The big gimmick is that Humphrey Bogart has been awkwardly inserted into several scenes.  There seems to have been a big deal made of this at the time even though the same director made Forrest Gump a year before and Woody Allen did something similar in Zelig 12 years earlier.  The effect is nothing special, yet there is fun to be had here.

The whole episode is a flashback, which is almost never a good idea.  It does not flash back to the 40s or 50s when Bogart was alive, though.  It begins in the present, or least, the present in 1995.  We see Bogart’s mug in the side-view mirror of a wrecked car as he narrates.  It is simultaneously off-putting and interesting.  The image shown appears to merely be a colorized 2-D photo of Bogart.  They further deaden the dead actor with the stylistic choice to not have his lips move.

On the other hand, this is not supposed to actually be Bogart, but a gangsta who had plastic surgery to look like him and, apparently, talk like him.  He has been killed in a car crash.  The entire episode becomes a Weekend at Bogie’s exercise with the POV story eventually seen through the dead man’s eyes.  They could have taken some license and had his lips move in the numerous mirrors, but they made the right choice.

A couple of hours earlier, Bogart look-alike Lou Spinelli was in a conference room at his company.  Oddly, no one seems to realize he looks like Humphrey Bogart.  Or I guess they are just used to it the way long-time co-workers never comment on my resemblance to Brad Pitt.  They are also immune to the fact that his advertising director looks like 1980s Sherilyn Fenn, which I don’t think I would ever get used to.  Her beauty is not lost on Lou who calls her “doll” and “baby” but, commendably, not “babydoll”.

During the meeting he gets a call from his wife Betty who he thought was dead.  He had his pal Oscar send over some goons to knock her off, but she got away.  As he drives home, he thinks about his life.  He came from a tough neighborhood and did what he had to to survive.  After spending some time in jail, he “busted out of the joint and got a new name and a new face”.  Presumably, he chose Bogart’s mug for its inexplicable ability to attract hot babes 25 years younger than him.

Back at his place, he discovers Oscar betrayed him and has been banging Betty for the past year.  They plan to kill Lou, but he is able to take Oscar’s gun from him.  Unfortunately, Betty conks him on the head with a statue. ^[1]  It is poorly staged because he actually has a few seconds to react to her coming at him and does nothing.  Still, it was funny to see him get brained with the sculpture.  Twice.

The rest of the episode is Oscar and Betty dragging the body around with the POV still from Lou’s dead eyes.  This is good, original stuff.  In fact, it surpasses the Bogie/Noir gimmick of the episode.  John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini were great with the over-the-top acting that a good TFTC requires, and have perfect faces for those close-ups from Lou’s POV.

They could have ditched the Bogart angle and still had a great episode.  However, they tried something creative and mostly succeeded.

Other Stuff:

• [1] The sculpture of a nude woman is said to be a Picasso but is utterly unconvincing because it actually looks like a nude woman.