Dora Charleston: Mr Diamond, you have a bullet hole in your back!
Sam Diamond: You should see the other guy.
– Maggie Smith & Peter Falk hamming it up in Murder by Death
The 1970s was a big decade for pastiches of classic detective fiction. Robert Altman brought a slovenly, anachronistic Philip Marlowe into a bohemian, weed-scented Los Angeles in The Long Goodbye; there was a whole raft of reimaginings of the Sherlock Holmes myth, including The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother; Neil Simon brought together a roster of thinly-disguised classic sleuths – Sam Spade, Miss Marple, Charlie Chan, Hercule Poirot and Nick and Nora Charles – in his silly spoof Murder by Death.
Even the Czechs got in on the act, with Oldřich Lipský’s Adele Hasn’t Had Her Dinner Yet (Adéla ještě nevečeřela) resurrecting a gumshoe from an earlier era that I wasn’t familiar with: Nick Carter.
Buy Adele Hasn’t Had Her Dinner Yet from Amazon HERE
Carter is largely unremarkable save for the distinction of preceding Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes by a year or two, and Lipský, forever playful with western genre fiction, gleefully pits the half-forgotten detective with an antagonist straight out of Little Shop of Horrors. Along the way we also get the director’s goofy sight gags, fabulous steampunk-ish gadgets by Jan Švankmajer, and broad performances from a variety of Czech actors playing the shenanigans with a straight face…
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