The Cheap Detective

Lou Peckinpaugh is a small-time private detective working in San Francisco around 1940. When his partner turns up dead, Lou becomes the prime suspect, largely because of his involvement with the man's wife. A woman calling herself Mrs. Montenegro then hires him to track down a set of missing diamond eggs, drawing him into a case involving rival criminals, Nazis and assorted shady characters. Peter Falk plays Lou, with Ann-Margret, Eileen Brennan, Sid Caesar, Stockard Channing and James Coco among the credited cast of sixty.

Robert Moore directed the film from a screenplay by Neil Simon, and Ray Stark produced it for Columbia Pictures, EMI Films and Rastar Productions. It followed Moore's Murder by Death, also written by Simon, and arrived in theaters in June 1978, running 92 minutes. The film is a broad comic send-up of 1940s detective stories rather than a straightforward mystery.

On IMDb it holds a 6.5 rating from roughly 6,400 votes, and on TMDB a 6.3 from about 109 votes, indicating a modest but durable following. A critics' rating of 5.7 from 17 reviews sits below the audience scores, suggesting reviewers were less taken with the parody than general viewers.