Gumshoe (1971)

Recommended

UK

Feature Film

Director: Stephen Frears

Writer: Neville Smith

Cinematographer: Chris Menges

Composer: Andrew Lloyd Webber

Cast: Albert Finney, Billie Whitelaw, Frank Finlay, Janice Rule, Carolyn Seymour, Fulton Mackay, George Innes, George Silver, Bill Dean, Wendy Richard, Maureen Lipman, Neville Smith, Oscar James

A fast talking Liverpudlian comedian, who wishes that he had written The Maltese Falcon and recorded Blue Suede Shoes, begins – in between visits to the dole office and his psychiatrist’s office – to moonlight as a private detective; a career move that soon has him chatting-up femmes-fatale, fleeing “spades” and “jocks,” and generally getting up to mischief, in Frears’s thoroughly entertaining theatrical debut. Iain.Stott