Watch Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid For Free

good back-story, and good acting

As Good As It Gets

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

In the autumn of 1983 I was visiting Minnesota, and rented this tape. My mother and I watched it (I was 33 then) together. She had obviously seen many of the films used as comic counterpoint to the Martin/Ward side and seen them in THEATRES! Anyway, there was laughter throughout the playback. The scenes that stand out are like the one where Ward's character reads the back of a newspaper that Rigby is reading... and faints. THEN Rigby muses a bit before 'massaging' her breasts... which wakes Ward up "What are you doing?" "Uhhh, when you fell, your breasts were knocked out of whack. I'm trying to re-align them." Or words to that effect. Then at some point Rigby has to think up a name for a saint... and he hesitates for a few beats and then says "Saint Betty." OK, I admit, my mother's name was Betty, so it had more comic impact.The other comments about razor edged inter-cutting of scenes (for comic effect) are very accurate. This was a very good movie to watch straight through, without interruptions.About the "Zelig" film. While that film didn't make as deft use of stock footage, Woody and his technical people were VERY good at inserting the Zelig character into the stock footage itself. So while there are similarities to the two films, to my recollection, there were no Martin scenes inside the film noir excerpts. I think that there was a later Allen film that pretty much sucked where he tried to do large scale image alterations, but Zelig - with the first class narrative done BY a documentary/news personality - made it's points, both as comedy and social commentary.I'll probably check out Zelig and this one on the near future.

Carl Reiner's collage film homage and/or parody to 1940s film noirs and thrillers is unusually funny and a clever example of placing movie scenes in a new context as a means for comedy. I'm not sure if you actually need to be familiar with the noirs that the film borrows from, but having only seen one (the excellent Notorious) of the nineteen films from which scenes are lifted, I didn't get much enjoyment through recognition.I used to think that the film would have been successful even without the recycling of old material, but it struck me this time that that would wipe out the entire movie. Nevertheless, the funniest part is Steve Martin's deadpan narration that helps framing the clips. The only thing that I don't think is very funny is the recurring cleaning woman gag, but that still makes for a very high success rate.

This is one that every fan of films noir has to see. It's a parody of the genre, in which Steve Martin plays a private eye and Rachel Ward his sexy client. Ward wants Martin to find out who killed her father. To do so, Martin must track down the list of names that is the only clue. So he meanders through an impossibly complicated plot and runs into numerous odd and dangerous people, just as in one of the originals.The people he meets and the situations in which Martin finds himself are represented by clips taken from noirs and semi-noirs, well known and some less well known. In his first encounter, for instance, there is a knock on his office door. "It's open," calls Martin. And it's Allan Ladd from "This Gun For Hire," in fedora and trench coat. Martin invites him to sit down. We see Ladd take a seat. "Have a cookie," suggests Martin, and Ladd picks up a cookie from the end table and munches it wordlessly. Then Ladd suddenly draws his automatic from a briefcase, Martin dashes into the next room and slams the door behind him, and Ladd shoots a hole through the door, then leaves.The other faux encounters are a little more complicated and require skillful integration into the nonsensical plot because the rest of the original actors have lines. Martin's behavior and dialog have to be suited to theirs. Thus, when Edward Arnold, out of "Johnny Eager", angrily orders Martin to "Pick that up!", Martin must have brought Arnold a puppy which has done it's business on the carpet. "But," Martin protests, "it's all wet and steamy." "PICK THAT UP!" It's like one of those all-star movies that were popular some years ago, rather on the order of "Around the World in Eighty Days," in which you wait for the next appearance of a genuine, historical noir figure and thrill quietly when it comes.The problem is that integrating clips from old noirs with a superimposed parody is that it's tough work making them funny in and of themselves. And so the encounters between Martin and Kirk Douglas and the rest aren't really very funny. The thrills are effective and short, and that's about it. The framing story has its moments but it's a long wait between funny lines and silly Three Stooges assaults.It's fine, seeing it once, but after that -- well, the thrill is gone.

A simply moronic film that I doubt can even be loosely described as a comedy (unless jokes repetitive jokes about boobs make you guffaw with laughter). It wastes no time in befouling the grave of classic Noir with Steve Martin's usual brand of dim-witted, inane, unfunny claptrap. A real endurance test to sit through it in its entirety. Conversely, in its concept the film is 'one of a kind', and some of the splices are done very well, some are very clumsy. It is an interesting concept to use clips from old movies as part of the plot, but one more befitting of a film student's experiment than a mainstream feature film, and was certainly not enough to redeem the film of its blistering asinine ineptitude.