Worn-Down Gumshoes

By J.C.

MICKEY AND BOGGS

Directed by ROBERT CULP Screenplay by WALTER HILL

There is little sense but much of interest in this quirkish thriller about a couple of Los Angeles gumshoes on their uppers. Al Hickey (Bill Cosby) and Frank Boggs (Robert Culp) are two private eyes who look as if they just got pulled out of a lineup. Their office is off a parking lot behind Hollywood Boulevard, although you'd have a better chance of finding them at the bar down the street, last two stools on the end.

Al and Frank are hired by a limp-wristed shyster to locate his girl friend. "A switch-hitting sweet lips?" Boggs inquires skeptically, but he doesn't press the matter. He and Hickey need the $200 a day. The investigation becomes progressively messier, involving counterfeiters, fences, torpedoes and other citizens of the Southern California underworld.

Culp, who is directing his first feature film, disdains coherence in favor of establishing a seedy L.A. milieu, which he does so well that the frenzied illogic of the narrative is almost forgotten. Chili-dog stands, musty apartments atrophied since the 1920s, labyrinthine ranch houses perched on the edge of cracking cliffs, all give Hickey and Boggs a fine, evocative sense of a seamy city rotting in the sunshine.

Culp and Cosby, who worked to gether on television's I Spy for three years, have established an effortless and instinctual rapport. Instead of casual, world-hopping superspies, here we have them as two weary, dreary guys whose lives are on the skids. Hick ey is estranged from his wife (excellently acted by Rosalind Cash).

Boggs, divorced from his, occasionally picks up hookers of indeterminate gender. Once in a while these characterizations swerve close to caricature, like the movie itself. But Hickey and Boggs is one of those weird, not wholly successful genre films that, for their general vigor and many individual virtues, end up being a great deal more engaging than the typical big-budget Hollywood behemoth.

J.C.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.