Hickey & Boggs (1972)

There's nothing left of this profession, Frank. It's all over. It's not about anything.

When people talk about the key private eye movies of the 1970s, they invariably mention the triumvirate of The Long Goodbye, Chinatown, and Night Moves. All three, whether through reflexive irony or pastiche, comment loudly on what was seen as a moribund sub-genre.

But there is another contender. That movie is Hickey & Boggs.

Robert Culp was a seasoned television performer by the time he co-starred with then rising star of stand-up Bill Cosby in NBC’s hit espionage show I Spy. The show was pioneering, not only in its interracial friendship (which drew fire from the less tolerant NBC affiliates), but also in its use of location shooting and its emphasis on realism. For all its banter and tennis pro cover identities, this was a show firmly rooted in the Cold War, dealing with plausible threats, rather than acronymic boogeymen. For Culp, I Spy was a chance to flex his creative muscles; he helped establish the series tone with his pilot script (he would write six other episodes) and the show would provide an opportunity to direct for the first time. When the series came to an end in 1968, Culp was already looking for the next challenge.

Meanwhile, fledgling screenwriter Walter Hill had attracted studio attention with his western script Lloyd Williams and His Brother, and had just pitched “the idea of a detective thing” to Warner Bros. John Calley, then production chief, paid Hill to develop the idea into the first draft of Hickey & Boggs and felt it would be a good fit for Cosby¹. Cosby agreed with one condition: Culp would direct. Calley wasn’t keen, but Cosby stood firm: if Warner Bros didn’t want to make it with Culp behind the camera, then the former I Spy partners would buy it themselves. Calley took them up on the offer.

Hickey & Boggs was now effectively an independent picture. Culp trawled the streets of Los Angeles as he tried to pull together the budget – “got the money three times, lost it three times in about a month” – earmarking potential locations and rewriting Hill’s script. With a final confirmed budget of just over $1 million, Culp was ready to embark on his feature directorial debut², albeit one already fighting an uphill battle – Cosby was only available for thirty-five days before he had to be in New York for The Electric Company and Culp had recently undergone double hernia surgery: “I wasn’t healed, but I couldn’t tell anybody … because the insurance company would shut us down.”

These restrictions meant a streamlined approach to production. Culp cut Hill’s already laconic script to the bone, used his I Spy goodwill to secure locations, many of which allowed filming for free as long as the crew “didn’t get in the way”, and Bill Hickman, legendary stunt driver and main heavy, managed to get all the cars used in the film for a grand total of $6,000³. For many directors, these restrictions would be a source of grumbling in later years, but Culp was keen to note that they were a help rather than a hindrance, and that the months spent searching for money had helped him focus on the script and schedule. So his surgery meant he could barely run. So what? His physical infirmity added painful verisimilitude to the action sequences. And so what if they accidentally caught a weird, echoing laugh on film? The so-called “laughing garbage man” would act as a chorus on the soundtrack, a scornful leitmotif that would undercut the action.

The plot, like most private eye movies, is enough to make you cross-eyed if you think about it too much, involving a missing mystery woman, the loot from a Pittsburgh bank robbery that may or may not be earmarked for revolutionary purposes, a trio of cartoonish hitmen (very much a Hill staple), a very white-collar mob (including a typically shifty Michael Moriarty), a gang of black militants clearly modelled after the Black Panthers, and the detectives’ pitiful home lives. Major developments happen off-camera, time is elided, and motives are largely unvoiced. The plot does ultimately make sense - which is more than can be said for most of the alcoholic logic in most Chandler adaptations - but it does require attention and perhaps multiple viewings.

And unlike other PIs of the time, Hickey and Boggs are never truly bamboozled by the machinations of the plot – they may be one step behind the bigger picture, but they’re still ahead of the game for most of the movie, at least compared to their pursuers. Theirs is the lizard-brained professionalism of men who have been in the job too long for too little reward and who are otherwise unemployable: they’ll take a job from an obviously coded paedophile if it means paying the phone bill; they’ll make people think they’re cops if it gets them information; they’ll bag parking meters with an out-of-order sign to secure a spot; they’ll even play ball with the police to keep their licences. While they might have been idealists at one point, they’re now all about survival.

