Hickey & Boggs

Something else my dad threw in the box. Hickey & Boggs put Bill Cosby and Robert Culp back together, after I Spy. This time they're alcoholic, nearly broke private investigators. They're hired to find a woman, who just so happens to have a lot of money that several very dangerous people are interested in. So Hickey and Boggs keep trying to track down leads, and those leads keep get killed, and the police keep getting angrier about all these dead bodies turning up around these two investigators.

So the plot's a little formulaic. OK, very formulaic. I do like the gradual gathering of the hit squad Hickey and Boggs must contend with throughout. They don't talk to each other. They receive phone calls at their usual place of business, grab the equipment they'll be contributing, and off they go. The scenes are cut in amongst other developments, so there's a rising tension to it. How many are there? When are they going to clash with our heroes? That sort of thing.

Still, I was mostly paying attention to Cosby's performance. For someone who pretty much only knows him from The Cosby Show, this is a bit different. There are no jokes. He makes a few smart ass remarks, mostly to angry police captain Papadakis, but for the most part, he's just tired. He smokes cigars almost constantly, he's on the outs with his wife, the job's not what he wants it to be. Last night I settled on the description that he's an idealist looking for something to believe in. He doesn't want to believe the world's gone to hell, and he doesn't just want a job to pay the bills. It needs to mean something, have a purpose behind it.

Still, it's strange to see Bill Cosby stand there with a loaded gun, waiting patiently for someone to wrench loose a piece of metal they plan to cave his skull in with, only for hit to shoot them square in the chest. It's so deliberate and matter of fact. He has his reasons, but it's still unusual.