THE LATE SHOW Warner Archive Blu-Ray

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There’s a version of my family history where ART CARNEY is my grandfather. I’m not kidding. Carney grew up in Mount Vernon, the same place my grandmother Dorothy Larkin and my father are from, and Dorothy went to the same high school as him. Family legend has it Carney once asked her out and she turned him down. She later married someone who would end up abandoning the family, so maybe she passed on the better option. Maybe I could have inherited a little of that Art Carney energy by blood instead of by coincidence. Either way, sitting down with THE LATE SHOW, I can’t pretend he feels like just another old movie star to me. He feels weirdly, almost comically, adjacent to my own family tree.

That personal connection makes THE LATE SHOW hit even harder, because this is the kind of performance that feels like it comes from an actor refusing to be frozen in one beloved image forever. By 1977, Carney had already won the Oscar for HARRY AND TONTO, and here he takes that late-career weight and channels it into Ira Wells, a battered, wheezing, half-exasperated private eye who feels like Philip Marlowe after the glamour has worn off and the aches have set in. Roger Ebert more or less got at the same thing when he argued that the plot is almost secondary to the pleasure of simply watching Carney and Lily Tomlin exist together as full, specific human beings.

Written and directed by Robert Benton, THE LATE SHOW takes the bones of a classic detective picture and filters them through a distinctly 1970s Los Angeles shabbiness. The setup is pure noir: an aging gumshoe, a dead partner, a missing cat, blackmail, murder, stolen goods, and a whole ecosystem of lowlifes and oddballs. But the film never feels like empty nostalgia or dress-up. It’s too funny, too melancholy, too observant. It has that lived-in, slightly grubby quality that makes the mystery feel less like a game and more like a world. There’s a reason the film still carries a strong reputation, with Rotten Tomatoes summarizing it as a “savory neo-noir treat.”

And then there’s Lily Tomlin, who is such a strange and perfect match for Carney here. She brings this wonderfully scattered, prickly, funny energy that could have tipped into caricature in somebody else’s hands, but instead becomes one of the movie’s great pleasures. Their chemistry is what makes THE LATE SHOW so distinctive. It doesn’t just work as a mystery. It works as a character piece, a comedy, and a kind of weary love letter to people who are too eccentric and too bruised to fit neatly inside genre clichés. Critics picked up on that from the start, and it remains the central reason the movie endures.

What I love most about THE LATE SHOW is that it understands the romance of noir without being fooled by it. Ira Wells is no sleek fantasy detective. He limps, he complains, he looks tired, and he keeps going anyway. That makes him more moving, not less. Carney plays him with the kind of weathered dignity that only age and disappointment can give you. If part of this role was about proving he could be more than the Ed Norton people remembered, it was a hell of a way to do it. He doesn’t strain to escape that persona. He deepens it, darkens it, and lets time reshape it.

So yes, Warner Archive giving THE LATE SHOW a Blu-ray release feels exactly right. This is the kind of smart, offbeat, slightly under-sung studio gem that deserves to be rediscovered and preserved. It’s funny, sad, sly, beautifully constructed, and anchored by one of Art Carney’s richest screen performances. And on a purely personal level, it’s nice to have a high-definition reminder that one rejected date in Mount Vernon may have cost me a very interesting grandfather.