locate his long-lost daughter, as he wants to make her his heir. The trail leads to the Prendergast family and one of their two daughters MIGHT be the heiress. To complicate things, two thugs are on his tail and seem ready to kill him--and yet, inexplicably, each time Caine captures them he gives them a chance to escape instead of either turning them into the cops or shooting them. This actually frustrated the heck out of me--and again and again, Caine's character seemed to make dumb decisions. I hate films where you must accept the stupidity of the lead in order to make the plot workable! It's a shame, as Natalie Wood is gorgeous and Caine tries his best. It's just the case of a film that needed a re-write before it was actually made.

"Peeper" is a lightly amusing, rapid fire spoof of vintage film noir. Its greatest assets include a witty script by W.D. Richter (based on a novel by Keith Laumer) and the top notch cast which delivers their scores of dialogue in a truly breathless manner. Ultimately it's a little too silly for its own good, and does lose its momentum a few times, but it's still entertaining and good for some real laughs. It sure gets off to a great start with the opening credits, which aren't listed but *spoken*, by Bogart impersonator Guy Marks. Peter Hyams directs with a fair amount of energy, and the movie does have a decent feel for the 1940s period, complemented by Earl Raths' cinematography and Richard Clements' music. It also helps to have the very English Michael Caine in the lead role, and to see him in this sort of setting.

Caine plays Leslie Tucker, a hard luck private eye hired by blustery stranger Anglich (a memorable Michael Constantine) to hire his long lost daughter Anya, who may have grown up to be one of the two daughters in a rich but eccentric family. Those lovely ladies are Ellen (Natalie Wood) and Mianne (Kitty Winn), and Tucker does find himself quite taken with Ellen. Meanwhile, he's constantly being chased and threatened by two goons who are dubbed "torpedoes": Sid, played by the great screen psycho Timothy Carey, and Rosie, played by Don Calfa, who became a fixture in several Hyams movies.

"Peeper" is fun, at least to a degree. The pacing is very, very good, but viewers might have a hard time keeping track of the plot with so much information divulged in such a snappy way. Caine is wonderful, with strong support from Wood, Winn, Constantine, Thayer David as pompous Frank Prendergast, lively Liam Dunn as weaselly lawyer Billy Pate, Dorothy Adams as the Prendergast matriarch, and Robert Ito as a gruff butler.

No, "Peeper" is no "Chinatown", not by a long shot, but fans of the genre and the actors may have a pretty good time with it.

Six out of 10.