| The Private Eyes | |
|---|---|
DVD cover for The Private Eyes |
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| Directed by | Lang Elliott |
| Produced by | Wanda Dell Lang Elliott |
| Written by | Tim Conway John Myhers |
| Starring | Tim Conway Don Knotts Trisha Noble Bernard Fox Grace Zabriskie Irwin Keyes Suzy Mandel |
| Music by | Peter Matz |
| Cinematography | Jacques Haitkin |
| Editing by | Patrick M. Crawford Fabien D. Tordjmann |
| Studio | The Private Eyes Partners Limited |
| Distributed by | New World Pictures CBS Hen's Tooth Video |
| Release date(s) | April 17, 1980 |
| Running time | 91 min. |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $18,014,000 (US) |
The Private Eyes (1980) is an American film starring Tim Conway and Don Knotts. The pair play bumbling American detectives who (unexplainedly) work for Scotland Yard. The film is directed by Lang Elliott, and marks the final pairing of Conway and Knotts, not counting their cameos as two California Highway Patrol officers in the 1984 film Cannonball Run II.
The film opens with the apparent murder of Lord and Lady Morley in their car by a figure in a black cape. Inspector Winship (Knotts) and Detective Tart (Conway) then travel to the Morley mansion, brandishing a letter from the late Lord Morley asking him to investigate the murder. They encounter the heiress (Trisha Noble) and a questionable staff. As the two investigate the murder, each of the staff, which includes a Japanese samurai caricature, a hunchback, a busty maid, a gypsy, and an insane butler to mention a few, are seemingly killed. However, each of their bodies disappear before the detectives can show them to the heiress. The detectives then wind up in a 'torture chamber' (whose purpose is not explained), where Winship is caught in a deadly trap until the caped figure ("The Shadow") leaps out to rescue him.
A boa constrictor then frightens them into a trash compactor, where they survive being compressed into a bale of garbage. Once out of the garbage, they find the heiress taking the Morley money and preparing to leave the mansion. She then confesses to having killed the Morleys for their money as she has a gambling habit. Planning to kill the detectives and escape the mansion, the shadow then jumps out of a flower bed and scares her to the point that she faints. It is at this point that the shadow takes off his cape revealing himself to the detectives to be Lord Morley, who escaped and then faked his own death in a plan to force the heiress into confessing to murdering his wife and attempting to murder him. The members of the staff reappear, and it is revealed that they merely faked their own deaths.
The film fails to resolve a number of questions: why Lord Morley was reported dead when his body would have been missing from the crime scene, why he didn't simply report the heiress as the murderer, why he believed his elaborate plot would lead to his heiress confessing, why Scotland Yard is employing American detectives, why the members of the staff are dragged away when they were in fact alive and capable of hiding themselves, why Lord Morley locked the detectives in a torture chamber and threatened their lives. The film features a mansion full of secret passages (filmed on-location at the Biltmore Estate) and is full of stock characters. A recurring gag is the Wookalar, a half-man, half-pig monster, on which the superstitious Tart is fixated.