Re: RARA-AVIS: "best private eye parody"?

From: JIM DOHERTY ( jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com)
Date: 29 Jul 2003


Chris,

Re your comments below:

> > [Hope's] "My Favorite Brunette" may be the best
> private eye parody (of "Murder My Sweet") ever
> filmed.
>
> *
>
> As soon as you use that word "best," you're gonna
> have yourself an argument.

That wasn't my comment. It was Dick Lochte's. I was piggy-backing off it remembering a line of V/O narration I found both particularly funny, and typically Hope.
 
> For my money, I prefer the "Girl Hunt" number in
> "The Band Wagon," with Fred Astaire as a Mike Hammer
> caricature named Rod Riley and the following lines
> of pseudo-tough narration (written by an uncredited
> Alan Jay Lerner):
>
> "She came at me in sections. More curves than a
> scenic railway."
>
> "She was bad, she was dangerous, I wouldn't trust
> her any further than I could throw her -- but -- she
> was my kind of woman."

I like it, too, and, I think Mickey Spillane did as well. It always struck me as more than a coincidence that his Mike Hammer "comeback" novel was entitled THE GIRL HUNTERS.
 
> And shouldn't we also mention Daffy Duck in the
> Robert Clampett-directed "Great Piggy Bank Robbery"?

And who can forget the V/O narration from that classic? "She had guilt written all over her face," muses Daffy, as we see a close-up which shows that, by God, she really does have guilt written all over her face.

> As long as we're talking "My Favorite Brunette,"
> though, it might as well be noted that the story's
> being told as a flashback from a jail cell counts as
> parody of "Postman Always Rings Twice." Its plot is
> kicked off by Hope's character, a baby photographer,
> "minding the store" for a detective played (in
> cameo) by Alan Ladd -- thus making it all a reaction
> to such Ladd vehicles as "Blue Dahlia" and the
> second "Glass Key." And, given that the plot turns
> on Hope's specialized camera with its ability to
> take photos through keyholes, you could easily claim
> that "Brunette" is a film founded upon voyeurism ...

To a lesser degree, it also recalls MURDER, MY SWEET which is told as a flashback from a police station where Marlowe is undergoing a grilling.

Just before we're shown Alan Ladd as the "real" detective, Hope tells Ladd's character that he wants to be a hard-boiled private eye, "like Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell. And Alan Ladd."

JIM DOHERTY

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