Released in the year after The Goodbye Girl won him an Oscar, The Big Fix showed Richard Dreyfuss moving in a different direction. As Moses Wine, a former 1960s radical turned private investigator in Los Angeles, Dreyfuss played a man caught between the idealism of his youth and the compromises of adult life. Directed by Jeremy Paul Kagan and based on Roger L. Simon’s novel, the film is a detective story, a political thriller, and a comedy of midlife reassessment all at once. It is less famous than Dreyfuss’s biggest hits, but it captures something essential about late-1970s America: the feeling that the revolution had ended, and its veterans had to find a way to live in what came after.
Moses Wine, Ex-Hippie Detective
Moses Wine is not a hard-boiled detective in the classic mould. He is divorced, broke, Jewish, funny, and perpetually a little behind on his rent. He once marched and protested; now he takes photographs for divorce cases and tries to stay on good terms with his ex-wife and children. When he is hired to investigate a political smear — a forged pamphlet apparently linking a liberal California gubernatorial candidate to radical violence — Moses finds himself pulled back into the world he thought he had left.
The case matters because it is personal as well as political. The people involved are former activists, some of whom have become respectable, some of whom have become cynical, and some of whom have become dangerous. Moses has to decide whom to trust, and his investigation becomes an inventory of his own generation. Who sold out? Who stayed true? Who simply grew tired? Dreyfuss plays those questions with humour and melancholy, never turning Moses into a mouthpiece. He is a man trying to do a job while realising that the job is forcing him to confront his past.
Susan Anspach plays Moses’s ex-wife, and Bonnie Bedelia appears as a key figure from his old circle. The supporting cast, including John Lithgow, helps create a Los Angeles that feels both sunlit and paranoid. Kagan shoots the city as a place of freeways, offices, and comfortable suburbs where radical posters have been replaced by campaign billboards. The conspiracy at the centre of the plot is less important than what it reveals about how idealism curdles when power is at stake.
A 1970s Thriller With a Comic Edge
The Big Fix belongs to the wave of 1970s conspiracy thrillers, films in which an ordinary person uncovers a plot that implicates institutions. Unlike the bleakest examples of the genre, however, this film keeps a comic pulse. Moses cracks jokes even when he is in trouble, and Dreyfuss’s timing gives the investigation a lightness that prevents it from becoming grim. He is funny not because the situation is funny, but because humour is how Moses copes.
That tone suits Dreyfuss, who had always excelled at playing intelligent, talkative men under pressure. In Jaws he was the earnest scientist; in Close Encounters he was the man driven by a vision he could not explain. Moses Wine is more grounded and more wry. He talks fast, he argues with himself, and he often seems to be thinking aloud. The performance feels lived-in, as if Moses’s jokes and anxieties are habits formed over years, not lines written for a scene.
Kagan, who had worked in television and film, directs with an emphasis on character over spectacle. The action sequences are modest, and the tension comes from conversations, betrayals, and the slow realisation that old friends may now be enemies. The title is a pun: a rigged outcome and a solution. Moses seeks both, and discovers fixing the case may require fixing himself.
Politics, Memory, and Growing Older
What makes The Big Fix distinctive is its treatment of the 1960s. By 1978, that decade was already becoming myth. Films and television were beginning to treat it as nostalgia, a soundtrack of protest songs and faded photographs. The Big Fix resists that easy version. Its characters remember the 1960s differently, and their disagreements about what happened are part of the mystery. Some remember solidarity; others remember naivety. Moses remembers both, and that double vision makes him a good detective. He is sceptical enough not to be fooled, but not so cynical that he stops caring.
The film also touches on Jewish identity, divorce, and fatherhood with a candour that was unusual for a studio thriller. Moses is not a hero who transcends his domestic life; his domestic life is the reason he keeps going. He needs the money, he wants to be respected by his children, and he wants to believe that his youthful convictions were not wasted. Dreyfuss, himself a product of the generation the film portrays, brings an authenticity to those concerns. He does not play Moses as a symbol. He plays him as a specific, flawed, likeable man.
Critically, The Big Fix received a mixed but respectful reception. Some found its plot convoluted, while others praised Dreyfuss and the intelligent, funny script. It did not become a box-office sensation, and it has remained somewhat overlooked compared with Dreyfuss’s Oscar-winning work. Yet for viewers interested in how 1970s cinema processed the recent past, it is a revealing film, and a reminder of how willing studios then were to make adult thrillers built around talk, character, and ideas.
Why Moses Wine Deserves a Second Look
Rewatching The Big Fix today, its pleasures are clear. The Los Angeles locations evoke a specific moment, just before the 1980s transformed the city’s politics and culture. The dialogue is sharp, the mystery is engaging, and Dreyfuss is at his most relaxed and charismatic. He makes Moses’s contradictions feel natural: the ex-radical who now works for hire, the divorced father who still wants to be a hero to his children, the sceptic who still hopes that the truth matters.
The film also fits neatly into Dreyfuss’s run of late-1970s roles. After playing a shark expert, a man haunted by UFOs, and a struggling actor, he now played a man haunted by his own history. Each role explored a different kind of obsession, and Moses Wine’s obsession is with integrity: his own, his friends’, and his country’s. That theme would recur throughout Dreyfuss’s career, in dramas and comedies alike, but rarely with the same blend of humour and political awareness.
The Big Fix may not be the first Richard Dreyfuss film most people name, but it deserves its place among his signature roles. It shows an actor at the peak of his fame choosing a smart, talky, politically engaged story over an easy follow-up to an Oscar win. Moses Wine is a detective for a generation that had stopped believing in simple answers, and Dreyfuss plays him with the wit, warmth, and restless intelligence that made him one of the defining actors of his era.