Lost Cat
Walking home one rainy night, PI Dan Delon finds a cat under a Dumpster adjacent to a homemade poster about a lost cat. He takes it to its owner, Charlotte Mardou, and chats with her until the rain stops. The next day, they make a date. But she’s a no-show, doesn’t answer her phone or doorbell, is never at the bookshop she owns, and hasn’t been reported missing. At a dead end, Dan takes his next case: searching for a painting a wheelchair-bound old millionaire wants and meeting the kind of resistance Philip Marlowe met sleuthing for another wheelchair-bound old millionaire in The Big Sleep. Hard-boiled fans will have already sniffed out the allusion in the bookshop, but however the scent entices them, they’ll have to swallow the immense sf MacGuffin Jason inserts into the lengthiest and maybe most romantic mystery scenario his lean, animal-headed personae have ever performed. Luckily, if the plot developments are Chandleresque, the dialogue largely is not, which entirely suits the solemn-faced cast, who make Bogie look like Jim Carrey. Delicious . . . heartwarming, too. --Ray Olson