10 Best Carl Reiner Films

Following The Jerk, Martin was having lunch with Reiner and screenwriter George Gipe while discussing a scene in a script Martin had written. The suggestion to use footage from an old movie led to the three developing Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, which is... well, half a film.

Collectively, Dead Men collects scenes from 19 different old film noirs, from classics like The Maltese Falcon to lesser-known works like The Glass Key and films new scenes with Martin around them, concocting its own ludicrous detective plot.

It's easy to see how this idea could have gone horribly wrong, but the talent behind the camera ensured it wouldn't. Reiner is good at aping the styles of directors like Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder, but he never forgets he's making a comedy, exaggerating or accentuating the fine points of the noir genre. He smartly enlisted those who worked on the very films they were playing with, including costume designer Edith Head.

But the showcase here, as it should be, is Martin, who is having a ball trying to mix and match mysteries from several different plots in a way that loosely hangs together. He never tries to do an impression of the leading men he appears next to, wisely creating an entirely new, albeit goofy, hardboiled fiction legend.