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MovieMail's Review
Gumshoe has been rather hard to see in Britain for many years; aside from a handful of irregular TV screenings, it emerged only once on VHS video – in 1988 – before this belated but very welcome DVD release. Similarly, it has been barely visible on director Stephen Frears’ filmography, overshadowed not only by his later Hollywood films such as Dangerous Liaisons and The Grifters, but also by his British successes like My Beautiful Laundrette and Prick Up Your Ears. This is a shame, because Gumshoe is at least as good, if not better, than all of the above.
Albert Finney stars as Eddie Ginley, a Walter Mitty-esque Liverpool bingo caller who exasperates his colleagues and family with his Sam Spade fixation and relentless hard-boiled patter. After placing an ad in the local paper offering his services as a private eye, however, Ginley is lured into a case of gun smuggling and murder that sees him having to flex his detective muscles for real.
As you might expect from a film that projects the exotic attributes of forties Hollywood noir onto the seedy milieu of early seventies Liverpool, there’s a playful spirit running through Gumshoe, from Neville Smith’s witty and affectionate rapid-fire script to the histrionic score by a young Andrew Lloyd Webber. Finney is excellent in his rare comic turn as the hero, continually meandering from streetwise, Bogart-like commentator to hapless northern underachiever, while Frears skilfully weaves the high key expressionism of film noir with the artful inelegance of British social realism.
Gumshoe’s low profile in the film history books is probably due to the fact that for a long time it looked like a curious anomaly in Frears’ career. After its release in 1971, the 30-year-old director found himself working exclusively in television for the next 13 years (albeit increasingly successfully), finally coming back to the big screen in 1984 with the John Hurt-Terence Stamp crime drama The Hit. With this re-release, a new generation can appreciate Gumshoe as a great directorial debut, and one of the freshest and most eclectic examples of British cinema in the 1970s.
A Liverpudlian bingo caller dreams of becoming a Bogart type private eye. He decides to advertise his services as a private investigator, then one day he gets a call. A mysterious man hands him the photo of a girl, £1000 in cash, and a gun...
On the mean streets of Merseyside, Fast Eddie Ginley (Finney) makes his dough in the numbers racket… which is to say he’s a bingo caller with a lively imagination. But... more >
On the mean streets of Merseyside, Fast Eddie Ginley (Finney) makes his dough in the numbers racket… which is to say he’s a bingo caller with a lively imagination. But are his fantasies of being the Scouse Sam Spade really so outlandish? A newspaper ad gets Eddie entangled in a dangerous world of dames, goons, guns and dope. It’s his chance to prove he’s not quite the loser he seems.
Neville Smith’s script splices Billy Liar and The Big Sleep. Although Gumshoe enjoys using the conventions of detective fiction, this is more than parody. The labyrinthine plotting and rat-a-tat dialogue are suitably Chandleresque but Philip Marlowe was never obliged to queue at the labour exchange. Eddie’s more complicated than the average shamus: none of them needed a shrink.
This was Stephen Frears’ debut; the quiet confidence for which his later films are celebrated is already visible. He has numerous elements to juggle – plot, character detail, humour – and never once fumbles. Shame he never showed us any of Eddie’s other cases: this one is a little gem.
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