The 70s. You had to be there.The cheap production standards of the 50s were an attempt to mass produce films the way you would would mass produce shoes. The 60s was an experimental era the same way the children of the 60s were experimenting with everything they could get their hands on.By the 70s films had become more contemplative. The folks behind this little gem decided it was time somebody wrote a script that captured the very essence of the film noires from the 40s.Notice I emphasized the script first, because the rest seems almost an afterthought. Make no mistake. Finney is brilliant as the protagonist comic who wants to be a shamus, a gumshoe, but without that magical script there would be no movie.The script is brilliant. You could turn the picture off and simply listen to the soundtrack and not miss much. ITS THAT GOOD.One scene in particular where Eddie has to seduce an office girl to get an address seems a riff off Bogey in BIG SLEEP. But with better and faster dialog.The fact that even the IMDb tag for the film says "comedy" -- WHICH IT WAS NOT -- tells you how lost this gem is in the annals of film.Whitelaw is great. Janice Rule steals her few scenes.Recommended.

"Gumshoe" is a nice film for Albert Finney to show his talent for wit and humor. The movie came fairly early in his film career – at age 35 he had 14 total film and TV movie roles behind him. This is a very snappy film, with lots of quick lines and retorts. In the theater, I would have missed some of this. But on DVD, I can use subtitles and/or stop and playback for parts that I missed. Finney shows his talents for imitation and impersonation as well. His "Boggie-esque" quips are quite funny. Some reviewers dubbed this film an "oddity" or a "curiosity." I'm not sure what that means. If it's because comedy is mixed with crime – well we have plenty of that dating back to the 1930s. The series of "Thin Man" movies with William Power and Myrna Loy helped make the comedy-crime mix very popular. Others have commented on the plot and cast. I will add only that this film is spot on for intrigue, and it has some very good twists. A casual viewer could miss a lot of what's going on. The roles are all quite good. Finney's Eddie Ginley is a very likable chap. Finney is one of those very talented people in the entertainment field who have played some great roles, but who have not struck gold spelled with an "O."

I'm going to annoy everybody here by writing a middle-of-the-road review. I know that Gumshoe is a movie that you either love or hate, but that's me – eccentric to the last. So let me start out by saying that Gumshoe is a confused and confusing movie, full of odd characters who all talk doubletalk. True, despite all the talk, the movie moves fast – too fast in fact because the super-rapid pace makes the plot impossible to follow. (Maybe that was the whole idea. You've got a plot that doesn't make too much sense, so you "move it along so fast that nobody notices!" (To quote Michael Curtiz). Determinedly TV-style direction doesn't help either. Nevertheless, the movie most certainly has plenty of atmosphere. For me, at least three or four of the scenes actually did work and have certainly stayed in my memory.

Albert Finney is wonderful playing a nightclub comic in Liverpool, a fan of hard-boiled detective stories, who places an advertisement in the paper looking for work as a private eye; he is immediately handed a case involving a fat man, a college student, drugs, and gun-running. Directorial debut from Stephen Frears is consciously not a spoof or satire of American noirs, but rather an homage: an original detective story all its own (albeit one with an unfulfilled plot and supporting characters). Screenwriter Neville Smith's wisecracks work far better than the mystery Finney finds himself enmeshed in, and the pieces which do fall into place seem to happen off-screen. A nonchalant running joke with Finney talking in fast, curt one-liners--and everyone else responding to him in kind--is the film's most charming achievement. If only the story were not so convoluted (and yet wrapped up so unceremoniously), this might have been a minor gem. **1/2 from ****