On Screen

...How could the artistic imagination possibly improve on the real-life character of Anthony Ulasewicz- Or contrive a plot more fantastic than the convoluted series of events-from the "stonewalling" strategy to the self-incriminating tapes—that enabled Richard Nixon to bring about his own downfall...

...As for Ira Wells, while Carney-a careful and competent actor-tries hard, he just is not equal to the task...

...Indeed, it is downright tasteless...

...Moreover, whatever shock value the film starts out with is cynically and tire-somely exploited in pointless repetitions...

...Regrettably, the movie is as long as the novel was short, and as blatant as the book was allusive...

...The greatest virtue of Spark's novel was its length-100 pages...

...In fairness, it should be added that the script is not much help...

...Fortunately, though, director Benton's self-indulgent hommage is at least partially foiled by writer Benton's straightforward thriller: We are quickly plunged into a vintage mystery...

...his characterization, like Tomlin's, is almost wholly external...

...There is little else to say about this wretched movie, except that it has about as much to do with Watergate as All the President's Men did —which is to say not very much...

...This random recycling of cinematic trash can lead to a somewhat distorted image of the motion picture past...

...The part of Margo—the self-dramatizing has-been actress, would-be dress-designer, part-time drug-dealer, and full-time nonstop talker—would be a plum for any talented actress...

...instead of furniture, there are endless stacks of stolen merchandise—everything from permanent-press shirts to portable stereos...

...There she conceived the part from the inside...

...The Late Show, a weak brew, is still pretty stimulating in this age of soda pop...

...A late-night television watcher might conclude, for example, that murder mysteries were the only kind of film Hollywood made during the '40s...

...we never quite feel the obsession driving Wells to solve the mystery...

...As the title obviously and ironically suggests, the movie owes a debt to its predecessors...

...For one thing, despite his grumbling and bad leg and hearing aid, he never really appears old enough (he is not yet 60...

...The makers of Nasty Habits seem determined to remedy that situation with a perverse vengeance...

...Apparently aware of the need to involve the audience, Benton cooked up a May/December love affair between Margo and Wells...

...Carney, alas, is damned whatever he does: If he is any more amorous he will look foolish, and his gruffness makes him seem unsympathetic...

...Yet The Late Show, for all its faults, is entertaining...

...The garish characters, in particular, are wonderfully evocative of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett mysteries...

...Even if we did not raise an eyebrow at the things Spark found shocking—nuns mouthing obscenities and copulating under bushes—we could nonetheless appreciate the rich suggestive-ness of her carefully-wrought prose...

...Wells' old pal, Harry Regan (Howard Duff), arrives with a .45-caliber bullet lodged in his gut, and dies before revealing the name of his killer...

...Haldeman), Anne Jackson (as John Erlichman), Anne Meara (as Gerald Ford), and Sandy Dennis (as John Dean) are permitted —nay, encouraged—to make fools of themselves by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg...

...One need only contrast it with her work in Nashville, where the frustrated housewife and mother she played was unlike any of her comedic personae...

...At one point, Wells proclaims his duty to track down Regan's killer, and Margo shuts him up by saying, "That's bullshit—it's just one more chance for you to go around shooting guns and playing cops and robbers...

...an apartment building named La Paloma, after the ship in The Maltese Falcon...

...The premise of the satire was obvious to the point of simpleminded-ness, but at least the development of the idea was restrained...

...But her rather timid satire could not overcome the fundamental problem that most of the actual events of Watergate were so outrageous, any work of fiction would seem feeble by comparison...

...And that new thriller, The Late Show, would do nothing to disillusion him...

...Nasty Habits, a new British/American joint production, is a much less appetizing concoction...

...This limited range undermines the credibility of the entire role...

...It is especially disheartening to see Glenda Jackson gradually turning into the next great harridan of the screen, a fate that formerly befell Bette Davis (whose career Jackson's has paralleled in many other ways...

...Spark, a Catholic convert, hit on the idea of using the political and sexual scandals within the walls of a fictional English convent as an allegory of the Watergate affair...

...Wells' weaknesses are physical rather than emotional, and his alienation results less from a sense of honor confronting evil than from his infirmities...

