Very well executed

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

"Gumshoe" is a nice film for Albert Finney to show his talent for wit and humor. The movie came fairly early in his film career – at age 35 he had 14 total film and TV movie roles behind him. This is a very snappy film, with lots of quick lines and retorts. In the theater, I would have missed some of this. But on DVD, I can use subtitles and/or stop and playback for parts that I missed. Finney shows his talents for imitation and impersonation as well. His "Boggie-esque" quips are quite funny. Some reviewers dubbed this film an "oddity" or a "curiosity." I'm not sure what that means. If it's because comedy is mixed with crime – well we have plenty of that dating back to the 1930s. The series of "Thin Man" movies with William Power and Myrna Loy helped make the comedy-crime mix very popular. Others have commented on the plot and cast. I will add only that this film is spot on for intrigue, and it has some very good twists. A casual viewer could miss a lot of what's going on. The roles are all quite good. Finney's Eddie Ginley is a very likable chap. Finney is one of those very talented people in the entertainment field who have played some great roles, but who have not struck gold spelled with an "O."

Gumshoe (Stephen Frears, 1971) - or Scouser on the Third Floor, as I shall insist on calling it - is a skilled pastiche of classic film noir, with Albert Finney as a bingo caller and part-time comedian who fancies himself as a private eye. In his first day as a self-styled Sam Spade, he receives a mysterious phone call, plunging him into a superbly-realised world fusing the mundanity of Liverpool life with the Chandler-esquire yarn going on inside Finney's head. It's deftly done, with a ready wit and the deep knowledge of crime flicks (and the odd Western) essential to such genre explorations, while the script fairly drips with zingers. The narrative seems to house elements of Chinatown, Charley Varrick, The Cheap Detective, Hammett and Brick, but this was released before a single one of them. Another similar work, Play, It Again Sam, had played on Broadway but would not reach the screen for another two years.Finney is faultless in the lead, delivering his hard-boiled patter in a sliding hybrid of Bogart and Scouse, and keeping us guessing as to just how far gone his character is. The supporting cast includes Porridge favourite Fulton Mackay, making an ideal heavy as the Scottish hood on Finney's trail, Frank Finlay as our hero's menacing brother and Samuel Beckett alumnus Billie Whitelaw, playing a morally ambiguous woman caught between the siblings and sporting a hairstyle that would be impressively '80s were it not so resolutely '70s. Also cropping up in bit parts are Maureen Lipman as our bookshop floozy and Wendy Richards, speaking nineteen-to-the-dozen in a way that's very hard to decipher. Andrew Lloyd Webber's score - containing a rock 'n' roll parody written with Tim Rice - is also good fun, and if the eventual uncovering of the film's central conspiracy is a touch too small-scale to pack the requisite punch, that's a minor price to pay for 80 minutes of tense, superbly-scripted British noir.

"Exhilirated" was the way my father felt, as he emerged from the new Scala cinema in Kings Cross, after watching Albert Finney in Gumshoe sometime in the 1970s. He loves the writing of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett. The idea of a fellow aficionado so caught up in the idea of being Philip Marlowe that he places an advertisement in the local Liverpool paper offering his services in 1972 as though he were the fictional private eye in California of the 1940s and is then caught up in a case he doesn't understand but which he sets out to follow nonetheless as though he was the legendary hero of those mean streets completely captivated him. The fast talking repartee. The refusal to compromise. And the gun. It comes in at the beginning. It is undoubtedly real - in an England where there are no guns. Will Finney who carries it everywhere with him ever get to fire it? Prepare to enjoy a pacey, brilliantly written plot which refreshingly expects the audience to have the knowledge and intelligence to keep up and be swept away. Anyone who knows my father will know that this review was really written by him!

An excellent cast does its utmost, but the results can be characterized as uneven at best. This movie had many clever ideas, and should have saved half of them for another film. It also alternates uncomfortable between laughing at its characters and laughing with them. Still, there are several brilliant scenes that will reward those with the tenacity to stick with it, especially in the film's last third. My rating -- 6/10.