Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

1982 • 89 minutes

About this movie

As the private eyes of private eyes, Steve Martin is Rigby Reardon. He's tough, rough and ready to take on anything when Juliet Forrest (Rachel Ward) appears on the scene with a case: her father, a noted scientist, philanthropist and cheesemaker, had died mysteriously. Reardon immediately smells a rat and follows a complex maze of clues that lead him to the "Carlotta Lists". With a little help from his "friends", Alan Ladd, Barbara Stanwyck, Ray Milland, Burt Lancaster, Humphrey Bogart, Charles Laughton, etc., Reardon gets his man. An exciting, action-fun packed film the way '40s films used to be!

Ratings and reviews

This is from a time of slapstick comedies and sillier farce than Hollywood typically does these days, and you would think it has no right to be as amazingly brilliant as it is, but you'd be wrong. Where The Jerk and Man With Two Brains haven't aged nearly as well, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid is up and down fantastic, a funny movie that stays funny, and sharp, and ridiculous, and is simply too much fun. Funny the first time, hysterical the fifth time, it's one of comedy's great achievements.

Brilliant work taking old detective moves and interweaving with live action to create a new movie (from 1982). Just don't say cleaning woman out loud.

Campy but wonderful tribute to film noir. The most fun is figuring out (without checking Wikipedia) which films were used and then checking those out for the clips used.