Fresh Eye

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE LATE SHOW

Directed and Written by ROBERT BENTON

Movies have expended much effort, and received scant reward, trying to revive that beloved figure of another age's popular culture--the private eye. They have lovingly re-created his old ambience (Farewell, My Lovely) and succeeded only in embalming him. They have also tried transplanting him, old knightly virtues intact, into our own time. But whether aware of his awkwardness in this era (The Black Bird) or seemingly oblivious of it (The Long Goodbye), the resulting films have been discomfiting.

The Late Show represents by far the most intelligent and engaging attempt at reincarnation so far. Writer-Director Benton (coauthor of the script for Bonnie and Clyde) has imagined a Philip Marlowe type named Ira Wells (Art Carney), who has outlived his day. He is discovered existing in a rented room on Social Security, watching old movies on TV while his attempt at an autobiography languishes in the typewriter, just one paragraph written. Then his old partner (played by Howard Duff, who was Sam Spade on the radio in the old days) arrives gut-shot at his door, dies in his arms, and Wells takes over the case his friend was working on. On its face, it is not much: Duff had been trying to recover a kidnaped cat for Lily Tomlin, who plays one of those self-consciously dizzy L.A. types who are simultaneously into talent management, psychoanalysis, Eastern religion and dealing--that is to say, anything going. It turns out that a lot more than a cat is missing, of course. Before the picture ends, several lives are colorfully mislaid and a good deal of expensive stolen property is shuffled from hand to hand.

As was the tradition in private-eye melodramas, the enormously complicated plot is merely a convention permitting the hero to come into contact with large numbers of colorful characters, here including a very shifty informer and a bodyguard who thinks he's tough until he runs into Wells, who is not quite as fragile as he looks.

This is all good fun, with plenty of smart cross talk and enough twists in the plot and situations to occupy even those unafflicted with nostalgia. What lifts the movie out of the curiosity category, however, is the performances of Carney and Tomlin.

Laid-Back Lives. With his dark suits and white shirts, Carney's character could not be more conspicuously out of place in modern Los Angeles. Then there is the glaring contrast between his tough, rational practicality of mind and the laid-back characters he keeps en countering. How, one wonders, will this cultural laggard cope with them? And even if he catches their drift, what if they get tough with him? He suggests a physical fragility that may not permit him to put enough muscle behind his hard-working mouth. There's good suspense here, the kind that derives from really caring for a singular individual.

As for Tomlin, her impersonation of the kind of West Coast lady who has every style of salvation that has been introduced in the past decade hanging in her mental closet is just about perfect.

So is the slow, believable way she al lows Carney's realism, his low-keyed contempt for such nonsense, to win her over. It may be a trifle too much for the film to suggest at the end the blooming of, as we now say, "a relationship" be tween them. Spade or Marlowe would have let her go. It may be that Benton is occasionally a trifle too aware of his own cleverness. On the other hand, he has made a first-class entertainment out of material that has defied other modernizers.

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