Alicia I love this movie so much
StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.
Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.
Justina The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
mgtbltp Al Hickey (Cosby) and Frank Boggs (Culp) are two ex LAPD cops scrapping the bottom of the barrel trying to make ends meet as PI's in the brown haze of the smoggy gas guzzler dominated LA of the seventies. Their office is a back room accessed from a parking lot through a dilapidated peeling panel door, they can't pay their phone bill and the answering service so they opt for the service which they can check from phone booths. They chow on chillidogs from a street vendor and strategize the case at their local bar. Hickey drives a '62 Chevy Nova and is estranged from his wife & daughter, Boggs is a boozer, has a dented '61 T-bird, watches his ex-wife Elaine dance at a Live Nude Girl joint enduring her "eat your heart out" verbal jabs, and pays prostitutes at 20 bucks a pop. The film nicely transitions through Tinseltown's classic Film Noir icons of the past, the classic streamlined silver Super Chief "F" units, Union Station, and the Los Angeles City Hall to the smog shrouded broken dream downtown of 1970s.The tale starts when a creepy pedophile-ish lawyer named Rice hires the team to just find his "wife" Mary Jane (Carmencristina Moreno). Rice works for Leroy the head of a black power organization. Mary Jane is really the wife of Quemando (Louis Moreno) who held up a federal reserve bank in Pittsburgh for $400,000. She just hit town on the Super Chief and is trying to unload the hot money to various factions around SOCAL by mailing $1000 dollar samples to them, one of which is syndicate mobster Brill (Robert Mandan) who bankrolled the original heist. Given a list of leads, Hickey & Boggs begin a strange journey through the miasma of decadence and decay of The City Of Angels that one usually never saw, LA's chamber of commerce should have had a coronary. The film is filled with the ambient sounds of roaring freeway traffic, passing disembodied conversations and pounding surf. The various leads our boys encounter make a nice cross section weird characters, nobody seems normal except for the Mexican American family and they are the bank robbers.Hickey in the course of the tale discovers a dead lead and then Boggs uncovers a hidden envelope containing the sample $1000 bills in his house. After reporting the murder to the police and the discovery of the bills the authorities match the serial numbers to the Pittsburgh heist Hickey & Boggs are informed of a $25,000 reward. Now the boys have a motivated goal.The detectives Hickey & Boggs are similar to their earlier counterparts in spirit but here in this film they have almost lost the power to change their situations. In part I think this is more the fault of the screenplay. Whether the original Walter Hill screenplay or Bill Culp's changes or studio suits are to blame is worth investigating. In classic hard boiled stories the confrontations were small scale, the stories convoluted but still simple. Here, our two dicks are out gunned in three confrontations even battling helicopter mounted machine guns at the final denouement. This may be an effect of the increasing popularity of the Action Genre in the 70's and trying to modernize a traditional noir story into an action film rather than any statement of the ineffectuality of a private dick in the modern world. But Hicey & Boggs do win in the end but at a big cost.A film not without faults 8/10.
lemans71 One of the greatest films ever made...... "Nobody came. nobody cares. It's still not about anything."As dark and brilliant as it gets.... ahead of it's time even BEFORE it was ahead of its time. Maybe we'll all catch up in another 20 years.If Culp had "just let up" it might have made more money and got better reviews.... it might have lead to other directing jobs...... be he DIDN'T let up..... and we have this masterpiece to thank for it.... Cosby gives the performance of a lifetime, Culp does the same on both sides of the camera
Watch the first few minutes and where Quentin got the opening of Jackie Brown. I wish he'd had another chance directing
.. but this film is so good
so perfect
. It's almost fitting.....What more is there to say anyways..If you want to see this film the way it was meant to be seen, on the big screen with amazing sound, Robert Culp in going to present it person at the AERO THEATER in Santa Monica, CA February 18th 2007 at 7:30pm with a Q&A talk afterwords
it'll be a beautiful print of Hickey & Boggs and then a Q&A with Culp... which will be followed by Walter Hills 48 hours....
robb_772 A complex and intricate crime thriller, the grim violence and downbeat tone of this film will come as a major surprise to fans of the popular tongue-in-television series "I Spy," which also starred Bill Cosby and Robert Culp. Culp actually positioned himself in the director's chair for this outing (it remains his sole feature as a director), and the usually light-hearted actor proves himself to be surprisingly apt at crafting such moody and atmospheric entertainment. Culp also manages to effectively direct himself in one of his least mannered performances, and (best of all) elicits a terrific performance from Cosby. For those of you who are only familiar with the man from years of playing Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable and appearing in those heinous Jell-o pudding commercials, the cynicism and weariness of Cosby's performance will be a revelation and, yes, he is completely believable as a tough guy.The screenplay by Walter Hill (who also penned scripts for 48 HOURS and ALIENS) is marvelously complex, and never insults the intelligence of viewers. There are a massive amount of characters that come in and out of the film (this is one of the only films I've ever seen where the end credits read like an organizational flow chart), and much of the film's plot doesn't finally fall into place until the second and third acts. Thankfully, both Hill and Culp are not afraid to ward off impatient viewers, and take plenty of time in establishing their intriguing set-up. The emerging film is intense and mature, and falls just behind IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT and TAXI DRIVER as the apex of modern film noir.Even though I truly believe this is a great and underrated film, I will fully admit that it may not be possible for me to be truly unbiased towards it. Matt Bennett, who memorably plays Fatboy, was my Great-Uncle. The intensity and menace that Matt brought to the role has always impressed me, and he was so convincing in the role that it basically type-cast him as insane villains for the rest of his career. I would probably love the film for his performance alone, but I did try to be as objective as possible.
Woodyanders Walter Hill wrote the deliciously knotty and fatalistic script for this marvelously gritty private eye mystery action thriller with the unlikely (and possibly incredible) duo of Jason Robards and Strother Martin in mind for the leads. Instead, the familiar "I Spy" team of Robert Culp and Bill Cosby wound up playing the titular rumpled, cynical, tight-lipped and terminally luckless desperate and destitute detectives for hire, a couple of rundown and weary inconsequential losers whose seemingly simple and straightforward case involving a missing rich girl ties in with a suitcase full of mucho stolen mob money and a bunch of dangerous, not to be trifled with gangsters who are willing to use any brutish means necessary to get their hot loot back.The wonderfully easy'n'breezy chemistry between Culp and Cosby effortlessly carries the picture from start to finish. Culp's laudably crisp and assured direction scores a completely on-target bull's eye with the resolutely hard-boiled, tough-minded and no-nonsense harsh tone in particular; this is the kind of top-notch rough'n'tumble modern-day film noir affair where several innocent bystanders are unfairly killed and everyone connected with the stolen bucks ends up getting their violent just desserts by the movie's thrilling conclusion. Peppered with a splendidly sharp line in sardonic humor, punctuated by three stirring shoot-outs (the first in an empty baseball stadium, another in a parking lot, and the last one on a beach), immensely enlivened by a sensational supporting cast filled out by such always welcome folks as Rosalind Cash, Michael Moriarty, Vincent Gardenia, Ed Lauter, and James Woods, and topped off with one of those quintessentially 70's amazing downbeat defeatist climaxes, this simply super sleeper overall rates as one of the finest, most shamefully neglected and undeservedly undervalued crime features from the 70's.
