HICKEY AND BOGGS – The DVD Review

Review by Sam Moffitt

The private investigator has been with us for years, decades really. When I was younger I read as many private eye mysteries as I did science fiction and horror novels and short stories. I read as much of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane as I could find. I also read a lot of the two MacDonald’s, Ross MacDonald’s novels about Lew Archer (one of which made a great movie with Paul Newman as Harper) and John D. MacDonald’s novels about Travis McGee. Although McGee was not strictly speaking a PI he still functioned as one in MacDonald’s color coded novels like Darker Than Amber (which made a great movie with Rod Taylor).

I used to stay up late to watch classic private eye movies like The Maltese Falcon, Kiss Me Deadly (the best Mike Hammer movie ever, seriously!) Murder My Sweet, even weird experimental film noirs like Lady In the Lake with Robert Montgomery. I got to see Lady In Cement in a theater, the Berwan in Sullivan, Missouri in 1968, with Frank Sinatra playing private eye Tony Rome. The first time I ever saw a woman’s butt in a movie.

It also seems like Bill Cosby has been around my entire life. I can barely remember a time when I did not enjoy Cosby’s stand up routines and roles in major television series like I Spy and the various sitcoms that have had his name in the title (there were a lot more than the beloved Cosby Show, trust me.) Cosby’s comedy albums helped me get through a rough childhood.

What do the two have in common? Robert Culp and Bill Cosby were in a now almost forgotten private eye thriller called Hickey and Boggs, released in 1972, not too long after I Spy had run its course. Directed by Culp and starring these two television icons and written, very well written, by Walter Hill, Hickey and Boggs was mercilessly hammered by critics and ignored by the general public. I personally think that’s a shame and that’s why I’m choosing to write about this fallen-between-the-cracks film.

A young Hispanic woman arrives in Los Angeles by train, carrying an ordinary suitcase. The suitcase is buried, dug up, opened and contains many, many bundles of crisp, brand new 1000$ bills. (A denomination no longer printed, I believe.) Several are placed in envelopes and mailed, to who?

Then Bill Cosby as Al Hickey and Robert Culp as Frank Boggs come on the scene, and are shown to be the most down on their luck private investigators in movie history. Hickey had to make a choice to pay the answering service or the phone bill. He chose the answering service so they could still get messages. And to make a call? For the entire movie they will do their business out of phone booths, remember them? They will also use the phonebooks hanging in those booths to do some of their investigating. Hickey’s marriage has broken up though he still cares for his ex-wife, Rosalind Cash, and hopes to get back together with her and dotes on his daughter.

Al Boggs has somehow lost a house that was for sale. We never do learn all the details but apparently the house was in such bad shape he couldn’t sell it, and now… Like I say, the details are a little sketchy. Boggs actually seems to live in their office as he has no other place to go.

Boggs is also divorced and his ex-wife is now a topless dancer on the Sunset Strip. He tortures himself by getting drunk and going to watch her dance. “Eat your heart out” she tells him in one scene. In classic PI fashion they both drink and smoke too much. They both drive cars at least ten years older than the release date of 1972. Their cars are falling apart and burn oil. There is a running gag that they cannot even afford to put coins in the parking meters, Boggs carries a paper bag with “out of order” written on it to put over meters so they can park for free (would that really work? In LA or any other city?

Cosby wears the same pea green sport coat through most of the movie and it looks too small for him, as if it were bought off the rack at a thrift store. When they do get hired to locate the woman who has possession of the stolen 1000$ bills and get the classic private investigator retainer, the first thing Boggs does is blow his share on a hooker.

And in classic private eye fashion bodies start dropping every few minutes. Hickey and Boggs get into serious problems with the police, both are ex-cops of course. Also in classic fashion they find evidence the cops missed, keep running into brick walls and keep pissing off the mobsters who want the money. In Hickey and Boggs we get three groups chasing after that cash, the cops and a mob family, of course, but this being a 1970s movie there is a group of black revolutionaries for whom the money was stolen in order to finance some revolutionary activity. All power to the people!
The action keeps ending up at sporting events. Shootouts occur in the parking lot of a football game, in a baseball stadium, after the game is over, and finally on a beach where everybody shows up, except the cops, oddly enough.

