As one might surmise from the tagline, The Late Show attempts to combine the cynicism and cinema of Chinatown with the wit and bonhemie of The Thin Man; unfortunately, as the joke goes, it ended up with the reverse. It was fun to see a young Lily Tomlin, who is one of those actors I only really know of in the context of their later career; beyond that, there was no real sense of if this was meant to be parody or sincerity, and the coterie of paper-thin characters did little to salvage an uninteresting pair of leads and an up-it's-own-ass plot. The closest thing this movie had to a through-line was the repeated emphasis that the day of the private detective was over (as foreshadowed by us opening the film with Carney's character writing his own memoir), but it hardly tackles that subject in a more interesting or meaningful way than Klute or The Conversation.

★★