Foul Play (1978) Foul Play (1978)

See also: _Index | Plot Structure (Foul Play) | Backbeats (Foul Play)

Quick Facts

  • Director: Colin Higgins
  • Screenplay: Colin Higgins
  • Starring: Goldie Hawn (Gloria Mundy), Chevy Chase (Lt. Tony Carlson), Burgess Meredith (Mr. Hennesey), Rachel Roberts (Gerda Casswell / Delia Darrow), Eugene Roche (Archbishop Thorncrest / Charlie), Dudley Moore (Stanley Tibbets), Brian Dennehy (Inspector "Fergie" Ferguson), Billy Barty (J.J. MacKuen, "the Dwarf"), Marc Lawrence (Stiltskin), Don Calfa (Scarface), William Frankfather (Whitey Jackson), Bruce Solomon (Bob "Scotty" Scott)
  • Cinematography: David M. Walsh
  • Editor: Pembroke J. Herring
  • Music: Charles Fox; theme song "Ready to Take a Chance Again" performed by Barry Manilow (lyrics Norman Gimbel)
  • Runtime: 116 minutes
  • Release Date: July 19, 1978 (US)
  • MPAA Rating: PG
  • Distributor: Paramount Pictures
  • Setting: San Francisco, 1978

Overview

A recently divorced San Francisco librarian gives a stranger a ride, accepts a pack of cigarettes he asks her to hold, and within a day is the only person who knows that a roll of microfilm hidden inside the pack is the key to an assassination plot against the visiting Pope at a gala performance of The Mikado. Goldie Hawn plays Gloria Mundy as a woman whose life has organized itself around staying inside — the library, the books, the friend's lecture about getting back into the dating world — and the film's gag is that the only way back out is to be hunted through her own city by a contract killer (Stiltskin, "the Dwarf"), an albino enforcer (Whitey Jackson), a knife-thrower with a scarred face, and a pair of villains hiding in plain sight as an archbishop and his secretary. Chevy Chase, in one of his first leading roles, plays Lt. Tony Carlson as the laconic foil who keeps showing up to escort Gloria away from a corpse that has just disappeared. Colin Higgins — who wrote Harold and Maude (1971) and would direct 9 to 5 (1980) next — pitches the film as an explicit Hitchcock pastiche (innocent woman, MacGuffin in the cigarette pack, cathedral of a setting, climax at a public performance) crossed with the looser physical-comedy idiom of the late 1970s. The Barry Manilow ballad over the meet-cute montage tells you which idiom is going to win.