Punched Out

By J.C.

SHAMUS

Directed by BUZZ KULIK Screenplay by BARRY BECKERMAN

Burt Reynolds must be the first actor ever to have been influenced by a television star. In Shamus he often seems to be doing Johnny Carson impressions, as if too many appearances on the Tonight show have left him with a chronic case of mimesis. "Healthy devil, aren't you?" he murmurs to a top-heavy ingenue, who promptly melts at his wit. 'Thought we might do a little skindiving," he suggests to a hat-check girl, who replies, "Bring your snorkel."

Reynolds not only sometimes sounds like Carson, with his voice full of curdled cuteness, but acts like him, too, doing long, innocent, slightly baffled takes and little-boy expressions of wonderment. Why Reynolds bothers with this remains mysterious, because when he is doing the material straight, he is truly funny, dexterous and quite winning.

He plays it straight enough of the time to keep kicking Shamus along at a reasonably swift rate. Reynolds is a randy private detective from Brooklyn named McCoy, who is hired by a rich businessman to recover some stolen diamonds. The whole business is pretty shady, and McCoy gets roughed up or punched out in every scene where he is not bantering with or bedding a society type (Dyan Cannon) from Sutton Place. The plot makes no sense, although it tries. It all ends with one of those tenuous solutions that raise more questions than they actually answer.

The script is shoddy enough so that Reynolds might well have been tempted to send it up; maybe that is what he meant to do with the Carson impressions. Screenwriter Beckerman lifts at least two scenes from Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep. He may know quality but he cannot duplicate it, and never makes up his mind whether to do straight hard-boiled melodrama or imitation Damon Runyon. No such doubts apparently plagued the director. He establishes a consistent tone of massive mayhem. Kulik attempts to disguise every lapse in logic with a lapse in taste. -J.C.

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