The Case of the Vanishing Bodies

Press, 28 May 1979, Page 14

The Case of the Vanishing Bodies

| Some films set out deliblerately to make you laugh, ;tnen scream, then laugh again. “Foul Play’’ (Savoy) is. one of them. That mix of thriller and comedy is not easy to put across on the screen, but the makers of “Silver Streak” have done the job with a few gaffes. They have taken a familiar formula — an innocent girl is caught up in a maze of murders, no-one believes her, the bodies keep disappearing and her life is in more danger as she tries to convince everyone it isn’t all a nightmare. So our heroine. Goldie Hawn, is set upon with gieat regularity by villains with scarred faces and white eyes (Scarface and Ihe Albino), and another assassin a bit shorter than most people (the Dwarf). Always a good actress, Goldie is getting better even with such slap-dash material. She can screw up her face and look puzzled one moment, then belt a bad guy with a roundhouse brass knuckle approach the next. The story is a confusing, obscure, flimsy concoction of every Alfred Hitchcock intrigue ever made, yet it could almost survive on its pace alone,. Some corpses don’t even stay decently dead for long. They keep coming back for more — knives, knitting needles, you name it. Most of the laughs, and there are plenty, have little to do with the story. Dudley Moore is thrown in to do his never-say-die routine as a dirty little man with a wardrobe full of inflatable women and perversions based on binoculars, among other things.

In the end. naturally, he makes his rale clear by turning up as the conductor of an opera orchestra, at a performance where the Pope is about to be killed by antiChurch fanatics. Meanwhile, the clue to all these mysterious goings-on lies in plain sight but is noticed only by a laughing python called Esme. In fact, the snake and a dog named Chaucer seem to be the most intelligent members of the cast. The creators of this likeable mess play fast and loose with plausibility, then send cars careening down the San Francisco hills. We know you’ve seen that sort of thing before, but they give it a bit of extra zing.-

In “Silver Streak”, the fi 1 m-makers sent a speeding

passenger train into a Chicago station This time, they crash a car into a pizza parlour. The\ love crashes. ,-Mi -ioul Play” really lacks is a staid detective at the end. summing up the case and telling us what it was all about. But if films like this had a point, they would be pointless.