Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982)

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982)

Directed by: Carl Reiner

Starring: Steve Martin, Rachel Ward, Carl Reiner

Hey, remember when Steve Martin was still funny? Back in the good ol’ days before things like Cheaper By the Dozen or Bringing Down the House? Yeah… those were good times. Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid definitely shows both Martin and Carl Reiner in their primes… with an interesting premise to boot. I have no idea why I waited as long as I did to watch this movie.

Martin stars as Rigby Reardon, a private detective who embodies all the traits of a 40’s movie private eye. He sets out to solve the murder of Juliet Forrest’s (Ward) father, and along the way gets shot several times, dresses like two different women, travels to a Caribbean isle, and makes a mean cup of joe.

This movie uses a very interesting gimmick: Many of the smaller roles go to archival footage of big names from the 30’s and 40’s in other film noir detective stories. For instance, Humphrey Bogart is Martin’s assistant, using footage from three different films in creative ways. Now, this was still made in the early 80’s, probably just when they were really able to do this idea well, and so there’s still a lot of body doubles and obvious screen splitting going on, but coupled with the great writing, you really don’t care about the faults of the process and can just enjoy the film. I have a feeling if they tried something like this nowadays, they’d use CGI to rotoscope dead people on to living motion capture bodies and etc etc… I dunno, it’d probably end up just looking creepy instead of funny.

I’m not sure if I found Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid as funny as I did because I love the old film noir detective stories so much or if it was just plain hilarious, but I certainly did like this one. Like I said, it showcases Martin’s impeccable timing with Reiner’s (and Martin’s) witty and authentic sounding writing, making for a really funny movie. Go ahead and pick it up. You get points for every old movie star you can name!