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Wrote this comment about Stephen Frears's Gumshoe on a friend's locked thread (friend was comparing a whole set of '60s and early '70s films including this one to prog rock):
Gumshoe - terrific movie, and the only one of these I've seen - seems more punk than prog, actually, though not punk in a confrontational Stooges or Sex Pistols (or Mean Streets) manner; more like the Dolls, suffused with mourning for all the breakdowns of wild late-'60s promise, but reaching back earlier (Dolls to the girl groups, Gumshoe to the rockabillies, to Marlowe and Spade) for forms that give the promise a more mundane form, without giving up on it. The Finney character really does become the detective-story hero of his imagination, against a resolutely non-Hollywood backdrop. And in the tentative alliance near the end between Finney and the rival old detective-enforcer who'd been stalking him, Frears foreshadows the new cultural configurations he plays with later in Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie.
Surprised this movie hasn't gotten more attention, given the respect now accorded Stephen Frears. I remember Kael or Gilliatt in the New Yorker giving it a rave at the time, which is why I eventually saw it, which wasn't until sometime in the mid '70s, or even later*: Was part of a revival double feature with Billy Wilder's The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes: I watched Gumshoe, then Private Life, then sat through Gumshoe again so that I could make more sense of the accents and lingo. Then saw it a third time several years later.
*[EDIT: Don't know the source of my uncertainty here. I'm sure I saw it the summer of 1975, part of weekly film showings at the Art Institute Of Chicago.]
Gumshoe - terrific movie, and the only one of these I've seen - seems more punk than prog, actually, though not punk in a confrontational Stooges or Sex Pistols (or Mean Streets) manner; more like the Dolls, suffused with mourning for all the breakdowns of wild late-'60s promise, but reaching back earlier (Dolls to the girl groups, Gumshoe to the rockabillies, to Marlowe and Spade) for forms that give the promise a more mundane form, without giving up on it. The Finney character really does become the detective-story hero of his imagination, against a resolutely non-Hollywood backdrop. And in the tentative alliance near the end between Finney and the rival old detective-enforcer who'd been stalking him, Frears foreshadows the new cultural configurations he plays with later in Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie.
Surprised this movie hasn't gotten more attention, given the respect now accorded Stephen Frears. I remember Kael or Gilliatt in the New Yorker giving it a rave at the time, which is why I eventually saw it, which wasn't until sometime in the mid '70s, or even later*: Was part of a revival double feature with Billy Wilder's The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes: I watched Gumshoe, then Private Life, then sat through Gumshoe again so that I could make more sense of the accents and lingo. Then saw it a third time several years later.
*[EDIT: Don't know the source of my uncertainty here. I'm sure I saw it the summer of 1975, part of weekly film showings at the Art Institute Of Chicago.]
