Robert Benton, who turned 87 this year, engraved his name on film history when he co-wrote the tide-turning Bonnie and Clyde (1967). He and his Esquire colleague and filmgoing buddy David Newman had tailored the screenplay for François Truffaut (who called them "the boys") before the movie ended up with Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn. Benton also contributed to What's Up, Doc? (1972), directed by friend Peter Bogdanovich, and the Christopher Reeve Superman (1978). And as a director in his own right, Benton achieved glittering early commercial and critical success with his third film, Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), which was honored with Oscars in most of the big categories including for his directing and writing. But the two films directed by Benton prior to that career watershed, Bad Company (1972) and The Late Show (1977), are in almost every way more interesting, moody genre deconstructions that evince Benton's fealty to the French New Wave and its veneration and repurposing of cinema history and technique.

One of only a couple of Westerns shot by Gordon Willis, Bad Company is gorgeous, its revisionist acid Western screenplay (also with Newman) functioning to demythologize received clichés of war heroism and outlaw chivalry. A forever foggy, brown and grey American landscape blighted by the Civil War, which grinds on and on, is the setting for its characters' youth-sapping slide into lives of crime and betrayal. The leads are played by a young Jeff Bridges (an actor whose early performances are an evergreen source of revelations) and Barry Brown, who tragically would die of suicide at 27. The Late Show is a comparatively comic affair, but its portrait of an outer Los Angeles populated by losers with aborted dreams, penny-ante criminals, and con artists is no less blighted in its way, made manifest by grainy, grubby cinematography (Chuck Rosher, who also shot Altman's 3 Women) and the jangling jazz of Kenneth Wannberg's score.

In the same way that Bad Company critiques and refigures Western and military-movie tropes, The Late Show both pays homage to and respectfully mocks Golden Era Hollywood private eye and noir films. (A later Benton film, 1982's Still of the Night, does much the same thing with the Hitchcock canon; Benton is an inveterate Movie Brat.) The 1940s adaptations of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are guiding lights, with The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep the most obvious touchstones. This is explicit from the opening shot, which tracks from a typewriter to a framed photo of the actress Martha Vickers, who memorably played drug-addicted jailbait Carmen Sternwood in the Howard Hawks film. The text on the paper slotted into the typewriter is "'Naked Girls and Machine Guns: Memoirs of a Real Private Detective' by Ira Wells." It's not clear how long Ira (Art Carney) has been stuck on the title page, but the 59-year-old gumshoe, who has a bum leg from a lodged bullet, a perforated ulcer, and janky hearing and eyesight, has retired into a dotage of sensationalizing reminiscence. When Ira's ex-partner (Howard Duff, aka Mr. Ida Lupino, and a fine film/TV actor) knocks on his door hemorrhaging blood from a point-blank gunshot wound, a grumbling Ira knows his quiet plans are scuppered.

Characters, corpses, and plot points accrue into a pleasantly convoluted tangle, again recalling The Big Sleep. At Harry's funeral, oily tipster Charlie (Bill Macy) introduces Ira to an excitable woman named Margo Sperling (Lily Tomlin). Immediately identifiable as a New Age or hippie dreamer, Margo tries to hire Ira to find her kidnapped cat, Winston. Ira semi-politely declines the insulting offer over Margo's protestations ("This little kitty's just a little honey bun! Give this little cat a break!"). But a follow-up briefing with Charlie reveals that the furry MacGuffin links up with Harry's murder and a stolen stamp collection desired by a local crime lord, the dingy but deadly Ronnie Birdwell (Eugene Roche). When Margo gets pulled into a high-speed car and van chase, she teams up with a reluctant Ira (it's a startlingly action-packed and violent film).

A household name from playing Ed Norton on The Honeymooners, Carney was newly off an Oscar-winning turn in Paul Mazursky's Harry and Tonto (1974), and his Ira is a distillation of pure physical exhaustion--with his job, his city, and humanity at large. Mainlining Alka-Seltzer and usually wheezing, he seems always on the verge of a heart attack, and indeed his touchy ulcer floors him more than once, though he's still a good shot. Pauline Kael wrote that Carney here "seems to be working inside a nightmare that he's known for a long time," possibly an oblique reference to the alcoholism Carney had stanched a few years prior. Kael devoted most of her favorable review to Tomlin, who is rarely so delightful in her feature film appearances as she is here, and whose improvisatory comedic training and collaborative work with the film's co-producer Robert Altman made her an odd-couple fit with the script-bound Carney (the latter initially balked at Tomlin's methods, but the ice soon thawed). The potential cutesiness of the unlikely duo becomes enamoring thanks especially to the comic timing and unpredictability of Tomlin, hot off her devastating work in Nashville.

The film's avoidance of preciousness--thanks to its leads--is why The Late Show resides in a '70s neo-noir sweet spot somewhere between the heaviness of Chinatown (1974) or Night Moves (1975) and, on the other side, the overbearing parodic pastiche of Play It Again, Sam (1972) or The Cheap Detective (1978). It's a spot shared by the Altman masterpiece The Long Goodbye (1973), and Altman referred to The Late Show as an in-spirit sibling to his film. Benton, "the rank humanist in American film," per David Thomson, returned to the poignant well of the aging private dick in Twilight (1998), bringing the achy wisdom of his own more advanced years to a story of male old-timers (Paul Newman, Gene Hackman, James Garner). In The Late Show, his inspiration for Ira Wells was his own stubborn, ulcer-suffering father, and the film probably feels so lived-in--characters such as this haunt Los Angeles County streets then as now--because the likes of Mr. Benton, Senior, lived it.

by Justin Stewart


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