Word: bunko
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...Zimbalist) is an ambitious, adventure-hungry private eye whose phone never rang until she invented a partner who was, naturally, male (she got his name from marrying an electric shaver to a football team) and who would nominally solve all her cases. Clients flocked. Then an incessantly self-admiring bunko artist figured out Laura's canny fraud and threatened to expose her unless she let him become Steele, with appropriate office space and elaborate perks...
...Goldie Hawn) is a Barbary Coast hooker trying to get off her back and onto her feet by turning a dishonest dollar. The Dirtwater Fox (George Segal) is a sharpie whose smart schemes always collapse in chaos. These two hook up to defraud a lubricious Mormon-a bit of bunko that helps keep the Dirtwater Fox a few steps ahead of some bad guys who are giving him heated chase. It seems that he made off with their loot from a bank job, only the Duchess swiped it from him, mixing it in by mistake with the baggage...
SWITCH (CBS, Tuesday, 9 p.m. E.D.T.) has Robert Wagner as a sometime conman and Eddie Albert as a onetime cop linked up as private eyes specializing in bunko cases. The former is smooth, the latter crabby, and a four-year-old child could see through their schemes. Happily, they are all in bed by this hour, and older siblings and parents will be delightfully taken in. It would be an act of mercy to send the bunkobusters over to Doctors' Hospital or Kate McShane's office to expose their shabby fraudulence...
...hands of Bogdanovich and his scenarist, the material is gutted of charm. It becomes a sort of attenuated general-store yarn about a bunko artist named Moses Pray (Ryan O'Neal) and a nine-year-old girl, Addie (played by O'Neal's daughter Tatum), who team up to fleece the citizens of Kansas and Missouri. The relationship between the older man and the girl, who may or may not be father and daughter, is grudgingly respectful and guardedly affectionate. They start off trying to fox and swindle each other, and the girl actually runs an elaborate...
...Director Zieff does not make the fantasy of the script quite abstract enough, nor his odd, self-consciously cute characters quite believable enough. Whimsy and reality, neither fully realized, cancel each other out. Caan, a perennially baffled ex-con, basically plays straight man to Boyle as a bunko artist-bandleader and Lasser as the band leader's addled spouse, both of whom are amiably funny throughout. Keller man, a souped-up Bonnie Parker, pushes much too hard, perhaps in reaction to ZiefFs almost laboriously studied direction, which favors lingering takes and long pauses...