Martha Coolidge’s Forgotten Undercover High School Comedy: Plain Clothes (1988)

This week on The 80s Movie Podcast, host Edward Havens wraps up his miniseries on director Martha Coolidge with a look back at her overlooked 1988 comedy Plain Clothes. Starring Arliss Howard as an undercover police officer posing as a high school student to investigate the suspicious death of his younger brother, Plain Clothes blends teen comedy, murder mystery, and fish-out-of-water humor into one of the stranger studio comedies of the late 1980s. Along the way, Edward explores how the film followed Coolidge’s cult favorite Real Genius, why Plain Clothes struggled to find an audience despite a cast that included Suzy Amis, George Wendt, and Max Perlich, and how the movie became one of those forgotten 80s cable and video-store discoveries that audiences still occasionally rediscover today. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we’re going to complete our miniseries on the 1980s films of director Martha Coolidge with her little seen 1988 movie Plain Clothes.   When we last left Ms. Coolidge, she had just seen her 1985 film Real Genius get lost in the mix between a number of similarly themed movies, although it would eventually find its audience through home video and repeated cable airings throughout the rest of the decade.   Shortly after the release of Real Genius, she would pick out her next project, a comedy mystery called Glory Days. Written by Dan Vining, Glory Days was one of a number of television and movie scripts floating around Hollywood that featured a supposedly young looking cop who goes undercover as a student at a high school. Whatever Coolidge saw in it, she would quickly get to work making it her own, hiring a young writer working at Paramount Studios named A. Scott Frank to help her rewrite the script. Coolidge had been impressed by one of his screenplays, a Neo-noir romantic mystery thriller called Dead Again, and felt Frank was the right person to help her add some extra mystery to the Glory Days screenplay.     While Frank and Coolidge would keep some elements of the original Glory Days script, including having the undercover cop’s high school identity, Nick Springsteen, be a distant relative of the famous rock star from whose song the script had taken its title. But Coolidge would have Frank add a younger brother for the cop, and add a murdered teacher, who the younger brother is accused of killing, to give the film something extra to work towards.   For the cast, Coolidge would go with a mix of newcomers in the main roles, with some industry veterans to fill out the supporting cast.   When casting began in early 1987, Coolidge looked at dozens of actors for the lead role of Nick Dunbar, but she was particularly struck by thirty-two year old Arliss Howard, whose film work had been limited to supporting roles in two movies, but was expected to become a star once his role in Stanley Kubrick’s next project, Full Metal Jacket, opened later in the summer.   Twenty-five year old Suzy Amis, a former model who, like Arlisss, had limited film work in supporting roles, would be cast as Robin, a teacher at the school who Nick develops a crush on while undercover.   The supporting cast would include George Wendt from Cheers, Laura Dern’s mother Diane Ladd, an Oscar nominee for her role as Flo in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, veteran character actor Seymour Cassel, an Oscar nominee himself for John Cassavetes’ Faces, Robert Stack, the original Elliot Ness who was yet another former Oscar nominee, Harry Shearer, and the great Abe Vigoda.   The $7.5m film would begin production in the Seattle metro area on May 6th, 1987 and would last for seven weeks, ending on June 30th.    Plain Clothes would open in 193 theatres on April 15th, 1988, including 59 theatres in New York City and eight in Seattle. The reviews would be vicio