Lily Tomlin and Art Carney make the most randomly awesome team ever in one of my favorite films which I recommend to anyone who loves oddball cinema. 

Art Carney plays a semi retired private detective in Los Angeles in the 1970’s who, after the murder of a colleague from the old days, is guilted into taking on a small-time gig to find a missing cat belonging to Lily Tomlin. 

Part old school detective story, part buddy comedy, part quasi uncomfortable love story, part character study, Art Carney and Lily Tomlin play as both heightened LA caricatures and utterly believable humans (who to this day you could find living somewhere in the San Fernando Valley, most likely in Reseda).  

There…

My grandfather, Eugene Roche, died when I was 4 years old. I have memories of him, few, but I do remember him. To this day, when someone describes another person as “warm,” grandpa Gene’s smile wanders into my mind. He embodied warmth, love, and humor. Although he passed away when I was young, my grandfather has always been present in my life. My father, an actor as well, shares stories about how Eugene inspired and ignited his creativity on screen and off.

Through his films, he lives on in my life, and because of the films, I am given the opportunity to be inspired by him the way my father was. Tonight, I had the chance of seeing him on…

Art Carney plays a semi-retired private investigator who partners with Lily Tomlin to catch and revenge the people that murdered his partner. Carney makes a great private eye....I could easily picture Bogart in this role. If Bogart would have lived longer....I am sure he would have played an aging past his prime detective. The younger Ira Wells (Carney's character) would have used his brawn to get out of the messes he finds himself in...the older Wells has to use his brains as he can not be the physical stuff anymore.

I have never been a Lilly Tomlin fan....and this movie did not change this opinion. To me her part slows the movie down....and I am not even sure why she…

Alongside Long Goodbye, Hickey & Boggs, and Night Moves, another "what if a hardboiled gumshoe but in the 70s" exercise. Also like those movies: totally great. It's not as hopeless as the latter two and unlike Long Goodbye, the protagonist (Art Carney) isn't just old-fashioned, he's also just plain old, as everyone he encounters is quick to point out. "You're late. About forty years too late," an electronics and menswear pushing fence tells him. Lily Tomlin plays a flaky new age pot dealer (well, only until she gets enough money to open a boutique dress store), rambling on about karma, she elicits a wonderful, "What the hell is she talking about?" from Carney.

I've always loved Tomlin, but this may be…

Art Carney is Ira Wells, an old-time private eye, stuck being an old man in late 1970s LA. He's got a bum leg, a hearing aid, and instead of bourbon, he drinks Alka-Seltzer when he gets shook up. Lily Tomlin is Margo, a nutcase who's lost her cat.

The lost cat ties into the murder of Wells' friend Harry Regan, so he agrees to work for Margo to find the man who killed Harry. A complicated case follows, of course.

Not fast-paced and somewhat predictable with the noir tropes, but extremely well done. Director and screenwriter Robert Benton put together a beautiful homage to the 1940s-50s detective movies. The dialog is sharp, without being over-the-top. As to the acting, Art…

Warning: do not binge watch film noirs, and by binging I mean half a dozen or so within a few months. Space them out more. I over-indulged this year, and it might be why I had so little patience for this breezier, generally well-liked effort by Robert Benton, that otherwise belongs to the shambling '70s sub-category of the genre. Like all the ones from that decade, this one essays an over-the-hill Marlowe-type, and there's a melancholic sigh of defeat permeating the whole thing (though it's intentionally nowhere near as bleak as its era's counterparts), but I just couldn't bring myself to give a damn about the particulars - how aging detective Art Carney and kooky client Lily Tomlin get mixed…

I think we need a new 1970s crime film list - '1970s Crime Movies That Prominently Feature A Cat'.

I've watched so many crime films from this decade now that I'm mostly running out of what are widely believed to be the big hitters in this genre and decade, and I'm starting to work my way through what I hope will be some under-appreciated and just plain forgotten gems. Probably the last such example was the excellent Going In Style, a film that also featured a performance of the highest calibre by Art Carney.

Yet the stuff around about The Late Show isn't quite right to me. The poster here and its description is misleading. This isn't really a warm…

The 1970s: 85/100
1977 Ranked

Ira Wells (Art Carney) is at the end. He has been a private detective in Los Angeles for many years and it is clear: retirement, perhaps even death, is near. A perforated ulcer keeps him in check, while he recounts the horrible stretches he has spent in the hospital recently for other “gut” ailments. Men he knew in police departments are long since dead, albeit without Ira even knowing. This is a man of great experience, as he has seen everything and everyone, knows every personality type in Los Angeles, and has met just about everyone. If he needs information, Ira knows where to kick some up and shake loose what he wants. While he…

What if the noir genre died a natural death, not endlessly reinvented, but allowed to live and die on its own terms? Ira is the same age, and from the same world, and professionally hewn from the same wartime detritus, as the high-noir dicks of the late 40s.

By which I mean that at the same time this film is being made, Chinatown (or maybe something else but Chinatown just stands out the most?) had spawned a cycle of neo-noir fare that delved back into that age, even getting Mitchum, from the same age set as Ira, to play a Marlowe who lives and works at the same time as Dick Powell's much younger, peppier Marlowe. The Long Goodbye has…

THE LATE SHOW coasts on Robert Benton’s cracklin’ throwback dialogue, and Art Carney’s stodgy performance as Ira, juxtaposed with Lily Tomlin’s daffy, offbeat “modern” woman. Tomlin's Margo reminds me of the more grating-type of neurotic women found in some of Neil Simon and Woody Allen's less popular 70's movies, but Tomlin really leans into the role and the rest of the cast keeps her down to earth. The villain Ronnie Birdwell’s character-game - constantly offering lifted goods - is great. The hidden “item” in the Laura Birdwell's fridge - the one that Margo fails to notice at first - is a nice visual reveal.

The blossoming relationship between Ira and Margo is the selling point of THE LATE SHOW. After…