Marlowe, Gittes and Moseby might have looked down-at-heel, but they were never this close to going out of business. Those men exist in romantic poverty; for Hickey and Boggs, any romance has long since curdled into impotence. Hickey struggles to keep his cheap cigar lit. Boggs carries Harry Callahan’s .44 Magnum but can’t hit a damned thing. Hickey can’t afford alimony; he can barely afford the spare change he leaves under his daughter’s pillow so she can phone him. And when Boggs isn’t working his way through the office bottle, he’s being serviced by twenty-dollar hookers or mooning over his stripper ex-wife. These men are exhausted and marginalised, little more than process servers in a world where every relationship is transactional. In these circumstances, a code of honour is a luxury; any pretence at having one would be sarcastic at best.

And yet, despite appearances to the contrary, Hickey & Boggs is no exercise in grim nihilism. Granted, the ending promises a cathartic shootout and delivers a pointless bloodbath, but the friendship between the two men remains intact. This relationship is the core of the movie. Culp and Cosby don’t need to be wisecracking to show rapport, nor do they need big emotional moments to sell it. The relationship is in the small things: the worried look on Hickey’s face every time Boggs drinks too much, the sardonic ribbing about Boggs’s inability to sell the house he once presumably shared with his ex-wife, the trepidation with which Boggs asks, “Al, you ever kill anyone? In the United States?”, which hints at Hickey’s dangerous past and possibly explains his emotional shutdown later in the film.

In fact, the best scenes in the movie are those where Hickey and Boggs try to process the enormity of their situation, whether it’s Hickey trying to pull a drunken Boggs out of the strip club where his ex-wife works or, even better, the scene where Boggs tries to persuade a mute, almost catatonic, Hickey into taking revenge. Culp’s performance is extraordinary, as Boggs shifts from chipper wheedling to macho aggression before finally appealing to his partner’s need for closure, and the scene is punctuated with an exquisite double-take from Boggs as Hickey finally shifts from his stool:

While most critics found something to praise - most notably Charles Champlin, who was the only critic that Culp felt “got it” - audiences, perhaps expecting an I Spy reunion, were unmoved. “It tanked horribly the first weekend,” said Culp. “This thing didn’t make a nickel.” The film also tanked Culp’s directing career. Because he’d rewritten Hill’s script, “I began to give the impression that I would only direct my own stuff … But it doesn’t necessarily make a career and it doesn’t necessarily make for consistently good movies. That’s what I did and I ran afoul of it. I was very arrogant and I don’t recommend it.”⁴ He continued to support the film, however, repeatedly trying to secure a DVD release even as the rights flitted from MGM/UA to Sony and Paramount. The film was released as a murky bootleg in 2004, and a marginally better DVD-R in 2011. It was only in 2014 that Kino Lorber released a Blu-ray, some four years after Culp’s death.

It’s sad but somehow fitting that Hickey & Boggs missed its audience for so long. Just like its protagonists, it is a victim of poor timing and a lack of funds, arriving in cinemas a year before the neo-noir boom of the ‘70s and caught up in rights wrangles that meant it couldn’t be reappraised during the neo-neo-noir boom twenty years later. Even now, the film is tainted by what some perceive as the misogyny of the two detectives, a perception exacerbated by the monstrous behaviour of one of its stars.⁵

So while it’s understandable that “nobody came” and “nobody cares” about Hickey & Boggs, it’s still a shame, because the film is a fine, subversive addition to the canon.

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Next up: “The nightmare was over … or had it just begun!”

1. Hill wasn’t so sure. He’d written the script with Jason Robards and Strother Martin in mind for the titular duo.

2. Culp had already directed (and narrated) a documentary, Operation Breadbasket, in 1969. Not that it helped with financing his feature - according to Culp, “you couldn’t give away a documentary with a set of dishes.”

3. According to Culp, the Rolls Royce that feature prominently in the movie was the actual drug-smuggling vehicle used in the real-life French Connection case. It was confiscated by the FBI after the shoot.

4. Many of these Culp quotes come directly from the Aero Theatre Q&A, so massive thanks go to Lisa Philbrick at TheConsumateCulp.Com for making it available and doing most of my research for me.

5. This isn’t the place to get into the Cosby thing, suffice to say I completely understand why people can’t separate the art from the artist in this case.