Silver Screen Sleuths Noirvember: Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982)

If we started Noirvember by discussing Harrison Ford in WITNESS, it only makes sense that we’d finish the month by discussing the 1982 noir spoof starring his doppelganger, Steve Martin.

Just because we love to trot this out: they look like brothers. Close brothers. (Harrison Ford is three years older than Steve Martin.) You’ll never be able to unsee it.

Okay, back with our regularly scheduled programming.

By the early 1980s, Steve Martin had been working pretty consistently in stand up for about 20 years, and had grown to the point of selling out stadiums. He’d been getting bit acting parts on TV and movies for a while; his first hosting appearance on SNL was during the second season in 1976 with special musical guest Kinky Friedman. But his breakout year was the 1-2 punch of 1979’s The Muppet Movie (in which he plays a waiter in lederhosen) and The Jerk, which was co-written and directed by comedy legend Carl Reiner. I… do not particularly care for that movie, but that’s editorializing that I get to print because this is my newsletter and no one can stop me. The Jerk was successful (there’s no accounting for taste), and that led directly to a four-picture comedy pairing of Reiner and Martin that was almost as good as Carl Reiner and Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner and Dick Van Dyke, and Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Considering every single one of the men listed in that sentence lived to be at *least* 90 years old, there is something to be said, apparently, for making your living making people laugh. I can only assume that Steve Martin, who is currently going strong at 80, is going to outlive them all.

Reiner and Martin thought up the idea for Dead Men together while trying to come up with the perfect 1940s scene to use in a different project that never got off the ground. They followed up this spoof on noir movies almost immediately with a spoof on sci-fi B movies, 1983’s The Man With Two Brains, and a more straightforward comedy, 1984’s All Of Me, in which Steve Martin plays a revival preacher opposite Lily Tomlin. Oh, to be a fly on the wall of whatever parties they had.

In last week’s installment of Silver Screen Sleuths, I went to bat for Drew Goddard’s 2018 flop, Bad Times at the El Royale, a movie that prided itself on its ability to become a pastiche of neo-noir– referencing the works of David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino as rapidly as bullets fly in the movie’s showpiece finale. It’s an homage to two filmmakers Goddard would likely view less as historic influences and more like older brothers, or a cousin and a super-cool uncle (Goddard is 50, Tarantino 62, and Lynch passed away earlier in 2025 at 78). It’s important to remember that Tarantino and Lynch were still active in the filmmaking community at the time El Royale was being brought to life (Tarantino making Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Lynch up to his eyeballs in other projects because he basically never stopped working).

Martin, however, is working with Reiner to pull from an era of Hollywood long gone: noir movies of the 1930s and ’40s. Martin, born in 1945, and Reiner (significantly older, born in 1922) weren’t exactly in the same peer group as Hitchcock or Billy Wilder (though a quick goog reveals Wilder died in TWO THOUSAND AND TWO!!!). There’s a noticeable removal from the source material for this that helps aid the picture along– no sense from either Reiner or Martin that they’ll be stepping on toes or insulting a friend if a bit goes the extra mile. That space gives the movie a chance to be playful, rather than purely reverential, and breathe.

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is a strange beast. It’s called a spoof, and it is one. But I think it’s also something else, something I’d like to see repeated.

Many movies billed as spoofs fall flat on their faces– the release of the latest Naked Gun movie earlier this summer led many a movie writer to reminisce about the era of Space Balls, Airplane!, Police Academy, and even Scary Movie. And then ruminate wistfully on why the spoof limped off to die like a poisoned rat– in the era of Not Another Teen Movie, Epic Movie, and The Starving Games. (In fact, the day before publication of this newsletter, Variety has posted their list of The 100 Greatest Comedies Ever Made and their choice for number one has sent tongues lashing over on Bluesky.) A lot of essays around the time of the new Naked Gun came to the conclusion that no one is funny now-a-days, or that superhero movies have made everyone interested in CGI fight scenes and serial storytelling that never really ends.

But I don’t think that’s quite…it.

