VividSimon Simply Perfect

Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Loui Blair It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

NORDIC-2 First time producer Fouad Said, a former cameraman who worked on a number of episodes of the "I Spy" TV series (1965-68), joined forces with erstwhile associates Bill Cosby and Robert Culp to make 'Hickey & Boggs', a crime thriller written by neophyte screenwriter (later director-producer) Walter Hill ('48 Hours'). Viewers expecting a feature-length episode of "I Spy" were in for a surprise. The TV series was cool and jaunty: "Man from U.N.C.L.E." for hipsters. 'Hickey & Boggs' is grim, gritty, and downbeat with Cosby and Culp deliberately working against their glamorous TV star personae by playing Al Hickey and Frank Boggs as two world-weary, down-at-the-heels private investigators facing the moral wasteland of contemporary Los Angeles with a growing sense of powerlessness and despair. In its heyday (c.1940–1957), film noir typically espoused a bleak view of human nature and modern society but sometimes held out the possibility of the hero's redemption through honor and heroism. By the early Seventies such romantic notions of individual agency seemed quaint if not deluded. Accordingly, the movie's complicated plot, involving stolen money from a bank heist, vengeful mobsters, no-nonsense cops, and volatile revolutionaries, soon expands beyond the ability of the protagonists to control it, or even affect the situation to any discernible degree. After surviving an apocalyptic showdown, Hickey complains to Boggs: "Nobody came, nobody cares. It's still not about anything." Enfeebled by a world of intrigue that renders them mere adjuncts to the action, Hickey and Boggs are further emasculated in the war of the sexes. Neither is able to sustain a marriage, or even a healthy relationship. Hickey is to blame when his estranged wife, Nyona (Rosalind Cash) is murdered by the mob. Boggs, an alcoholic, frequents a bar where his ex- wife, Edith (Sheila Sullivan; Culp's actual wife at the time), works as a stripper and taunts him from the stage while revealing her assets. Cynical and nihilistic in the extreme, 'Hickey & Boggs' did poor box office; even by the pessimistic standards of its time, it was a bummer. Also featured is James Woods in an early film role. VHS (2003) and DVD (2004).

Robert J. Maxwell Bill Cosby is Hickey and Robert Culp is Boggs, two partners in a run-down Los Angeles private detective agency. They're swept up in a battle between two gangs over a stash of half a million dollars. The police hate the two private eyes because, as they investigate the case, dead bodies start turning up. A climactic shoot out on the beach involves two airplanes. The protagonists are the only survivors.It's a confusing and twisted story, hard to follow, but the frustration is relieved by occasional minor that have some originality. Director Culp doesn't always give us a head-on shot of what's happening, but shows us the reaction of others so that we know anyway. And there is some humor, understated like the rest of the story.Example of comic incident. Culp has been torturing himself by visiting the club where his divorced wife is a go-go dancer. He still loves her, while she enjoys seeing him in pain. "Eat your heart out," she sneers while uncoiling her hips towards him. Cosby drags him out, drunk, and takes him to a used car dealer to buy a car. The barely sober Culp reels to the nearest dented auto, clicks some switches on and off, and asked the smiling salesman, "How's it run?" Salesman: "Terrific." The salesman has his cigar almost back in his mouth but Culp instantly replies, "I'll take it," and the cigar is halted in mid-lift while the salesman gapes.The two men pack .44 magnums in the last half of the movie, but, alas, they don't have the panache of Dirty Harry's Big Gun, which appeared a year earlier, nor do they make thunderous sounds or give any evidence of recoil when fired. They look like pea-shooters with extra-long barrels.The fact that the story is almost too complicated to follow needn't be the kiss of death. Raymond Chandler was notorious and yet some of his work has been turned into winners. The thing is that Chandler usually had a narrator, Philip Marlowe, given to crude literary tropes: "Her hair was the color of gold in old paintings." Or, "My bank account could have crawled under a duck's belly." "Hickey and Boggs" has no narrator and, lacking a compelling plot, must be carried along by its performances and its atmosphere, a little like "Chinatown," but it doesn't pull it off. Both Hickey and Boggs seem exhausted and sweaty. Cosby and Culp work well together but their dialog lacks drama. They'd worked together for years on a TV series, "I Spy." There's nothing notable about the milieu either. The set dressings are no more than functional. The exteriors have only occasional scenes that hint at the summer heat and noise of Los Angeles -- the cars whizzing by on the freeways, the houses perched on cliffs, the ubiquitous Cal Worthington commercials on television.In the end, after a nihilistic pronouncement, the two men walk away from the carnage with shoulders slumped. The viewer knows how they feel.

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.

cabrelli9 A real treat. Cosby is straight as an arrow. Reminds me of Lee Marvin, here. Culp uses very simple but arresting technique in this directorial debut. His style may look limited but it is hard to imagine a film edited and paced in such a style today except maybe Soderberg's THE LIMEY. This is a key film in the PI genre. It should be seen. Very intelligent, very enjoyable and marvelously put together. It has the pitfalls of the era, the 'heavies' are like lumbering monsters and there is probably one chilli dog too many. But these are quibbles. It's a pity Cosby wasn't in more movies like this. And a damn shame that Culp never picked up the camera again. 8/10