"Quietly and delightfully funny every inch of the way … Gumshoe [is] an extraordinarily difficult film to review, mainly because its various levels are so closely dovetailed that any attempt to take them apart leaves one with limp, meaningless strands in one's hands"

[Tom Milne, Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1972]

Gumshoe was Stephen Frears' first cinema feature as director and he regards it in a typically unself-conscious way :

"I think it was a wonderful script directed by a very inexperienced director. But the script was great and I had the good taste to realize that. I just didn't know how to make films.

But that was how I got my start. I never had any dream to direct. I just sort of fell into it, and when I look back on my career today, it's with complete amazement. Today, everyone wants to direct films, but I didn't even know the job existed back then."

It's an entertaining salute to Hollywood's classic private eye movies : Albert Finney (on whose directorial debut Charley Bubbles Frears acted as assistant director) stars as a second-rate British vaudevillian and fan of detective books and films.

He finally gets the chance to realize his fantasies when there's a murder and he plays "gumshoe" to expose the killer (to the chagrin of his level-headed brother [Frank Finlay] and sister-in-law [Billie Whitelaw]).

On the trail, he gets mixed up with the members of a black South African liberation movement, a sinister "fat man" (with suitable Sydney Greenstreet overtones), and an attractive American married woman - read femme fatale - (Janice Rule).

The usual Frears modesty belies Gumshoe's accomplishment in its nod to one of Frears' favourite narrative genres : Monthly Film Bulletin acknowledged its "brilliantly self-effacing direction" at the time .

It also pre-empted something of mini-genre of its own. Unlike the Michael Caine vehicles Pulp [1974] and Peeper [1975], and Robert Benton's sly The Late Show [1977], however, it's the hovering sense of Northern reality that makes Gumshoe such a beguiling - and rarely shown - treat.

As Frears told The Times on its release

"It is about fantasies and the way they weave in and out of our lives. Everyone in the film is incompetent - even the professional killer"