5 Swell Facts About Steve Martin’s ‘Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid’
Steve Martin is the rare person who gets to say he shared the screen with icons from the Golden Age of Hollywood, including Cary Grant, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart — without ever stepping onto the same set as them. That’s because Martin acted “opposite” those stars in 1982’s film-noir parody Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, which used spliced clips from classic 1940s detective films to set the scene for Martin’s Rigby Reardon, a private eye on the hunt for a cheesemaker’s murderer.
That kind of movie magic meant director Carl Reiner and the rest of the film’s crew had their work cut out for them, as you’ll sleuth out in these fun facts about the production.
1 It began as a more conventional Steve Martin script titled Depression
©Universal/courtesy Everett Collection
The idea for Dead Men came as Reiner and writing partner George Gipe were brainstorming movies to write for Martin.
“He had a deal with Universal, and he had a script he’d written himself,” Reiner later told The New York Times. “It was called Depression, and it wasn’t working. Because doing a picture about the Depression was depressing. During bad times, you don’t do that, you tell people, ‘We’re in the money, times are funny.’ And we began talking about the ’40s, and the kind of mystery movies that were successful, and the old actors and what they looked like, and we said, ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be nice to do one of those movies?’”
2 Cinematographer Michael Chapman used old tricks to match old footage and new
Where modern-day productions might use green-screen and CGI to insert actors into old movies, cinematographer Michael Chapman used rear projection to have Martin share scenes with Suspicion’s Cary Grant and The Killers’ Ava Gardner. In other words, Martin acted his part in front of a screen upon which the original film was projected.
“You not only have this old material, which is not necessarily in very good shape, but you’ve got to blow it up to be 10 feet high, so it really showed,” Chapman told American Cinematographer in 1982. “The one with Cary Grant worked pretty well, mostly because it was so dark — the interior of a train coach coming out of a tunnel — so we got away with a lot then.”
Rear projection was also used in Dead Men’s driving scenes, as were prop cars without windshields. “Somewhere, they found some of those old half cars; some old prop man had them,” Chapman said.
3 Production designer John DeCuir created dozens of sets — and got one directly from Suspicion
Everett Collection
Do you feel a certain Suspicion that you’ve seen a train compartment in Dead Men before? Turns out, production designer John DeCuir created more than 85 sets for Dead Men, but the train compartment in which Martin’s character meets Cary Grant is the same one from Suspicion, according to TCM.
4 Composer Miklós Rózsa had to create a new score to fit the film clips’ old scores
Miklós Rózsa composed music for Dead Men, as he did for some films that Dead Men excerpted: Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, The Killers, and The Bribe.
And scoring Dead Men proved a unique challenge for Rózsa, since the new score had to blend seamlessly with the scores heard in the clips from the original films.
“I asked, ‘What will happen with the music which is already in the picture?’” Rózsa told Soundtrack! The Collector’s Quarterly in 1982. “Carl replied, ‘You put in a couple of trombones and that will wash it out.’ This is not the case. When I started to write music for these spots, you have to be on the same tonality, preferably the same notes, otherwise the whole thing will clash, because something of the original score will come through. I thought they had the dialogue track separately, but they didn’t, and they couldn’t get it.”
5 Costume designer Edith Head worked on several of the original films
© Universal/courtesy Everett Collection
Legendary costume designer Edith Head, who designed costumes for Dead Men, also designed costumes for the classic films This Gun for Hire, The Glass Key, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, I Walk Alone, and Sorry, Wrong Number, all of which had clips in Dead Men.
Head died the October before Dead Men hit theaters, but the film’s end credits give her a shout-out. “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid was Edith Head’s final film,” a title card in the credits reads. “To her, and to all the brilliant technical and creative people who worked on the films of the 1940s and 1950s, this motion picture is affectionately dedicated.”
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