In the course of a few days on the job as an investigative reporter for a Los Angeles daily, Irwin Fletcher (Chevy Chase) presents himself to various sources as G. Gordon Liddy, Harry S. Truman, Igor Stravinsky, Don Corleone and Arnold Babar (as in the elephant). He also makes up a few monikers: Mr. Poon from the SEC, for example, and John Coctosea ("it's Scotch-Rumanian"). Sometimes he does not bother with name-dropping; he just gets a false beard or teeth from the novelty store and skips blithely into and out of trouble.
Since Fletch writes his column under yet another pseudonym and repeatedly states his loathing for his first name, a shrink might assume that he has something of an identity problem. And since he likes to visualize himself sporting an Afro haircut and helping Kareem Abdul-Jabbar lead the Lakers to N.B.A. glory, the evidence seems to support that theory. But a couch, unless it is shared by a blond as attractive as Dana Wheeler-Nicholson -- playing a distressed damsel he rescues -- is the last place any sensible person would want to find him languishing. Much better for himself and a gray, tired world that Fletch be up and doing, a gliberated male whose principal weapon in the war against crime is the put-on.
Asked by a corrupt police chief what his occupation is, he replies, "I'm a shepherd." Confronted by a huge and angry attack dog, he cries, "Look, defenseless babies," then muses as he skids away from the befuddled beast, "Fell for the oldest trick in the book." Staring down the wrong end of a revolver aimed at him by the mastermind of a drug-smuggling and -peddling scheme, the reporter eyes the plaques on the wall behind the crook and sighs, "You know, if you shoot me you'll lose a lot of those humanitarian awards."
Writer Bergman has a million of these one-liners, and Actor Chase, whose funniest movie this is, has a way with them that is very ingratiating. He falls about a bit in his patented manner, but basically he keeps surprising ) with the competence that lies just beneath his disarming air of distractedness. In the classic dramas of private investigation, the cheeky quip is the tough guy's challenge to toughness. In Fletch the quick, smartly paced gags somehow read as signs of vulnerability. Incidentally, they add greatly to the movie's suspense. Every minute you expect the hero's loose lip to be turned into a fat one.
While this gambit refreshes one basic convention, Fletch hews very closely to another. As Philip Marlowe and his heirs have delighted in showing us for the past half-century or so, corruption, especially in the greater Los Angeles area, knows no class distinctions. Start working on what looks like a scruffy street crime and one of the threads you find yourself tugging on is bound to lead to the very top of the social order. That is just fine with Director Ritchie, whose best work (Smile, The Bad News Bears) is acutely observant of manners and morals on every rung of the American ladder. Here everything from the way members treat servants at a posh tennis club to direct-mail advertising receives a glancing satiric blow from his camera. Even the car chase in Fletch is witty and believable and something an adult can attend without flinching. As the adolescent revels of summer wear on, that alone could make it a movie to cherish.