Pulp

Murder! Mystery! Michael Cain! Mickey Rooney! Lizabeth Scott, for goodness sake! How could this not be good.

I'll tell you how.

This tale of a pulp writer who gets involved in real murder features an unfocused story, a diffident Caine and a low budget that leads to the sort of artificial voice inserts and poor lighting you would expect from a TV movie of the era.

To some extent, you could argue that it's not so much inept as it is representative of the early 70s, where directors like Robert Altman tossed out a lot of the cinematic gloss of earlier eras in favor of a messier, more "realistic" style. But the movie fails even in that regard compared to something like Altman's more watchable The Long Goodbye, which came out the following year.

The beginning isn't terrible, offering a little humor, but as the movie wanders into its absurd story, it gets harder and harder to sit through. About two-thirds of the way through I gave up and read how it ended on wikipedia.

I wouldn't recommend this for fans of pulp detective novels, but if you like that 1970s pseudo-naturalistic style you might find this more tolerable than I did.