Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

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!

Favorite Movie Quote - "I'm re-adjusting your breasts. When you fainted they shifted out of whack. And, so, I was just re-aligning them for you." I'd easily say that this picture has got to be one of the best and most entertaining parodies of the 1940s Film Noir/Detective genre that I've ever seen.This film really delivers some great laughs.Filmed in glossy black and white, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid ingeniously weaves its plot and production design around numerous movies clips from such golden-oldie classics as This Gun For Hire, Double Indemnity, Notorious, The Big Sleep - To name but a few.Steve Martin plays Rigby Reardon, a $10-a-day gumshoe (working in Los Angeles) who is hired to solve a truly incomprehensible mystery that involves the apparent death of brilliant scientist, Dr. Forest.Reardon immediately smells a rat as he sets out to follow a complex maze of clues that eventually lead him to the "Carlotta Lists" of friends and enemies.Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid was directed by Carl Reiner and stars the gorgeous screen-siren, Rachel Ward. (Whatever became of the husky-voiced beauty, anyways?)

A simply moronic film that I doubt can even be loosely described as a comedy (unless jokes repetitive jokes about boobs make you guffaw with laughter). It wastes no time in befouling the grave of classic Noir with Steve Martin's usual brand of dim-witted, inane, unfunny claptrap. A real endurance test to sit through it in its entirety. Conversely, in its concept the film is 'one of a kind', and some of the splices are done very well, some are very clumsy. It is an interesting concept to use clips from old movies as part of the plot, but one more befitting of a film student's experiment than a mainstream feature film, and was certainly not enough to redeem the film of its blistering asinine ineptitude.

To explain, should it be necessary, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid is a black and white crime thriller set in the 40s, starring Steve Martin and a host of the top noir actors and actresses of the 40s, created by taking assorted scenes from those classic movies of the past and hanging them on a framework of a newly written story centred on Martin's character.The idea is smart. The screenplay is smart in the way that it cleverly integrates the old and the new. The film is technically smart in the way it seamlessly joins footage shot in the 1980s with footage from various films shot 40 years earlier. And the performances are particularly smart in the way that they play to the knowing humour underlying the whole project which remaining true to the spirit of the originals.Oh, did I mention that it's very funny?