Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

This was Carl Reiner's favorite film that he directed.

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This was the last film of legendary costume designer Edith Head. The end of the film pays tribute to her and to the personnel who worked on Hollywood's Golden Age films. Head died on October 24, 1981, shortly after production on the film was completed. Accordingly, the film includes many of her earlier designs in cleverly edited clips from old films; in fact, she had worked on six of the films originally included. According to Carl Reiner, Head owned a hat worn by Ava Gardner and kept it under lock and key. To help match the scenes in the clips, she designed a total of 20 suits for Steve Martin to wear.

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Rigby Reardon (Steve Martin) tells Lana Turner that he left her sitting on a stool at Schwab's. Turner is said to have been discovered while sitting on a stool at Schwab's drugstore.

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The idea came out of a conversation between Carl Reiner and Steve Martin about finding the right vintage clip to include in a film. From there, the idea of making an entire film out of old clips took shape.

PRODUCTION STORY · SOURCED

Steve Martin suggested using footage of William Hartnell, Red Skelton, Jerry Lewis, Jack Benny, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Carl Reiner rejected this, however, because he thought it would be funnier to use footage of actors who had spent most of their careers away from comedy.

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Carl Reiner's Nazi character Field Marshall Von Kluck was based on Otto Preminger.

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Eighty-five sets were built for this film under the supervision of production designer John DeCuir. Because of the large number of scenes needed to edit the film to the old film footage that had to be matched, the number of sets created was far greater than on an average film.

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This was the last film of legendary composer Miklós Rózsa. This was ironic because Rózsa was asked to re-score the music for the original footage he had worked on in the 1940s.

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The actors who appear in footage from earlier classic films in this film include: Edward Arnold, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Wally Brown, James Cagney, William Conrad, Jeff Corey, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Brian Donlevy, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, Cary Grant, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Burt Lancaster, Charles Laughton, Fred MacMurray, Charles McGraw, John Miljan, Ray Milland, Edmond O'Brien, Vincent Price, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner and Norma Varden.

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Steve Martin's character was originally written to describe the worn-out state of Humphrey Bogart's "mentor" character. The scene in which Martin does this was restored for network TV showings.

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The longest-surviving actor among those whose clips were used in the film was Kirk Douglas, who lived until his death in 2020.

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This was the first of two screenplays co-written by screenwriter George Gipe, who wrote this film with director Carl Reiner and actor Steve Martin. The same writing team reunited shortly afterward for Reiner and Martin's next film, The Man with Two Brains (1983).

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The Universal Pictures logo seen at the beginning of this film was not the color logo used in the early 1980s, but one of the old black-and-white Universal logos from the 1940s.

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Among the films used are: Alan Ladd as The Exterminator (from This Gun for Hire (1942)); Barbara Stanwyck as Leona Hastings-Forrest (from Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)); Ray Milland as Sam Hastings (from The Lost Weekend (1945)); Ava Gardner as Kitty Collins (from The Killers (1946) and The Bribe (1949)); Burt Lancaster as the Swedish Anderson (from The Killers (1946)); Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe (from The Big Sleep (1946), In a Lonely Place (1950) and Dark Passage (1947)); Cary Grant as the Handsome Man (from Suspicion (1941)); Ingrid Bergman as FX Huberman (from Notorious (1946)); Veronica Lake as Monica Stillpond (from The Glass Key (1942)); Bette Davis as Doris Devermont (from Deception (1946)); Lana Turner as Jimmi Sue Altfeld (from Johnny Eager (1941) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)); Edward Arnold as Jimmi Sue's father (from Johnny Eager (1941)); Kirk Douglas as the Head Thug (from I Walk Alone (1947)); Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff (from Double Indemnity (1944)); James Cagney as Captain Cody Jarrett (from White Heat (1949)); Joan Crawford as Margaret (from Humoresque (1946)); Charles Laughton as the Very Sweaty Fat Man (from The Bribe (1949)); and Vincent Price as Rice (from The Bribe (1949)).

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The film marked actor Steve Martin's return to comedy after his previous film, Pennies from Heaven (1981), in which he played his first straight dramatic, non-comedic role.

