Hickey & Boggs (1972, Robert Culp) (Patreon)

66/100

Just insanely bleak, to the point where I'd argue that bleakness is really the only thing it has to offer. (Fine by me, as my rating indicates.) Not that there weren't a fair number of films, particularly around this time, dedicated to exploring some private dick's miserable existence, at the partial expense of whatever case he's ostensibly working—the genre's always leaned seedy, which is probably why it's endured even as the profession itself has all but vanished. Here, though, you've got two hard-luck losers unconsciously competing for the title of Most Pathetic, with the ebony-and-ivory aspect pointedly unmentioned but also impossible not to think about. (Should note that I've never seen, so far as I can recall, more than a brief excerpt of I Spy, so couldn't say to what extent, if any, Hickey & Boggs deliberately fucks with viewer expectations informed by the show.) Cosby withholds his sense of humor and personal charm, actually coming across like the closet sociopath he was eventually revealed to be (Hickey's a full-blown nihilist by the end); Culp plays Boggs as a perpetual emotional scrounger, with every interaction equivalent to furtively shoving his hands between someone else's couch cushions, just in case some loose change fell down there. Even the gunplay has been made uncool: Hickey carries a revolver—just now learned that .357 Magnum technically denotes the cartridge, not the gun!—anyway, he carries a revolver so large that it can't be comfortably holstered, forcing him (and later Boggs) to just clumsily carry it around wrapped in old newspaper, like an alcoholic trying to disguise his cheap bottle of whiskey. Did I mention that Boggs clearly is an alcoholic, and downs many shots while masochistically watching his ex-wife strip at a local bar? Or that Hickey, likewise divorced, has been reduced to playing the tooth fairy for his daughter even when she hasn't recently lost any teeth? (On how she can increase her revenue: "Well, you could knock 'em out with a stick, or you could get a pair of pliers.") 

If I seem laser-focused on the title characters and their shabby milieu, that's because the narrative's kind of a mess, at once overly complicated and devoid of any real interest. This was Walter Hill's first produced screenplay, and while it boasts some choice hard-boiled dialogue—Vincent Gardenia's cop observes that Hickey and Boggs' investigation has led to two fatalities thus far; "We live in troubled times" is Hickey's sardonic reply—the question of who did and/or wants what and why receives a lot of attention but very little clarity. Some of the confusion's attributable to strangely inept editing: Business with the cash-filled briefcase at the beginning makes no sense unless there's some sort of completely unmarked time jump (first we see Mary Jane holding it in a taxi, then she's watching a gardener unearth it from his nursery), and at one point the film cuts directly from a long shot of Hickey walking into the building that houses his and Boggs' office—before that location has been established—to the interior of a gym, thereby falsely creating the impression that Hickey's at the gym. Just amateur-hour stuff, and while this is the first and only theatrical feature that Culp directed, you'd think that somebody would've better advised him. Still, his instincts are reasonably strong where it counts, w/r/t mood, tone, atmosphere, and performance, and that counteracts the distractingly jagged rhythm. In the end, Hickey & Boggs is one of those half-forgotten '70s films that you stumble across and gape at, reminded anew that despair became so thickly dispersed in '70s America that Hollywood couldn't contain it and briefly stopped trying.