The best of the spoof movies– of which I would consider Dead Men– are movies that take the genre in which they are working very, very seriously. In Dead Men, Martin and Reiner set up an honest-to-God mystery: our femme fatale, Juliet, waltzes into Rigby Reardon’s office and demands he find her father, who was recently reported as deceased in an accident. She has no contacts and no family that can help– and so begins the conceit that the movie is most famous for. Rigby calls up Juliet’s hospitalized “sister,” and is intercut with moments of Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number, losing her mind.

What ensues is a deftly plotted and delicately detailed mystery utilizing footage from movies released forty to fifty years before.

The intercut scenes are as follows:

• Alan Ladd, This Gun for Hire
• Barbara Stanywyck, Sorry Wrong Number
• Ray Milland, Lost Weekend
• Ava Gardner, The Killers, The Bribe
• Burt Lancaster, The Killers
• Humphrey Bogart, The Big sleep, In a Lonely Place, Dark Passage
• Cary Grant, Suspicion
• Ingrid Bergman, Notorious
• Veronica Lake, The Glass Key
• Bette Davis, Deception
• Lana Turner, Johnny Eager, The Postman Always Rings Twice
• Edward Arnold, Johnny Eager
• Kirk Douglas, I Walk Alone
• Fred MacMurray, Double Indemnity
• James Cagney, White Heat
• Joan Crawford, Humoresque
• Charles Laughton, The Bribe
• Vincent Price, The Bribe

I was almost afraid that this movie didn’t take mysteries seriously at all– horrifically, it begins with a joke that would now be considered a joke about sexual assault. It is literally the first 30 seconds of the film. The bit turns into a running thing– Rigby keeps ending up with Juliet, his client and love interest, fainted/knocked out/assaulted/bleeding in his arms, and she always, without question, forgives him for the injury or indignity he has inflicted upon her person. Less intelligent writers would have continued the first gag as a joke of Rigby being a lech. Reiner and Martin (and the third writer, George Gipe, who passed away in 1986) know the joke is how hardboiled movies treat women as lovelorn sheep, not the lechery. I won’t say all the jokes in this movie have aged well, but most of the angles are pretty solid.

When it comes to spoofs, I think the question is this: if you remove all the jokes, the winks, and the nods, does the film still work as a piece of genre fiction? I haven’t seen the Liam Neeson Naked Gun, but the Leslie Nielson movies absolutely worked as pieces of cop fiction (even if I don’t think the first one is the best comedy ever made). All of the work by Mel Brooks– with or without Carl Reiner– got the gist of what was meant to be on screen.

You cannot parody a genre without creating, at the core of the parody, a piece of work in that genre.

I’d like to think that the experience of Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid laid the groundwork for the incredible Only Murders in the Building, one of the best murder mystery shows out there. Even with Steve Martin and Martin Short goofing for twelve+ episodes a season (that first season bit with Steve Martin slowly becoming comatose and slithering through hallways and elevators is testament to whatever pilates or workout regimen that man does on the daily), the show is, at its core, a cozy whodunnit that follows the rules of the genre. Yes, sometimes the celebrity cameos get a bit overwhelming. But the show– and Dead Men– is unimpeachable as a piece of genre work.

Those of us who are genre fans are frequently assaulted with a word we cannot stand: “elevated.”

Elevated horror, elevated romance, elevated mystery. It’s an insult, of course– the idea that genre is itself garbage, and that something printed in its first run as a pulp fiction wasn’t worth better paper. People think that the only way to make genre fiction good is to upend genre conventions. Elevate it past its history, its tradition, your expecations.

But Carl Reiner and Steve Martin have shown us– with this absolutely absurd spoof– that the structure of genre never, ever has to be left behind. The elevation of genre fiction comes from genius, not destruction.

I’ve decided to talk more about mystery novels every week too, so here’s a link to M.K. Dean’s cozy series, The Cozy Pet Lovers mysteries. I haven’t read them yet but they are, indeed, right up my alley! Billed as Diagnosis Murder meets All Creatures Great and Small, this is a cozy conceit I can get behind.