Howard Eppis News Today

A lot of recent private-eye movies have either kidded the genre (“The Cheap Detective”), or made it so much an invocation of past styles (the Robert Mitchum version of “The Big Sleep”) that the characters seem out of place in the 1970s. It's tricky when you kid; you've got to be sophisticated (as in “Death on the Nile”) or you wind up looking lead-footed by comparison to the slick originals that inspired you.