Peeper (1975)

Name: Peeper
Genre: Comedy, Mystery, Thriller
Released: 1975-12-03
Duration: 87 min
Rating: 5.1
Cast: Michael Caine, Natalie Wood, Kitty Winn, Michael Constantine, Thayer David

Peeper (1975), directed by Peter Hyams, starring Michael Caine and Natalie Wood.

12/03/1975 BR Comedy, Mystery and Thriller 1h 27m

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Quiz about this movie

Back in '47, a gun was a roscoe, a private-eye was a Peeper, and murder was okay as long as nobody got hurt. In fact, anything was okay with this Peeper on the case because he wouldn't know who-done-it even if he done it himself.

Synopsis

A detective is hired to locate a girl adopted 30 years earlier whose birth father wants to bequeath her his fortune.

Earl RathCinematography
Peter HyamsDirector
James MitchellEditing
Irwin WinklerProducer

About the film

Peeper is a 1975 American mystery comedy film directed by Peter Hyams, starring Michael Caine as Leslie C. Tucker, a bungling private investigator. A send-up of 1940s films noirs, Peeper was a box-office failure that jeopardized Hyams's career and almost prevented him from obtaining funding to produce Capricorn One.

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Plot

The film is set in Los Angeles in 1947. A criminal on the run from hired killers comes to the office of a private detective named Tucker and asks Tucker to find a daughter he left at an orphanage in 1918. The man has a substantial amount of money that he wants to give the girl. Tucker's search leads him to two sisters, daughters of a rich Beverly Hills widow. Tucker is sure one of the sisters is the man's daughter, but he's not sure which is the right one. Meanwhile, the killers chasing Tucker's client are now chasing the detective, and Tucker also discovers that the widow's brother-in-law may be blackmailing the two girls and/or embezzling from the widow. Tucker also keeps encountering a mysterious stranger who seems to know more than he admits, and may or may not be working with the brother-in-law. Ultimately everyone ends up on a cruise ship headed to South America and the various mysteries are resolved.

Cast

Production

The film originally was titled Fat Chance and began filming in June 1974. The producers had worked with Peter Hyams on Busting and hired him to rewrite W.D. Richter's script and direct because they liked the comic elements of Busting. In 1975 Keith Laumer's 1971 novel Deadfall, on which the script was based, was republished under the title Fat Chance by Pocket Books in the US and New English Library in the UK with film tie-in covers.

Reception

In 2002, Hyams observed that he "managed to combine critical and commercial failure. And that made me colder than ice. Nobody wanted me."

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 29% of 31 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads: "Despite a deftly droll performance from Michael Caine, Peeper continually stumbles over its muddled plot and uncertain tone." Variety called it “flimsy whimsy” On the other hand, Bill Cosford's review in The Miami Herald is a rave, calling the film “an absolute charm…that hits the right notes over and over again.”

References

External links

Peeper at IMDb

Peeper at the TCM Movie Database (archived)

Peeper at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films

Text from Peeper (film) on Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peeper_(film)

Trivia

It premiered on December 3, 1975, a Wednesday.
It runs 1h27 — a typical feature length.
This film's quiz has 11 questions — enough to play more than once without repeats.