Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

Produced by William E. McEuen and David V. Picker; directed by Carl Reiner; screenplay by Carl Reiner, George Gipe, and Steve Martin; cinematography by Michael Chapman; production design by John DeCuir; set decoration by Richard C. Goddard; edited by Bud Molin; costume design by Edith Head; music by Miklós Rózsa; starring Steve Martin, Rachel Ward, Reni Santoni, and Carl Reiner. After starring in a musical-a dramatic musical, for God's sake-here he was in this black-and-white peculiarity, no arrow through the head, no bunny ears, no "King Tut." The execution wobbles, but conceptually Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid is the smartest of the four Martin-Reiner movies. Since I was stuck in the "I was born a poor black child" groove of The Jerk, which Martin called stand-up by other means and played like R-rated Jerry Lewis, I didn't really get Dead Men's ambition then, nor did I recognize the absolute brilliance of that shunned "dramatic musical," Herbert Ross's Pennies from Heaven (1981). [...]thanks for picking up our Fall issue.) When filmmaker and film historian Daniel Kremer announced at the end of the Dead Men disc commentary that a movie like this wouldn't fly with today's audiences, I almost dropped my Lucky Strike into my Scotch, dumbfounded.