DEEPER MEANING · SOURCED

Of the nearly twenty old films used as footage and edited into this picture, all but one were from the 1940s; the one from the 1950s was In a Lonely Place (1950), released in May 1950, very close to the 1940s.

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The studio breakdown of the nineteen films used as footage to be edited into this film was as follows: both Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures provided five films each; four came from MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), Paramount Pictures and RKO Radio Pictures provided two films each, and one came from Columbia Pictures. No titles were taken from United Artists or 20th Century Fox; these were the only two major studios among Hollywood's eight Golden Age film studios not to have a film used for this film.

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When Rigby Reardon (the character played by Steve Martin) finds the Nazi "Top Secret" package labeled "Final Instructions," the date on the package is August 14, 1946. Martin's actual birth date is August 14, 1945.

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Carlotta is the name of the character played by Dorothy Lamour in My Favorite Brunette (1947), a detective-film spoof in which Bob Hope becomes involved in a spy-ring plot while disguised as a hard-boiled private detective, a film partly similar to this one.

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Juliet drives Rigby to the state prison in a 1941 Cadillac Fleetwood 60.

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When Carlos Rodriguez asks Rigby Reardon where he is staying, Reardon replies: "Hotel Guano". "Guano" means "dung" in Spanish; it is specifically the excrement of seabirds and of bats that live in caves.

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It is the second of four films actor Steve Martin made with director Carl Reiner. The others are The Jerk (1979), All of Me (1984) and The Man with Two Brains (1983).

EASTER EGGS & REFERENCES · SOURCED

Five of the old black-and-white films used for footage in this film belonged to Universal Pictures, the studio that made this film. All five Universal titles were from the 1940s: The Killers (1946), The Glass Key (1942), The Lost Weekend (1945), Double Indemnity (1944) and This Gun for Hire (1942).

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For actor Steve Martin, this was the second consecutive film referencing Hollywood's Golden Age, following Pennies from Heaven (1981), an MGM musical in the style of that studio's old Hollywood musicals.

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It is the second of three feature films actor Reni Santoni made with director Carl Reiner. The first had been Enter Laughing (1967), about fifteen years earlier, and the third was Summer Rental (1985).

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Although it did not come until shortly afterwards, the film was the end of a cycle of 1970s film-noir parodies and of the 1940s hard-boiled detective films of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, some of which starred Humphrey Bogart, the parodies' main target. The films include Neil Simon's Murder by Death (1976) and The Cheap Detective (1978), Peeper (1975), The Long Goodbye (1973), Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam (1972) and The Man with Bogart's Face (1980).

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It is one of two black-and-white films from the early to mid-1980s made as a collage of old material edited together with new footage. The other was Woody Allen's Zelig (1983).

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As Rigby leaves Altfeld's office, he is taken away by three thugs he calls the Three Amigos. In the confrontation with the bandit boss (Kirk Douglas), he attacks one of the thugs in the prankish style of the Three Amigos.

DEEPER MEANING · SOURCED

When Steve Martin insults Carl Reiner near the end, he calls him "Jerk!". The Jerk (1979) was the first film Martin and Reiner made together.

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In the later Steve Martin film ¡Three Amigos! (1986), Martin's character takes his first bullet wound in the left arm; that is also the spot where Martin is repeatedly shot in this film.

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Actor Steve Martin has black hair. The other films in which he has black hair were My Blue Heaven (1990), Little Shop of Horrors (1986) and Father of the Bride Part II (1995).

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The film's cast includes nine Oscar winners: Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Edmond O'Brien, James Cagney, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Burt Lancaster, Charles Laughton and Ray Milland; and six Oscar nominees: Brian Donlevy, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner and Cary Grant.

CAREER & AWARDS · SOURCED

It is the first of two consecutive spoofs of a genre for both actor Steve Martin and director Carl Reiner. This picture mainly parodies the film noir and detective films of the 1940s, while their immediately following film, The Man with Two Brains (1983), spoofed science fiction and horror films. Both pictures had titles five words long.

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