Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Picked this up in my local charity shop recently, although my decades- old memory of it was somewhat underwhelming. But I'm nothing if not fair. Maybe it's just that my critical faculties have improved with age, because in damn near every respect - and I'm even prepared to cut Rachel Ward some slack here - it's a cracker.Another reviewer has compared it to 'Zelig', and in its case I'm not even going to go there because the latter's concept alone is tedious. This film always had far greater potential, because of how classic film noir conventions and dialogue now lend themselves so easily to lampooning.Steve Martin was at the top of his game when he made this one - hopefully, my local charity shop receives a copy of 'The Man with Two Brains' anytime soon - and his timing and mugging is rotflmao flawless here. The film noir insertions are well-chosen, too, and integrated beautifully, cinematically. The hysterics of Babs Stanwyck and Joan Crawford; Bette Davis' toasted day-old bread scene; the follow-on from Edward Arnolds' 'Pick It Up!' are hilarious, of course, but as regards which gag is the best of the bunch, for me it's a toss-up between the sidekick Bogie sartorial tickings-off, and the climactic scene where Martin and Reiner look to assert their plot 'reveal rights', but ultimately settle for a seamless, breakneck-pace, collaborative effort .Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams might just have the edge on Martin in drag, though.Watch it and weep...with laughter!

As a fully paid up film buff the main attraction for me was the inserts and the fact that they didn't consist merely of 'classics' but threw in stuff like 'The Bribe' and 'Deception'. The problem is, of course, that this is such an original idea that you can only do it once because any attempt to replicate it would inevitably be a parody of a parody. The three writers have opted for an ultra typical plot of the genre - 'professor/inventor/researcher/scientist', the type of man least likely to be married at all has a beautiful daughter who enlists the help of private heat to find his kidnappers/killers thus saving the time, trouble and expense of writing and finding a 'love-interest' figure. Steve Martin and Rachel Ward handle these chores competently and for good measure the writers throw in a wacky finale. Highly enjoyable.

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.

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.