Cody Hamman meets the deadline to write a Film Appreciation article on 1985's Fletch.
Over the course of twenty years, from 1974 to 1994, author Gregory Mcdonald wrote eleven comedic mystery novels featuring the character Irwin Maurice Fletcher (and eventually his son), better known as Fletch. These books are great, often brilliant, driven by some wonderfully written dialogue that makes them a breeze to read. Kevin Smith has even said that reading Mcdonald's writing helped him learn how to write dialogue for his own work. In 1985, director Michael Ritchie and screenwriter Andrew Bergman teamed up to bring us a terrific adaptation of the first Fletch book, increasing the comedic silliness but staying reasonably faithful to the source material at the same time.
The comedy boost was to be expected, given the actor who was cast to bring Fletch to life on the screen, Chevy Chase. The role ended up in his hands after slipping past the likes of Burt Reynolds, Mick Jagger, Michael Douglas, Jeff Bridges, Charles Grodin, Barry Bostwick, George Segal, and Richard Dreyfuss - and as great as they are, Chase was the perfect choice. With Mcdonald's writing as the foundation and Chase playing Fletch, Ritchie was able to deliver a film that I count as one of the all-time comedy classics.
Fletch is an investigative reporter for a Los Angeles newspaper, and when we meet him he's three weeks deep into an undercover story about a drug supplier on a California beach. He's trying to pass himself off as a drifter and drug addict hoping to score, and he's so successful at this that wealthy Beverly Hills resident Alan Stanwyk (Tim Matheson), a pilot who married into aviation company money, sees him as someone who's probably bad off enough that he'll agree to kill him for cash.
Stanwyk says he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and rather than wait to die he will pay Fletch $50,000 to end his suffering before it begins. He'll even book Fletch safe passage to Rio so he can get out of the country once the job is done. Never mind that Brazil has had an extradition treaty with the United States since the 1960s. I'm not sure why writers are always making it sound like that country is the perfect hideout for American criminals. Stanwyk claims that extradition from South America is "very complicated", but I'm not so sure. Regardless, he says murder will also allow his family to collect his life insurance, while suicide would negate the policy.
The way Fletch handles the interaction with Stanwyk is a strong demonstration of just how irreverent the character is; a man is asking him to murder him and Fletch continues dropping wisecracks throughout the conversation. In the end, he agrees to do what Stanwyk is asking him to do. "Will you kill me?" "Sure."
Fletch agrees to commit the murder in a few days not because he intends to, but because he feels that he has just lucked into a story even more interesting than the "drugs on the beach" story he was working on. He doesn't trust Stanwyk, so he decides to use his investigative skills and newspaper resources to dig into the guy's history in search of the truth. He continues to work the beach story, but the Stanwyk story he's unofficially pursuing takes up most of his time. By the climax of the film, both of these stories will put Fletch's life in danger. This even allows some action to enter the picture, but this isn't quite an action comedy like the previous year's Beverly Hills Cop was (even though it sports another awesome synth score from Beverly Hills Cop composer Harold Faltermeyer), it just happens to have a standout car chase sequence and some minor gunplay.
Mcdonald provided an interesting mystery and amusing lines and scenarios, Bergman translated those well to screenplay form (with an uncredited assist from Phil Alden Robinson), and more humor came out from Chase's performance and the way he plays off the supporting cast, which includes Joe Don Baker, Richard Libertini, Geena Davis, M. Emmet Walsh, George Wendt, George Wyner, and Kenneth Mars. Fletch is a hilarious movie, with a ton of memorable scenes - like Fletch's visit to a doctor, his attempt to pass himself off as a doctor so he can access hospital records, a later attempt to act like he's an airplane mechanic, and the fact that he makes his way around a country club by charging multiple items to the account of Ted Underhill, a man he has never even met. Every time he has to find new answers at a different place, he pretends to have a different profession and a different name, usually something ridiculous. At the country club, Fletch meets Stanwyk's wife Gail (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson)... and in the course of trying to get information about her husband, also can't help but try to woo her into bed. A lot of the humor is wordplay, but Chase throws some of his expert physical comedy in there as well.
Oddly, despite the fact that it came out in 1985 and I was watching a whole lot of Chevy Chase comedy throughout my childhood, Fletch is not a movie I remember seeing at a young age. I was certainly aware of this movie and its 1989 sequel, I remember seeing them on the shelves in the local video stores, but they didn't seem to get the play that so many other Chase movies did in my household. Fletch is more something I caught up to as a teenager in the '90s, and that's when it became a favorite of mine. Soon after I became a fan, it was announced that Kevin Smith was going to be writing and directing a Fletch movie, which sounded like a perfect match to me. Smith even wrote a screenplay for an adaptation of Mcdonald's novel Fletch Won, which centers on a younger Fletch, but the project never made it into production - and a major problem was that the producers wouldn't let Smith cast Jason Lee as the young Fletch. I really wanted to see Jason Lee as Fletch, but it wasn't to be. I also really wish Chase had starred in more Fletch movies, preferably ones that would stick to being Mcdonald adaptations. For the Fletch sequel Chase did star in, the filmmakers made the baffling decision to come up with an original story, a story that wasn't nearly as good as the Mcdonald options they had at hand.
The Fletch film franchise has never been all that it should have been, but the 1985 film is great.
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