GOLDEN GRAHAMS

THIS MONTH The Big Fix

Editor-at-Large Jamie Graham unearths underrated classics…

So much about American cinema changed in the late 60s and 70s, and the private investigator subgenre was not immune to getting New Hollywood’s muss ’n’ murk treatment. Movies like Shaft, Klute, The Long Goodbye and Night Moves tuned their frequency to the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, women’s liberation, the decline of the counterculture movement and the Watergate scandal. It was like viewing classic PIs Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer through a kaleidoscope, or perhaps a fug of marijuana smoke.

One of the best PI movies of the era is less remembered than the titles above. The Big Fix (1978), directed by Jeremy Kagan, stars Richard Dreyfuss as Moses Wine, a Jewish gumshoe who’s eking out a living in Los Angeles. In the 60s, Moses was a student activist at Berkeley; now he’s disillusioned, divorced (his ex is played by Bonnie Bedelia, who played Mrs.

John McClane a decade later) and working two-bit cases while his two restless kids ride shotgun in his VW Beetle. Soon after we meet Moses, an ex-flame, Lila (Susan Anspach), appears with the offer of a case: she’s working for a political candidate whose campaign is being smeared by propagandist leaflets connecting him to Howard Eppis (F. Murray Abraham), a 60s radical who’s gone underground.

Can Moses find out who’s printing the phony fliers, and track down Eppis?

Kagan came to the project, based on the same-titled novel by Roger L. Simon, after directing Katherine (1975) and Heroes (1977), meaning The Big Fix can be viewed as the third in a trilogy of movies concerned with the malaise that followed the socio-political commitment of the 60s and early 70s. Dreyfuss, who also produces, had read the novel and chimed with it. ‘The 60s were the last gasp of principle and passion that we’ve had in this sorry excuse of a century,’ he wrote in 2000, in an essay reprinted in the booklet that accompanies Indicator’s excellent Blu-ray release. ‘They were our Spanish Civil War, our test, our moment where our reach for something fine exceeded our grasp. But reach we did...’

Few films so capture the sorrowful loss of the counterculture dream, and it’s impossible not to be moved as Moses one night sits alone and weeping as he watches footage of 60s anti-war protests. But The Big Fix is also terrific fun, beguiling viewers with its suitably fuzzy plot, honkytonk jazz score (by Bill Conti, who two years earlier wrote the Rocky theme) and arresting LA locations, from Beverly Hills to Koreatown. Most beguiling of all is Dreyfuss. Already a star after Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he won the Best Actor Oscar for The Goodbye Girl in between The Big Fix’s shoot and release, and is here on sensationally charismatic form. Never mind that he broke his arm two weeks before the shoot – the cast is weaved into the story, with Moses offering different explanations for his injury to each character who asks.

That The Big Fix didn’t do well enough financially for the studio to adapt any more of Simon’s eight Moses Wine novels is a huge shame. ‘I will always regret that we couldn’t make one or two or 10 sequels,’ said Dreyfuss. Oh well, we at least have this one. Make the most of it and watch immediately.

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