Foul Play **** (1978, Goldie Hawn, Chevy Chase) – Classic Movie Review 3058

Writer-director Colin Higgins’s hilarious 1978 comedy thriller stars Goldie Hawn as a shy San Francisco librarian innocently embroiled in a plot to kill the Pope on a visit to the city and Chevy Chase as the smooth but bumbling local police detective who protects her. 

Naturally, the duo bicker and fall in love as they try to solve the crime that involves a microfilm cassette, a dying secret agent, an albino and a dwarf as well as the Catholic Church (That’s right, honey, you’ve attacked an innocent dwarf’).

Using great skill, invention and imagination, Higgins plays some bright and lively variations on the well-known old Hitchcock themes, making them seem fresh again as it raids the master’s work to spoof it and use its plotlines, situations and characters. Specifically, it genially spoofs The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Notorious (1946), Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Wrong Man (1956), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Frenzy (1972), It’s a movie buff’s delight. It’s fun to see if you can spot the references.

The sometimes variable Hawn and Chase are on top form here as Gloria Mundy and Tony Carlson, sharing good star chemistry. And there is delightfully eccentric support from Dudley Moore as a sex-mad orchestra leader called Stanley Tibbets and Burgess Meredith as Mr Hennessey, plus Rachel Roberts (Gerda Casswell), Eugene Roche (Archbishop Thorncrest) and Marc Lawrence (Stiltskin) as the nuts who want to do away with the Holy Father. 

As enjoyable as Higgins’s earlier companion piece Silver Streak (1976), this follow-up movie is smart and very jovial, and is stirred along with an ideal score by Charles Fox.

Also in the cast are Billy Barty, Brian Dennehy, Marilyn Sokol, Chuck McCann, Don Calfa, Bruce Solomon, Cooper Huckabee, Pat Ast, Frances Bay, John Hancock, Queenie Smith, Hope Summers and Irene Tedrow.

Cyril Magnin, San Francisco’s real-life first Chief of Protocol, as well as businessmen, power broker, political fund-raiser, chief executive and multi-millionaire, plays Pope Pius XIII. And Esme the snake is played by Shirley Python.

A TV series followed.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3058

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