The Late Show, 1977. Written and directed by Robert Benton. Starring Art Carney, Lily Tomlin, the great character actor Bill Macy, Eugene Roche, Joanna Cassidy, and John Considine.
Who’s making noir anymore? Foreigners, maybe, immigrants from a decaying Russia come to France to ply their trade, or Austrians eager to shake us by the nape of the neck, make us tremble in our sleep. But who gives us the seediness that hides just beneath our well-tended lawns? Or the menace that lurks in every 9-to-5er, the soul who’s tired of the same grift, day after day, and thinks, maybe I ought to try one stab at the good life? Over the years there’s been some little noirs that have come our way, things like Fargo and A Simple Plan, clean and well-lit and brilliantly acted, but they aren’t messy enough, aren’t real. Noir, at its best, got the weariness, the ugliness, the migraine grind of the day. It got that you had to eat, and often you didn’t eat well.
Look at The Late Show. I don’t know how, because this little treasure isn’t available at most Blockbusters and Hollywood Videos. The library doesn’t own it, and neither does Cinema Revolution, though they should. It’ll never play in a theater–we don’t have a repertory theater anyway, and even if we did, this is the last film they’d show. The Late Show is noir. Dark edges and a complex plot whose job it is to obfuscate life for the poor saps who have to endure its vicissitudes. Like 70s films it is a grungy admixture of the goofy, trippy, melancholy, the horrifying and the sad, and doesn’t shirk from the minutiae of life. Our hero does his laundry, has problems with ulcers, gulps Alka Seltzer, and, like the other characters, wonders just what the hell is going on in the world. And why everyone has to make it so damned complex.
Even better: it is about how noir has altered life, how Raymond Chandler and Co. have made Los Angeles in their own image, and, good or bad, we cannot escape.
Art Carney plays Ira Wells, a once great detective and now semi-retired curmudgeon living in a boarding house in L.A. One evening, while watching garbage on TV, his partner stops by with a bullet in his gut, and dies on the bed. At his pal’s funeral, he’s approached by Charlie Hatter (Bill Macy), a grifter friend of Ira’s, who’s there to introduce old Ira to Margo Sperling (Lily Tomlin), a true space cadet, who needs someone to track down her kidnapped cat. Ira has no interest in hunting down lost felines, but of course he gets wrapped up in the case, which eventually involves stolen stamps, affairs, fencing, porno houses, and murder.
Carney is an old man, aching, waddling down the street to wash his clothes in a dumpy launderette, trying to make ends meet. His friend, Charlie, has a seedy office where he wears the hats of talent agent, realtor, detective… anything that’ll land him a lousy buck or two. And Margo is a talent agent, seamstress, one-time actress, the usual L.A. kook. The Los Angeles they live in cannot quite escape its past. The ghosts of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, of Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre, wander the streets and the empty homes, infusing the characters conversations, their movements, their dreams.
The movie is funny and has its rough spots: a few too many car chases, a couple of clunky spots of dialogue. But its humor we’re all familiar with, if we’ve ever tried to scrape out a living doing something we don’t like, working the telemarketing lines, knocking on doors, anything with sales. We’re all looking for the grift that’ll make us respectable. Ira stayed respectable for 31 years and all he’s got to show for it is a bad gut and some pennies in the bank. In the end, we’ll all be dead, just a plot in one of the massive graveyards that add some greenery to the city. Maybe that’s the point: be a gumshoe, be a grifter, turn the good life upside down because that’s what life’s all about. Chaos. Whatever happens, in the end, we all find peace.
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