Peeper
by Peter Hyams
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DVD details
Actor: Kitty Winn, Michael Caine, Michael Constantine, Natalie Wood, Thayer DavidDirector: Peter Hyams
Brand: Fox
Cinematographer: Earl Rath
Editor: James Mitchell
Producer: Irwin Winkler
Producer: Robert Chartoff
Writer: Keith Laumer
Writer: W.D. Richter
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 87 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-10-17
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
DVD Reviews of Peeper
DVD Review: Never had a chance
Summary: 3 Stars
Every man has a wonderful idea that absolutely will not work. Judging by his track record, director Peter Hyams has had several.
As the film itself strongly implies and as the attached interviews with Hyams make explicit, "Peeper" was intended as a loving re-creation of a noir-ish hard-boiled detective film. The screenplay, originally titled "Fat Chance," was based on a Keith Laumer novel of the same name. It so happens that I have never come across that book, but I certainly know Laumer's work. He was a good, sound wordsmith. His business was telling fast-moving stories and he was good at it. I'd be willing to bet that the book version of "Fat Chance" was swift of foot, peppered with lean, mean dialogue and generally smarter than its pulpish bloodlines might suggest.
As I sit here typing these comments, I find myself coming around to believing that many of the same things might be said about the screenplay written for "Fat Chance." I can't speak about the book, but it is clear that the particular hard-boiled detective the screenwriter had in mind was Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and the specific noir film he was channeling was "The Big Sleep." Marlowe's greatest film outing. Marlowe and "The Big Sleep" are gold standard stuff. Having chosen to be derivative, neither the screenwriter nor the director could have picked better models to rip off.
The intentions were good. The screenplay was sound. From that point, everything else went straight into the dumpster. The first appalling error was the tone chosen for the film: self-mocking and ironic. Self-mockery and irony are the very antitheses of film noir. Whatever a noir film may be, it is serious about it, deadly serious. As Edward G. Robinson's Keyes says not once but twice in "Double Indemnity," noir-ish protagonists are "on the streetcar bound straight to the cemetery." Marlowe can be ironic: "I counted seven lies in that statement and had high hopes for more" or this reply to a man who said he didn't like his manners: "Neither do I. I grieve for them." But Marlowe's irony is always verbal and never situational. Marlowe may be tattered and battered, but he's a born white knight and he knows it.
Mockery and irony are distancing; already the production team had taken one giant step away from the movie they had intended to make. The gap widened with the casting decisions. Michael Caine is a superb screen actor, as good as anyone might hope to get for a whole host of things, and he starred in the best equivalents to film noir ever shot on color stock, the Harry Palmer spy films. Nevertheless, Caine is dead wrong as a 1947 Los Angeles private eye. A few lines were interpolated into the screenplay to explain his highly unlikely presence. They only serve to make it more absurd. The effect is much the same as might be achieved by casting John Cleese as Babe Ruth: undoubtedly interesting, even fascinating, but dead wrong. Consistent with hard-boiled detective story practice, there is an ongoing patter from the detective's stream of consciousness. Words that would have emerged quite naturally from Bogart, Dick Powell or even James Garner, sound downright odd when pronounced in Caine's Alfie/Harry Palmer accent.
The casting error was compounded when Natalie Wood, of all people, was put in the Lauren Bacall/Barbara Stanwick part as the infinitely attractive, infinitely dangerous spider-lady role. Woods was a good looking woman and she could act a little, but she absolutely was not a spider-lady.
The errors were not limited to attitude and casting. The cinematographer completely missed the boat--or rather the film noir tramp steamer. Film noir is more than shadows. It is the people in those shadows and the shadows in those people. The great films noir are built of one- and two-shots. Offhand, the only wide-angle shot that comes to mind from "The Big Sleep" involve Marlowe's car arriving at the little bungalow in the Hollywood Hills. The only one I recollect from the hard-boiled "Maltese Falcon" is the hotel lobby scene where Spade calls the house dick over to point out that Wilmer the gunsel is lowering the tone of the joint.
In this film, wide-angle shots abound, in the conservatory scene, for instance. The concept is lifted straight out of "The Big Sleep." If only y had done the same thing with the camera set-ups. What was written as a claustrophobic sequence is shot widely enough to be a danger to those with agoraphobia. A standard set-piece in many a film noir is the mansion of the spider-lady and her endangered family. Here they shot at Harold Lloyd's classic movie star house. There are plenty of nice wide shots to show it off nicely and certainly enough to spoil the pace and visual style of the film. The same may be said of the sequences aboard the cruise ship.
(Let's not even bother with the fact that the concept of "cruise ship" instead of "liner" dates from a good twenty years or more after the notional 1947 date of this film. Or the fact that color film is not as contrasty as black and white stock and produces much warmer images, so that what would have been cool and crisp in a true noir film inevitably becomes, dim, unfocused and uncomfortably tepid here.)
Finally, there is the title. The studio lost faith in the picture as a noir vehicle. The self-mockery and irony triumphed with the change from "Fat Chance" to "Peeper." It didn't work. I vaguely remember the original theatrical releasee. It lasted about a week, impressed nobody at all, disappeared and was quickly forgotten.
Too bad. With rational casting and with a director who had the sense to see what actually lay within the screenplay as well as the ability to carry it out, this might have been a quietly impressive film. As it is, "Peeper" never had a chance, fat or otherwise.
Three stars.
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Description of Peeper
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