Gumshoe

Eddie Ginley works as a compère at a Liverpool nightclub but dreams of living inside the detective novels he loves. He places an advertisement offering his services as a private investigator, and a first job soon arrives: a package containing a photograph of a young woman, a gun and a thousand pounds. What begins as an experiment draws him into a complex tangle of heroin smuggling and arms dealing.

Albert Finney plays Ginley, with Billie Whitelaw as Ellen, Frank Finlay as William, Janice Rule, Carolyn Seymour and Fulton Mackay among the twenty credited cast members. Neville Smith wrote the screenplay, and Michael Medwin and Finney produced for Columbia Pictures and Memorial Enterprises. The film runs 88 minutes.

Gumshoe was released in December 1971 and is the first of 23 films directed by Stephen Frears in chronological order, followed by The Hit in 1984. Audiences rate it modestly: on IMDb it holds 6.4 from around 1,900 votes, and on TMDB 6.2 from a much smaller group of voters. Both figures point to a film with a settled, niche reputation rather than a widely seen one.