University of Virginia Library

CINEMA

Bogged Down In Fog Of Reality

By DAVE NOZIGLIA

One goes into Hickey &
Buggs with high hopes, since
this is the first time that
Bill Cosby and Robert Culp
have gotten together since the
famous I Spy series. One is
disappointed.

Robert Culp, the director, is
trying to show a piece of
sordid reality. So in several
places throughout the story
there are little vignettes from
the lives of Al Hickey
(Cosby), and Frank Boggs
(Culp), private eyes. Both have
ex-wives, both lose them, and
in the great tradition of all
super-realistic adventure
heroes, both head for the
nearest bar.

But the one talks the other
out of it, and reality is left
behind to continue with the
plot. And it's a whizzer. A
Chicano woman is a mob's
courier, to the tune of
$400,000. She steals it and
tries to sell the hot hills, and
everybody is trying to steal the
money from her. Hickey and
Boggs are called in by one of
the crooks to find the woman
for him. Not much action but a
lot of dead bodies from there
on in.

If you think the plot
stretches reality a little bit,
wait until you get to the
ending. Culp lingers lyrically
over every single death in the
final slaughter scene, moving
the camera just right and
getting sand in the way so we
don't actually see any good
people getting killed, just lots
of bodies.

Such a slow, drawn-out
lyrical scene really seems comic,
if only in contrast to the
stultifying slowness of the
realistic parts of the film.

If Culp's viewpoint is a little
hazy, Culp as actor seems to be
as much in a fog as his
character. Somehow, whenever
he tries to play a heavy part,
with humor or lightness, he
turns wooden all of a sudden.
Heavy breathing and an adam's
apple mean he's under
pressure. Staring at his drink
means he's glum.

Such cliches never show a
real character.

Cosby is much the better,
but here he suffers from the
same malady. He goes
absolutely nowhere with his
character, and plays each line
almost exactly the same.
Underplaying may be fine in
theory, but it looks lethargic.

Without wit, without any
true viewpoint on reality,
Hickey & Buggs mires down in
its own subject matter and is, in
the final analysis, simply a bore.

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