Peeper

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 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.

"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.

Bumbling PI Leslie C Tucker (Michael Caine) is hired to track down a little girl who was adopted many years ago. Her real father has an inheritance he wants to pass on to her. He tracks the girl to a wealthy family, but there are two daughters. Which of the sisters was adopted? And of course, there are others who would do just about anything to get their hands on the loot.

Peeper is supposedly a film noir spoof. I say "supposedly" because you would expect a spoof to be funny. Watching Peeper, not only did I not laugh, I don't think I even smiled. The script isn't anywhere near as clever and witty as it thinks it is. The jokes fall flat. In fact, flat is a pretty good adjective to use to describe the whole thing. The comedy is flat. The action is flat. The mystery is flat. The acting is flat. Caine is fine, but he's given an abysmal script to work with. It doesn't help much that he has about zero on-screen chemistry with co-star Natalie Wood. Even their scenes together are, well, they're also flat.

Another big problem I had with Peeper is how cheap it all seems. The film is set in the 1940s. Instead, Peeper looks like a poorly dressed film that can't hide its 1970s origins. Rarely did anything have an authentic 1940s feel. The supporting cash doesn't help any either. It's not necessarily their fault, but Michael Constantine, Thayer David, and Don Calfa have a 1970s TV vibe about them.

I honestly think Peeper might have been better had they just made a straightforward 1940s-style PI flick - without the attempts at comedy. I really think I would have enjoyed that much more. As for film noir spoofs, nothing beats Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. Now that's a funny movie.

4/10

A semi-spoofish deconstruction of 1940s film noir tropes, "Peeper" has plenty of witty dialogues - and monologues - delivered by Michael Caine in his inimitable style ("President Truman said there is now a boom in U. S. economy, but although I leave my window open every night I still can't hear it"), but it is underlit to an excessive degree, and filled with too many overacted "thugs" who are impossible to tell apart (we never really learn why they are after Caine's character, either). This one might have worked better as a radio program. **1/2 out of 4.