Willis still hadn't managed to tone down that self-satisfied smirk that was the signature of his character in Moonlighting when he made this rambling murder mystery set in a Hollywood on the cusp of sound. Perhaps the film's makers weren't sure that he had the pulling power to carry a film on his own because he shares much of the screen time with co-star James Garner, who provides an altogether more memorable character as Wyatt Earp who is either the sprightliest octogenarian you've ever seen or has mastered the art of time travel.
Earp is invited to Hollywood to act as technical adviser on his biopic, in which Tom Mix (Willis) will play his part. Studio mogul McDowell 'asks' Mix to befriend Earp, a chore against which he initially bridles. For a while it looks as if we're going to be faced with another of those buddy movies in which two disparate characters manage to overcome their initial mutual loathing in order to catch the villain and become best friends in the process, but Mix and Earp's mutual admiration is almost immediate and they quickly get down to business when McDowell's wife, an old friend of Earp's, asks the lawman for help.
Writer/director Edwards throws a few twists into an otherwise straightforward plot, and there's nothing here to really gripe about. The budget precludes any real depth to the period detail, and Edwards only half-heartedly weaves real incidents from Hollywood history into the mix. McDowell's character, Alfie Alperin who was once a film character called the Happy Hobo, is not so much based on Charlie Chaplin as a completely different character to Chaplin based on some aspects of the comic's life. We discover Alperin murdered his wife aboard a yacht, an incident which inevitably draws comparisons with Chaplin's exploits aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht in 1924 which culminated in the death of director Thomas Harper Ince, only for those comparisons to be found to be tenuous in the extreme. The finale takes place at the inaugural Academy Awards ceremony, and flies off in a complete flight of fancy that ties up all loose ends while curiously failing to offer much satisfaction to the viewer.
As a sidenote, I watched this film a couple of hours after watching The Milagro Beanfield War. Both films were made in 1988 and both feature Richard Bradford as a bad guy supported by the wonderfully weaselly M. Emmett Walsh. Bradford was better in Milagro, but Walsh gets more screen time here and makes the most of it.
Earp is invited to Hollywood to act as technical adviser on his biopic, in which Tom Mix (Willis) will play his part. Studio mogul McDowell 'asks' Mix to befriend Earp, a chore against which he initially bridles. For a while it looks as if we're going to be faced with another of those buddy movies in which two disparate characters manage to overcome their initial mutual loathing in order to catch the villain and become best friends in the process, but Mix and Earp's mutual admiration is almost immediate and they quickly get down to business when McDowell's wife, an old friend of Earp's, asks the lawman for help.
Writer/director Edwards throws a few twists into an otherwise straightforward plot, and there's nothing here to really gripe about. The budget precludes any real depth to the period detail, and Edwards only half-heartedly weaves real incidents from Hollywood history into the mix. McDowell's character, Alfie Alperin who was once a film character called the Happy Hobo, is not so much based on Charlie Chaplin as a completely different character to Chaplin based on some aspects of the comic's life. We discover Alperin murdered his wife aboard a yacht, an incident which inevitably draws comparisons with Chaplin's exploits aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht in 1924 which culminated in the death of director Thomas Harper Ince, only for those comparisons to be found to be tenuous in the extreme. The finale takes place at the inaugural Academy Awards ceremony, and flies off in a complete flight of fancy that ties up all loose ends while curiously failing to offer much satisfaction to the viewer.
As a sidenote, I watched this film a couple of hours after watching The Milagro Beanfield War. Both films were made in 1988 and both feature Richard Bradford as a bad guy supported by the wonderfully weaselly M. Emmett Walsh. Bradford was better in Milagro, but Walsh gets more screen time here and makes the most of it.