Foul Play (1978)

Who payed the critics

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Back when Chevy Chase was credibly a romantic lead, and Goldie Hawn a rising starlet, this was one of the best movies of the time. Hawn plays a librarian who runs afoul of a criminal plot to assassinate someone. She contacts the police when her date is murdered (but the body disappears), and again when she injures an intruder who is shot by *another* intruder (who both disappear when she faints...), and when she is apparently tracked down by the mysterious Dwarf. Sympathetic detective Chase decides to hear her out, with able assistance from his partner, a young Brian Dennehy, and together they start to unravel what's really going on. Dudley Moore has a hilarious bit-part as an oversexed Brit who misinterprets Hawn's plea for help as a request for a liaison, with amusing results. The casting is great, with the late William Frankfather as an eerie and unsettling albino hit-man, and the late Billy Barty as a... well, you'll know when you see him. Burgess Meredith is wonderful as Hawn's fatherly landlord, who lends a hand in solving the mystery.Much of the comedy in this film is based upon mistaken identification and being caught in innocent but seemingly guilty circumstances. It is well done. Much can also be said for Dudley Moore who has a minor role that keeps reappearing throughout the film. He's just a guy that want to get his ashes hauled and circumstances keep throwing him together with Goldie as she tries to evade bad guys. He is hilarious in this role. And finally, in what I consider one of the funniest scenes ever shot in any movie, are the elderly Chinese tourist couple, who have just arrived in San Francisco, armed with their suitcases and two small American flags. Again as Chevy Chase's character seized the limo they are in and charges through San Francisco to get to the Opera House to prevent "the Hit" this couple lets us sit back in uncontrolled hysterical laughter as you can only imagine what the two visitors must be thinking.Overall rating: 8 out of 10.

Colin Higgins' San Francisco-based genre-busting comedy-thriller starts with the murder of an archbishop (Roche), then jumps to a chucklesome brush between our protagonists Gloria Mundi (Hawn), a recently-divorced bimbo librarian and a smart-looking but clumsy lieutenant Tony Carlson (Chase in his debut leading role), next, backing with Barry Manilow's Oscar-nominated theme song READY TO TAKE A CHANCE AGAIN (by Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel) and sunlit bird's-eye view shots, Gloria decides to take the chance to embrace new adventures and picks up a random hitchhiker Scott (Solomon) and suggests they should have a movie date, unbeknown to her, Scott puts a small film inside his cigarette box and leave it to Gloria because someone is on his tail, before being dispatched in the cinema, he utters a foreboding warning to her "beware of the dwarf!".Once the MacGuffin is set, this Hitchcock parody goes heedlessly into the alley of a succession of cat-and-mouse chases and break-in attacks, with intermittent comic fodder involving a lecherous conductor Stanley Tibbet (Dudley Moore's American celluloid debut), who objectifies Gloria as a target for sex, Moore steals the limelight with his bravura of sexual perversity, straddling between farce and vulgarity. But the film goes downward from there, the story dully takes a familiar course of action with broad comedy sketches, romantic rendezvous and run-of-the-mill action pieces, a guilty-pleasure highlight involves a close-combat between the septuagenarian Meredith (as Gloria's karate-showboating landlord) and the villainess Rachel Roberts, simply because it is so off-centre. The final deciding event is set during the opera THE MIKADO, but until this point, our investment in the characters has already run its course, after a cringe-worthy kissing scene in front of all the dumb spectators (including a horrendous Pope Pius XIII), it is high time to bring down the curtain on this insipid crowd-pleaser.In any case, the film was a box-office hit in 1978, revives Hawn's career and establishes her oft- stereotyped screen persona as a simple-minded blonde with her innocuous bulging eyes, which certainly hampers her career longevity. Chevy Chase, barely appears in the first half of the film as a leading man, starts to integrate his deadpan drollness with a heart-throb front, which would subsequently lend him fame in his later works, notably in the National Lampoon and the Fletch movies. But as for the film, regrettably to say, it can barely leave any fresh impressions by today's new audience where the same tropes have been exploited by a surplus of emulators, time changes, that's why there is always a thrust for studios to remake old movies, maybe they can give this one a green light, at the least, the laughter-cum-scare blending has long exited the mainstream filmmaking in America.

Man there's so many things to like in this movie. The absurd story, Dudley Moore as the real life quagmire, and much more. I watched this movie on DVD as a random pick and I wasn't disappointed. In my book it's yet another comedy classic from Chevy Chase. Strange enough out of this weird movie my favorite scene would have to be the scene where Dudley Moore is first introduced and brings Goldie Hawn to his apartment and it is then revealed that he is practically the real life Quagmire. I swear the characters are so similar that it seems as if family guys famous character was influenced by Dudley Moore's.Anyways back to the main part, the film for a comedy has a really original plot and it works well with this film. It isn't a must see but it's funny and I enjoyed it. To each his own I guess. That's all I have to say thanks for reading my review.

Alfred Hitchcock's last film, "Family Plot", came out two years earlier than "Foul Play". It is also filmed in San Francisco, also features a winsome heroine and a clutsy hero, and also involves a diabolical plot against a man of the church. But instead of mediocre acting, lame pacing, and an endless car chase, it has Hitchcock's polish and gentle wit. "Foul Play" looks to me like a plagiaristic attempt to combine Hitchcock's work with -- what? -- "Bullitt"?The only thing that saves "Foul Play" for me is the Gilbert-and-Sullivan, although I have to admit that the treatment of what Hitchcock would call the "McGuffin" was somewhat inventive.