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Uppercut

by Ryan N. Wilcox

You stuck your finger in my
bullet hole…

What if I were to tell you that there was a movie starring Barbara Stanwyck,
Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Bettie Davis, Kirk Douglas, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, and Vincent Price, and most people haven't seen it? 1982's Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid is such a movie. Directed by Carl Reiner and written by Carl Reiner and Steve Martin, Dead Men was my first introduction to film noir.

I know I know, you might think that many of these actors were dead by 1982. That didn't faze Reiner at all. Heck, most of the actors were in their prime of their careers when the movie was made. Reiner and Martin, some of the best comedic minds of the twentieth century took clips from old movies, and tied them all together to make a seamless, though bizarre, story.

Steve Martin plays Rigby Reardon, a down on his luck private investigator, hired by Juliet Forrest (played by Rachel Ward) to learn who killed her father, an icon in the cheese industry. With the help of his partner, Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart), and a handful of others, he learns that there is much more to the life of this cheese maestro than the beautiful Ms. Forrest originally let on.

As I mentioned, this was my first film noir movie. In fact, it wasn't until years later in college, when I learned what film noir was as a genre, that I flashed back to Dead Men. In fact, many of the movies that define the genre provide clips for Dead Men, including Double Indemnity, Notorious, and The Postman Always Rings Twice.

One of the parts that make this movie shine is the attention to detail done by Reiner and Martin. This was not a movie made by special effects, but by putting Martin and Ward in clothes and sets that matched the scene from the movie where their co-stars had acted decades before. So many movies have dialogs containing over the shoulder shots, all Reiner and Martin had to do was match the costume and set of the recipient of the scene, make the dialog relevant, and you had a scene. All of it was done masterfully. They weren't trying to hide the fact that they were using footage from classic films. Reiner isn't one to hide the gags in his work. However, he made it silly that Steve Martin was talking with Charles Laughton in a bar that looked like Casablanca's Rick's Café.

All in all, the movie didn't rake in the dough back in the early 80's. Maybe it went over most people's heads, or they were more interested in the many other great films of the early eighties. I believe that is unfortunate because I can't imagine creating a script based on old movie quotes by many of the best actors Hollywood has known. I place Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid on a pedestal because of how creative a movie it is. It's one of my favorite childhood movies that becomes funnier as I get older. After all these years, I have now seen many of the movies from which the clips were used. The more movies you watch, the better this movie gets.