Raegan Butcher Fans of neo-noir should take note of Hickey & Boggs, made in 1972. It has a tart and tangy early script from the great Walter Hill and stars Bill Cosby and Robert Culp as two private dicks who are so down on their luck they can't afford to pay their phone bill. The I-Spy duo give excellent performances Bill Cosby is great. This is my favorite Cosby film. Robert Culp, recently deceased,also directed, and he shows a very sure hand behind the camera.I was quite surprised by the quality of this film after hearing about it for a number of years. Hickey & Boggs has a gritty downbeat vibe and it feels more desperate and low-rent and real than most private detective movies. A forgotten gem from the 70s.This is certainly one of my favorite films.

Joel Rane The early '70s was a goldmine for Los Angeles noir, as the city matured and the independent film came along for the ride. On the surface, this film is a great example: a complex, almost viscerally intuitive plot, excellent cinematography, decent and often interesting direction and editing, and like so many films shot during this period in Los Angeles, a kind of pre-nostalgia for the often-dark place that was disappearing, and turning into something even worse, a place of mindless, impersonal violence, with the bland corporate character of the late 20th century.That said, the film suffers from perhaps being too understated, and certainly too nihilistic. Fans of Walter Hill might take issue, but this is a problem I have with most of his films; while they might be visually interesting and often brilliant, they are so hopeless as to make one wonder, as the characters in this film do aloud, what the point is. In this film there are two survivors, the title characters; nearly every other character is killed or so one-dimensionally hateful that it renders the conclusion quite unsatisfying. I especially felt the lack of character permitted to Cosby and Culp; while they were certainly playing against their debonair banter in "I Spy" on purpose, Hill's screenplay renders them so oppressed and silent that they are almost outside the story, like some existential Pinter characters dropped in to intentionally find the rock-bottom. It was a valiant effort, but after the final carnage, I found it so pointless and yet a clear sign where Hill was going, into a glamorous, beautiful world of violence for its own sake.

lemans71 One of the greatest films ever made...... "Nobody came. nobody cares. It's still not about anything."As dark and brilliant as it gets.... ahead of it's time even BEFORE it was ahead of its time. Maybe we'll all catch up in another 20 years.If Culp had "just let up" it might have made more money and got better reviews.... it might have lead to other directing jobs...... be he DIDN'T let up..... and we have this masterpiece to thank for it.... Cosby gives the performance of a lifetime, Culp does the same on both sides of the camera…Watch the first few minutes and where Quentin got the opening of Jackie Brown. I wish he'd had another chance directing….. but this film is so good…… so perfect…. It's almost fitting.....What more is there to say anyways..If you want to see this film the way it was meant to be seen, on the big screen with amazing sound, Robert Culp in going to present it person at the AERO THEATER in Santa Monica, CA February 18th 2007 at 7:30pm with a Q&A talk afterwords……… it'll be a beautiful print of Hickey & Boggs and then a Q&A with Culp... which will be followed by Walter Hills 48 hours....

bmacv Action and suspense films from the early 1970s have a distinctive period flavor to them. The surprisingly effective Hickey and Boggs – co-star Robert Culp's sole directorial effort – embodies that disillusioned and dissolute era of movie making. The rough and choppy editing, the oddly cropped shots keep the viewer on edge; so do the less than pristine cinematography and the cacophonous sound track, with dialogue overlaid on a constant, dull background roar of ambient noise. Often this proved to be a recipe for pretentious but empty disasters and cynical exploitation films; here, it all works to keep the level of unease – of menace – uncomfortably high.Bill Cosby and Robert Culp play the title characters, a couple of down-on-their-luck Los Angeles private investigators. (Many moviegoers of the era apparently expected a big-screen reprise of their successful pairing in the television spoof of the 1960s, I Spy; how wrong they were.) They are engaged to find a missing woman by one of those creepily effete characters who, since Peter Lorre's Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon, exist only to set up private eyes in the movies. And as they go about their sleuthing, they uncover a trail of brutally murdered corpses, a situation which does not endear them to the police. They come to learn that the woman they're tracking holds the take from a robbery of the Federal Reserve Bank in Pittsburgh some years before; they've been hired as finger men by one of a number of murky but vicious groups seeking to retrieve the cash.The movie forgoes crisp, clockwork plotting for a generalized miasma of corruption, duplicity and malaise. There are allusions to the turbulent politics of the times in the involvement of black militants and Chicano radicals; there are whiffs, too, of the specter of newly hatched sexualities that threaten the status quo. At the scene of one murder, they find crushed amyl nitrite poppers and gay porn, while the jaded oldster who engages them suns himself on a towel sited suspiciously close to a set of swings where young children are cavorting; for that matter Culp, in his cups and a masochistic, self-pitying mood, watches his ex-wife flaunt herself in a strip club to be ogled by drunken strangers. The malaise, of course, becomes murderous in Walter Hill's very violent screenplay, touching Cosby's character (his estranged wife ends up tortured to death). Still, the two dead-end dicks soldier on, more though one another's goading than from any code or commitment – they're both on the verge of giving up and sliding down into the vortex of lust, avarice and revenge that has become their world (and by extension, THE world). Describing Hickey and Boggs makes it sound like the ultimate downer; it is, but it's an uncommonly compelling piece of film making, and one that has pretty much fallen through the cracks of movie history.