There’s a particular musty scent that wafts off movies like The Late Show. It smells like day-old whiskey, arthritic charm, and the warm, faintly mildewed pages of a Raymond Chandler paperback left on a radiator. This 1977 “neo-noir” mystery-comedy is a love letter to the gumshoe genre written by someone who never sent love letters and doesn’t particularly believe in stamps. It’s creaky and clever, dated and delightful, and—depending on your tolerance for geriatric detectives and cats named Winston—just this side of brilliant or just the other side of boring.
Altman Said No, Benton Said “Eh, I’ll Do It”
Robert Benton, who co-wrote Bonnie and Clyde back when Warren Beatty still had unshaven cheekbones, decided he was ready to fly solo. So he wrote The Late Show, a noir-ish mystery dipped in melancholy and fried in L.A. smog. He took the script to Robert Altman—big mistake if you’re looking for calm. Altman, just off directing The Long Goodbye, looked at Benton and said, “Kid, you do it. But I’ll produce and hover like a chain-smoking ghost.” And so Benton, who had never directed solo, climbed into the director’s chair with the tremble of a man checking his ulcer meds.
Filming started in 1976 and wrapped like a hastily done Christmas gift by November. With Altman in the wings and Lou Lombardo editing (he also cut The Long Goodbye and The Black Bird, aka the world’s most unwanted noir three-way), Benton tried to craft something between a noir revival and a geriatric buddy comedy. What he ended up with was a sort of cinematic pastrami sandwich—tasty in parts, a little dry in others, and inexplicably accompanied by a talking pickle named Margo.
Casting Grit and Glitter
Enter Art Carney, best known for arguing with Jackie Gleason and making us cry over a cat in Harry and Tonto. Here, Carney is Ira Wells, a retired private eye so dried out he makes beef jerky look hydrated. Ira’s got a bum stomach, a typewriter, and a landlady named Mrs. Schmidt (played by Ruth Nelson, a Group Theatre founder who hadn’t made a film since Truman was president). Carney is perfect: world-weary, trench-coated, a hangdog philosopher with a .38.
Then there’s Lily Tomlin as Margo Sperling—Hollywood’s idea of a zany, eccentric “client” who, despite dressing like a thrift store exorcism, is somehow the heart of the movie. Margo is the kind of woman who keeps a poster of Marc Bolan above her vanity and treats cat abduction like a federal crime. Their chemistry is endearing, like watching your aunt and her mailman fall in love after a shared trauma.
And yes, there’s a plot: stolen stamps, blackmail, murder, mistaken identities, and at least one body in a refrigerator—because no 1970s mystery was complete without Tupperware corpses. The twists are handled well enough, though some of them land like a pensioner on a yoga mat: stiffly and with a mild groan.
Reviews, Reactions, and Resurrection via Streaming
Critics in 1977 lapped it up like noir-starved alley cats. Roger Ebert gave it four stars, Gene Siskel ranked it #2 of the year (just behind Annie Hall, of course), and Pauline Kael—never one to cuddle up to sentiment—called it a “love-hate poem to sleaziness.” Which, frankly, is how I hope someone describes my obituary.
Tomlin snagged a Silver Bear at Berlin and was nominated for the Golden Globe. Carney bagged the National Society of Film Critics Best Actor award, proving that cranky dignity still had a place in Reagan-era cinema. And Benton, god bless him, was Oscar-nominated for his screenplay. He didn’t win (Woody Allen did), but he’d later get his revenge with Kramer vs. Kramer, a film so emotionally manipulative it should come with a court-ordered visitation schedule.
As time went on, The Late Show became that movie cinephiles whisper about in Reddit threads titled “Forgotten Gems Your Dad Likes.” It has a comfy seat in the Criterion-adjacent dustbin, championed by noir die-hards and Altman cultists. It even spawned a short-lived TV spin-off (Eye to Eye), but we’ll pretend we didn’t see that.
Goodbye, Ira. Hello, Retirement.
So is The Late Show a masterpiece? No. It’s a decent whodunit wrapped in old-school charm, slightly frayed around the edges, with dialogue like a valium-laced Bogart fever dream. Carney’s performance alone is worth the price of admission (especially if you still own a VCR). But some of it creaks. Some of it sags. And if you’ve got no patience for a noir that’s more prune juice than hardboiled bourbon, you might check out after act one.
Still, it’s warm, weird, and occasionally witty—a quiet curio from the time when Hollywood was willing to let old men and neurotic women solve crimes in bell bottoms.
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