Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

MartinHafer When the film begins, Harry Regan comes knocking on the door of retired fellow private eye Ira Wells (Art Carney). Regan's been shot and soon dies. Wells vows to find the man's murderer...even though he's rather old and paunchy. Soon, he meets a SUPER-quirky lady (Lily Tomlin) who whines again and again about her stolen dog and together the pair get pulled into this mystery.Whether you like or hate this film is strongly dependent on what you think of Tomlin's character. Some might find her funny and cute. Others, like me, might find her super-annoying and unfunny. For example, when Wells is at his friend's funeral, this woman (who doesn't even know him at this point) interrupts and goes on and on and on insisting Wells must drop everything to retrieve her stolen dog. Lady...the man's friend was JUST MURDERED and you're whining about a dog?! Her complete lack of social skills and empathy really, really annoyed me--to the point that I really didn't care what happened to her. I just wanted her to go away...and stay! A fatal problem that ruins an otherwise interesting take on Film Noir.By the way, seeing the car explode when Ira shoots the tire of a speeding car was pretty stupid...sloppy and unrealistic.UPDATE: Soon after I wrote this, another IMDb user,'themathexpert', contacted me to tell me it was stolen cat, not a dog. Oops. Sorry about that. Guess I hated the character so much I was not listening to much of what she said.

bkoganbing In The Late Show Art Carney may have created the most broken down action hero ever on the big screen. In fact his role here is in keeping with the Oscar he won playing irascible old codgers in Harry And Tonto and whom he would continue to play for the rest of his big screen career. The man truly reinvented himself after being so identified as Ed Norton of sewer repair on The Honeymooners.Probably at the height of the noir era in film post World War II Carney could have done private eye roles like Humphrey Bogart and Alan Ladd. But now he's retired from the business has a bad leg, wears a hearing aid and rents a room from an indulgent landlady Ruth Nelson.Until his old partner still in the game comes to him with a fatal bullet in his chest. An inside joke if you will because the partner is played by Howard Duff who was Sam Spade for years on radio. And at Duff's funeral he meets quirky former actress Lily Tomlin who was Duff's last client. She hired Duff to find her missing cat.The cat however is key and before the film ends several of the cast wind up dead. It's a well assembled ensemble who support Carney and Tomlin. Joanna Cassidy as the femme fatale, Eugene Roche as a fence, Bill Macy as a bartender/tipster who tries to play both ends, and John Considine are all at the top of their game.But Carney is a wonder, he's got great chemistry with Tomlin and he's got great moves as well. Wish I had some of them.

Lee Eisenberg I actually found "The Late Show" a little confusing. True, there are some funny scenes, as detective Art Carney and Hollywood connection Lily Tomlin have to loosely team up to solve a murder. Much like in '40s film noirs, certain people often meet each other and start shooting. But I recall that the movie tries to present itself as a comedy, while it comes across as more of a detective story; the bulk of the humor lies in Carney's and Tomlin's personalities occasionally bouncing off of each other.Mind you, it's not a bad movie by any stretch, just a strange one to advertise as a comedy. Maybe with Lily Tomlin alone, it would have been a full-scale comedy. Also starring Bill Macy.All in all, it looks like Lily found a sign of some kind of life in the universe!

sol1218 **SPOILERS** Nostalgic 1977 movie that's more like a 1940's film-noir crime suspense/drama with an over the hill private eye Ira Wells, Art Carney, teaming up with a middle-age hippie Margo Sperling, Lily Tomlin, to solve the murder of Ira's long-time friend of over 30 years, and also private detective, Harry Regan, Howard Duff. Harry coming to see Ira at his rooming house one evening collapses and dies right in front of him from a 45 slug in his chest. At Harry's funeral Ira gets to see his friend Charlie, Bill Macy, who has this young woman Margo Sperling with him and want's Ira to find her missing cat Winston. Having no patience to go looking for cats at his age Ira changes his mind when he finds out that Harry was on the case, in finding Winston, at the time of his murder and feels that Harry trying to find Margo's cat may have had something to do with his untimely death. Ira was right dead right. The serious Ira teaming up with spaced-out, on ideas about life not drugs, Margo realizes that Harry's murder was but a small part of a series of crimes, including at least four other killings, involving big time L.A gangster Ron Birdwell, Eugene Roche. Brdwell's wife Laura, Joanna Cassidy, has been missing for some three days and was involved with a Mr. Whiting who together with his wife both ended up dead. It takes a while for Ira to get to the bottom of what's been going on between Birdwell and the Whitings but with the help of screwy pseudo-philosophical Margo, who turns out to be a lot smarter then Ira at first thought, he puts all the pieces together. Ira comes up with not only who killed both the Whitings but who murdered his friend Harry Regan as well and, on top of all that, Ira finds Margo's cat Winston. The cat it turns out has been sitting on the evidence, a .32 pistol, to connect all the killings as well as it being used to blackmail Laura; in keeping her mouth shut about who's responsible for a sting of unconnected and unsolved murders in the L.A area.Art Carney giving the performance of his life as the broken down PI Ira Wells takes it on the chin and in the gut throughout the entire movie from hoodlums like Birdwell and his sadistic bodyguard Lamar, John Considine. Ira also has to puts up with the New Age Guru-like Margo, who he gets to like despite her almost talking him to death. Lily Tomlin is perfect as the over-age hippie Margo Sperling who also begins to take life seriously when she realizes that she and Ira's lives are in danger in an elaborate scheme to distance the Whiting murders away from those responsible for them and make them look like a robbery gone wrong. Ira who really got on the case to find who murdered Harry Regan finding Winston was only secondary for him and gets a lot more then he bargained for including a brutal beating by Lamar ,who he later pays back with interest. In the end he finds not only who killed Harry but a new place to stay, Margo's place, after his landlady kicked him out of her house for giving her more headaches and excitement then his rent could compensate her for: $42,50 a month. Art Carney besides having ulcers problems in the movie as Ira Wells walked with a limp, because of a bum leg, which in real life he really had from being wounded in France, by an exploding German artillery shell in World War Two.