This movie is so down beat I think it actually upset some movie goers. Critics were merciless, I never got to see this in a theater but I can still recall the critic for the Post Dispatch running off at the mouth about the violence and the nihilism. Isn’t film noir supposed to be nihilist? And the violence level is nothing compared with movie mayhem in action films in today’s world.

Hickey comments, at least twice, that being a private investigator “used to mean something, now it’s not about anything!” Hickey and Bogg’s own lawyer tells them their day is done, that all they are now is process servers. I think this movie was meant to hammer a nail into the coffin of the private eye movie. Private investigators, in literature and movies, were supposed to be the updated version of the cowboy in a B-western. Somebody who could make everything right with one bullet or one phone call to the right person. A movie that did a better job at putting that nail in the coffin was Chinatown.

I can still recall seeing Chinatown for the first time at the Sunset Hills Cinema, a theater long gone, and being horrified by that ending. The bad guy gets away with it? Yeah the bad guy got away with it! That ending was like a slap upside my head “wise up kid, the private eye can’t help these people, or you or anybody else! This is the way the world really works!”

That kind of down beat attitude is what Hickey and Boggs is all about, the stink of loser is all over these guys. I don’t think audiences were ready to see the guys from I Spy as losers, especially Cosby. I think word got out, that fabulous word of mouth that can make or break a movie, that this was not an I Spy movie, or anything like it. And so audiences stayed away.

And that really is a shame. The shocking thing about Hickey and Boggs, seeing it again after all these years, is how good it is. And especially how good Culp and Cosby are, and how good Culp’s direction is. Culp directed some television but this was his only feature. I never heard for sure but the rumor is that he was proud of this project and was disappointed it didn’t do better at the box office, and maybe it was his fault. Rumor also has it that Cosby won’t even talk about this film.

They have nothing to be ashamed of, Hickey and Boggs is no masterpiece but it is a good, solid private eye thriller that can hold it’s own with the best of them. I showed this movie a couple of times on my television station in the Navy and was amazed at how these two television actors, one of them best known for being a comedian, are at playing two very believable loose cannons. They are completely real at being losers but also very believable at turning dangerous when they’ve been pushed too hard. I don’t want to give out any spoilers but near the end Cosby has had enough, Culp gives him a little speech, in a bar of course, about how it’s time for some payback. We are convinced that Cosby is having none of it. At the last possible minute he follows Culp out of that bar ready to do what a man’s got to do. It is their Peckinpah moment, their Wild Bunch call to arms and it works beautifully. In a theater with the right audience it would get standing applause, it’s that powerful.

And another wonderful thing is the number of familiar faces, up and coming young actors and future television stars, among the cast. With the cops you have Vincent Gardenia who could play a cop in his sleep, he was in the original Death Wish with Charles Bronson. You also get a very young James Woods as a DA trying to get Hickey and Boggs into jail.

Among the gangsters Robert Mandan is the capo, most famous for playing Roger Tate on Soap, and he’s excellent in the part, who knew Roger Tate could be such a hard ass? His number one guy is Michael Moriarty, looking like a little kid playing at being a gangster. You also get Bill Hickman, stunt driver and bad ass from Bullitt, The French Connection, The Seven Ups and I don’t know how many other crime movies. Ed Lauter is in there too although I did not recognize him. And at a key moment Cosby gets screamed at by his mother in law and it’s none other than Isabel Sanford, Weezy Jefferson herself! Look close or you’ll miss her.

Hickey and Boggs has nothing for extras. It is a burn on demand dvd-r from MGM classics. I have very mixed feelings about this turn of events in dvd distribution. Warners, MGM, Sony and some others are releasing marginal titles as dvd-rs and that is a good thing. Every time I get on Oldies.com or Deep Discount DVD and look at the titles available I see dozens I would like to have, but even at a discount I think they are over priced. It would be nice if Netflix were to distribute these titles but I haven’t seen any of them turn up yet. I would like to see titles like Mickey One and Green Slime and Queen of Blood but don’t want to pay out twenty dollars for the privilege. With Hickey and Boggs it is worth it.