The thing you remember most about Fletch is the smart-assery, which is so consistent and pronounced that it could be the film’s primary theme. From what I have read, this isn’t a major detour from the 1974 Edgar Award-winning debut novel of the same title by Gregory Mcdonald, who also envisioned his titular investigative reporter as a wry smart-ass, although in the novel he is a decidedly darker, scummier, more anti-heroic smart-ass, whereas in the movie he is played by Chevy Chase at the height of his mid-1980s, post-Saturday Night Live fame. In some respects, Chase was the ideal actor to play Fletch, even though he doesn’t match Mcdonald’s physical description, the character’s age, or his aforementioned less-savory characteristics. Yet, the character’s core of sardonic confidence fits Chase like a glove, even as he dresses it up with some pratfalls and carefully staged bumbling.

The screenplay by Andrew Bergman follows the novel’s basic plot line fairly closely. Los Angeles-based investigative reporter Irwin M. Fletcher (Chase), known far and wide as Fletch although he writes under the pseudonym Jane Doe, is working an undercover story about the flow of narcotics on the beach when he is approached by a wealthy businessman named Alan Stanwyk (Tim Matheson), who offers him $50,000 to murder him the following week. The ostensible reason for this strange request is that Stanwyk is dying of bone cancer. He doesn’t want to meet a long, grueling, and painful demise, but suicide would rob his family of his life insurance. Fletch agrees to the scheme, but being an investigative reporter, he can’t let sleeping dogs lie, so he begins investigating Stanwyk’s background, which is how he meets Stanwyk’s wife, Gail (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson). Meanwhile, he is still looking into the drugs-on-the-beach issue, which ultimately involves a corrupt police chief (Joe Don Baker). All throughout his intertwining investigations, Fletch regularly takes on false identities to get the information he needs, which requires him to don various disguises (a surgeon, an airplane mechanic, an IRS investigator) and come up with amusingly unlikely aliases, many of which draw on real-life people (Ted Nugent, Harry S. Truman), fictional characters (Don Corleone), or simply bizarro names he comes up with on the fly (John Cocktoaston).

Although based on a widely known and much beloved novel that had, by 1985, produced eight sequels, Fletch is first and foremost a Chevy Chase vehicle, and how well the film works for you will depend heavily on how much you enjoy Chase’s shaggy comic style, which freely mixes deadpan dialogue and physical slapstick with heavy doses of sarcasm, the latter of which makes Fletch an endlessly quotable film for those who love it (a lot of the dialogue was ad-libbed by Chase, but I have to think that Bergman, who had co-written Mel Brooks’s uproarious Blazing Saddles and both wrote and directed the highly underrated 1978 comedy The In-Laws, contributed his fair share, as well).

Director Michael Ritchie had started in television and made his feature debut with Downhill Racer (1969), an offbeat sports drama with Robert Redford that took more than a few of its cues from European art cinema. Throughout the 1970s he made a series of satirical comedies, notably The Candidate (1972), which reteamed him with Redford, and The Bad News Bears (1976), surely the most vulgar, anti-sentimental movie ever made about kids playing baseball. At the time, he was coming off a rough patch that included the widely panned thriller The Island (1980) and the broad comedy The Survivors (1983), which paired Robin Williams and Walter Matthau. With Fletch, he was clearly playing it safe, giving Chase plenty of room to do his thing and allowing the film to take some crowd-pleasing detours, including an oddball dream-fantasy in which Fletch imagines himself as an Afro-ed superstar on his beloved Los Angeles Lakers and a lengthy car chase that has no function in the film other than providing a hectic action sequence.

Ritchie does bring some grit to the film; even though it doesn’t delve as deeply into the horrors of drug addiction and homelessness as the novel did, neither does it completely soft-peddle the drug subplot, which is aided greatly by the no-nonsense cinematography by Fred Schuler, who had earlier worked with John Cassavettes on Gloria (1980) and Martin Scorsese on The King of Comedy (1982). Some slickness is provided by the soundtrack, which, like many mid-’80s films, is punctuated with pop-rock songs and a largely electronic score, this one being composed by synth pioneer Giorgio Moroder’s protégé Harold Faltermeyer, who also wrote the score for Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and the anthem for Top Gun (1986). That sometimes awkward mix of polish and grit is typical of mid-’80s Hollywood fare, which often intercut action and comedy in equal doses. Fletch, as a Chevy Chase vehicle, certainly leans more heavily on the latter, but you might be surprised at how well the narrative holds up, even amid all the smart-assery.

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