...Like most self-conscious revisionists steeped in movie lore, Benton is about as subtle as an elephant...

...moreover, its leading man, Art Carney, is himself a retread (although The Honeymooners was a TV situation comedy and not a film noir...

...They are not as potent as they were when Bogart mouthed them—or as they are in 30-year-old movies seen on television today —but they are strong enough to confirm Edmund Wilson's judgment that enjoying mysteries is a lot like succumbing to alcoholism...

...Perhaps most irritating is the way the nearly all-female cast has been spectacularly misused...

...Carney plays Ira Wells, an aging, semiretired private eye who might have bumped elbows with Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe 30 years ago...

...Unlike Sam Spade, who was more than merely tempted by Brigid O'Shaugh-nessy, Ira Wells—perhaps because he is supposedly too old for sex-never is allowed to become truly intimate with the other characters...

...But Tomlin does not so much act as impersonate, a throwback to her schtick from the Laugh-In days...

...On Tomlin's part, it comes across as yet another of her manic free-floating fantasies ("I feel just like Nick and Nora...

...The most complex characters, however, the two leads, are the least well played...

...The movie was adapted from Muriel Spark's 1974 short novel, The Abbess of Crewe...

...The snappy romanticism that develops is empty sentimentality, on the same level as all those childish references Benton insists upon inserting (a picture of Bogart on the wall of the cafe where Wells delivers his big monologue...

...If Benton wanted to make the point that the old-style private eye is now —after 30 years—completely out of fashion, he certainly succeeded: Wells is so stolid that he is dull and so far out of step that he is unable to tap our sympathies...

...After suffering that laughably "serious" film and now this unfunny comedy, one can only hope that the Watergate scandal is now finally a thing of the past...

...We know that a certain tenderness is supposed to grow between the two^—but only because we have seen the same movies Benton has...

...Superficially vivid as her performance is, it lacks any real conviction...

...Birdwell (Eugene Roche, of television's commercials), for instance, is a high-living fence who operates out of a mansion that looks, on the inside, like a discount department store...

...But in the first scene of the film, as the camera makes a 360-degree sweep around his shabby boarding-house room, we learn less about Wells than about writer-director Robert Benton (the collaborator with David Newman on the screenplay of Bonnie and Clyde): We see Wells dozing at his desk—before a battered old typewriter, an unfinished manuscript entitled Naked Girls and Machine Guns: Memoirs of a Real Private Detective, and a framed photograph of Martha Vick-ers (one of Humphrey Bogart's co-stars in The Big Sleep...

...It is a commonly-voiced and legitimate complaint that women have not enjoyed many good leading roles in recent movies...

...It was the tension between vulnerability and alienation that made the Bo-gart persona compelling...

...And his bodyguard, Lamar (John Considine), in his cashmere jacket and jewelry, looks like a mod version of Caspar Gutman's gunsel in The Maltese Falcoln...

...Similarly, we can walk away from The Late Show feeling that we got our money's worth because it lets us lap up all those venerable cliches once more...

...In both conception and casting, The Late Show thus shrewdly exploits the television-saturated sensibility of our time...

...Glenda Jackson (as the Nixon-nun), Melina Mercouri (as Henry Kissinger, unintentionally hilarious in her Greek-accented attempt to mimic the former Secretary's Germanic English), Geraldine Page (as H.R...

...After bidding him farewell ("You were real good company—the best"), Wells grimly sets out to find the murderer...

...We know from all those old movies that this loony caper will eventually connect somehow with Regan's death, and sure enough, it does—but not before the obligatory number of beatings, shootings, doublecrosses, and bizarre low-life figures have colorfully advanced the plot along its convoluted and ritualistic path...

...At Regan's funeral, Wells runs into a small-time hustler, Charlie Hatter (Bill Macy, of television's Maude), and his "dolly," Margo (Lily Tomlin, of television's Laugh-In), who hires the detective to find her kidnapped cat...

...For another, he seems to think that walking stiffly and moving slowly are sufficient to convey the dignity of old age...

...here she apes it from without...

...Birdwell's cheating wife, Laura (Joanna Cassidy), comes on like an updated and even sleazier version of the temptresses played by actresses like Martha Vickers in the '40s...