Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
Theatrical poster
Directed by	Carl Reiner
Produced by	William E. McEuen Richard McWhorter David V. Picker
Written by	Carl Reiner George Gipe Steve Martin
Starring	Steve Martin Rachel Ward Carl Reiner
Music by	Miklós Rózsa Steve Goodman
Cinematography	Michael Chapman
Editing by	Bud Molin
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Release date(s)	May 211982
Running time	89 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid was a movie first released in 1982. It was directed by Carl Reiner and featured Steve Martin and Rachel Ward. It is both a pastiche of, and comedic homage to, film noir and the pulp detective movies of the 1940s and 1950s.

The film is a collage effect of old black and white movie clips from films of the 1940s and 1950s, with more recent footage of Martin and other actors (including Carl Reiner, Rachel Ward, and Reni Santoni) similarly shot in black and white. When everything is put together, the original dialogue and acting becomes part of a completely different (and ridiculous) story. This was the last film for both costume designer Edith Head and composer Miklós Rózsa.

Among the actors who appeared from classic films were Edward Arnold, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Wally Brown, James Cagney, William Conrad, Jeff Corey, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Brian Donlevy, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, Cary Grant, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Burt Lancaster, Charles Laughton, Charles McGraw, Fred MacMurray, John Miljan, Ray Milland, Edmund O'Brien, Vincent Price, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner and Norma Varden.

Film editor Bud Molin faced the challenge of linking Film Noir classics and contemporary footage, which ran at different speeds.

Films used

The films used in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid:

• Johnny Eager (1941)
• Suspicion (1941)
• This Gun for Hire (1942)
• The Glass Key (1942)
• Keeper of the Flame (1942) (uncredited)
• Double Indemnity (1944)
• The Lost Weekend (1945)
• Deception (1946)
• Humoresque (1946)
• The Big Sleep (1946)
• The Killers (1946)
• Notorious (1946)
• The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
• Dark Passage (1947)
• I Walk Alone (1947)
• Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)
• The Bribe (1949)
• White Heat (1949)
• In a Lonely Place (1950)

Reaction

In his review for Newsweek magazine, David Ansen wrote, "A one joke movie? Perhaps, but it's such an engaging joke that anyone who loves old movies will find it irresistible. And anyone who loves Steve Martin will be fascinated by his sly performance, which is pitched exactly between the low comedy of The Jerk and the highbrow Brechtianisms of Pennies From Heaven.^[1] Vincent Canby's review for the New York Times praised Martin's performance: "the film has an actor who's one of America's best sketch artists, a man blessed with a great sense of timing, who is also self-effacing enough to meet the most cockeyed demands of the material."^[2]

Trivia

Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines. The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.

This was legendary Costume Designer Edith Head's final film. There is a tribute to her in the closing credits denoting this. Fittingly, the film features many of her earlier designs in cleverly edited clips from old movies.

Also the last film of legendary composer Miklós Rózsa. This was ironic since he was also asked to rescore music for original images that he had worked on in the 1940's and 50's.

The Car accident at the beginning of the movie (the fake killing of the scientist) is taken from Keeper of the Flame (1942). The movie however is not credited as an item being quoted from.

The movie was initially planned by Martin and Reiner to be a '30s-era movie titled "Depression". After Reiner incorporated some footage of a '30s star into the movie, he and Martin decided that the entire movie should be done that way, and re-wrote it into a mock-detective story.

Rigby Reardon tells Lana Turner he left her sitting at a counter at Schwabbs. Lana Turner is rumored to have been discovered sitting in a Schwabbs drugstore.

At the end of the film, as Rigby Reardon and Juliette Forest are passionately kissing, Steve Martin, in voiceover, announces that there will be a sequel (which features a possible nude scene by Juliette) would be in cinemas soon. No sequel has been produced.

Initially, Steve Martin's character was written to tell off Humphrey Bogart's "mentor" character as an old has-been. The scene in which Martin did this was restored for network-TV showings.

It is alleged that the scene where the Nazi officer is killed and falls on the map showing the locations to be destroyed by their secret weapon, in which he claims "At least we got Terre Haute", was a retort to a public humiliation of Martin by that city, located in central western Indiana, over a claim by Martin published in a newspaper not long after he had performed his stand-up comedy routine at the local civic center that Terre Haute was "Nowhere USA".

Tagline:

"Laugh ... or I'll blow your lips off"

References

External links

• Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid at the Internet Movie Database
• Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid at the TCM Movie Database

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