General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Big Fix (1978 film)

The Big Fix is a 1978 American comedy-drama mystery directed by Jeremy Paul Kagan, in which private investigator Moses Wine, played by Richard Dreyfuss, investigates a political smear campaign in Los Angeles and uncovers a murder and a terrorist plot. Roger L. Simon adapted the screenplay from his own 1973 detective novel, and the film marked Dreyfuss's first credit as a producer.¹ It was released by Universal Pictures on October 6, 1978.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	October 6, 1978 (United States); PG rating; 108 minutes¹
Director / writer	Jeremy Paul Kagan; screenplay by Roger L. Simon from his own novel¹
Lead cast	Richard Dreyfuss (Moses Wine), Susan Anspach (Lila Shea), Bonnie Bedelia (Suzanne), John Lithgow (Sam Sebastian), F. Murray Abraham (Howard Eppis)¹^•²
Producers	Carl Borack and Richard Dreyfuss; Dreyfuss's first producing credit¹
Budget	Reported between $4.2 million (Los Angeles Times, 28 Dec 1977) and $3.2 million (LA Herald-Examiner, 10 May 1978)¹
Box office	$13,062,708 gross in the United States and Canada³
Critical scores	88% on the Tomatometer from 16 reviews; 54% on the Popcornmeter from 250+ audience ratings²

Spoilers

Plot

Moses Wine is a divorced private investigator and single father in Los Angeles, a former 1960s campus radical at UC Berkeley who now takes small cases while struggling to keep up child-support payments for his two young sons.⁴ His former college girlfriend Lila Shea (Susan Anspach) hires him on behalf of her boss, Sam Sebastian (John Lithgow), Southern California coordinator for the gubernatorial campaign of Congressman Miles Hawthorne, whose candidacy is being disrupted by leaflets linking him to Howard Eppis, a notorious 1960s leftist leader who has gone underground.⁴^•⁵ Wine's assignment is to find who is printing the phony leaflets and to locate Eppis.⁵

The investigation deepens into an unsolved murder and a terrorist plan to explode a Los Angeles freeway, and Eppis (F. Murray Abraham) turns out to have settled into suburban life.² Roger Ebert, longtime film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, noted that the Eppis character is unashamedly modeled on Abbie Hoffman and that the premise lets the film solve its case while exploring how the 1960s generation had changed a decade later.⁵

Production

Dreyfuss approached Simon hoping to play Moses Wine after Warren Beatty had expressed interest in the book and Twentieth Century-Fox had once optioned it, though neither party was attached at the time. Dreyfuss introduced Simon to producer Carl Borack, his business partner and former classmate at Horace Mann Junior High School, Beverly Hills High School, and California State University, Northridge. The three found an advocate at Universal in vice president Verna Fields, who contacted Dreyfuss when Kagan expressed a desire to direct.¹

In adapting the novel, Simon updated the time period from 1973 to 1978 and dropped the book's occult subplot. When a racquetball injury left Dreyfuss with an arm in a cast shortly before shooting, Simon wrote the injury into the script; the film opens with Wine offering several explanations for the broken arm.¹^•⁶

Originally scheduled to begin principal photography in early summer 1977, shooting finally started on November 7, 1977. On February 7, 1978, The Hollywood Reporter announced that the film had concluded a forty-eight-day shoot involving eighty-three locations in and around Los Angeles, including the Rainbow Club poker parlor in Gardena, the Santa Monica Pier, Venice's Ocean Front Walk, Topanga Canyon, Echo Park, and downtown freeway junctions.¹ Frank Stanley was the cinematographer, Patrick Kennedy the editor, and Robert F. Boyle the production designer.¹

Reception

The film came under heightened scrutiny after Dreyfuss won the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Goodbye Girl (1977), and reviews were mixed.¹ Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker in October 1978, criticized Dreyfuss's "love-me" star performance and the film's nostalgia for late-sixties Berkeley, which she compared to "a form of intellectual mildew," while praising Abraham's performance as Eppis as the production's one authentic piece of acting.⁷ Gary Arnold's Washington Post review called the film meandering and said its low point was a scene in which Wine sheds tears of nostalgia over 1960s newsreel footage.⁸ Ebert, by contrast, found Dreyfuss interesting as a detective updated to the 1970s and praised the film's winsome ending, though he judged the investigation so labyrinthine that a viewer might need to see the movie twice.⁵ The Daily Variety review of October 4, 1978 called it "better than any recent film."¹

On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 88% Tomatometer from 16 reviews, against a 54% Popcornmeter audience score from more than 250 ratings.² Retrospective critics have noted the film's tonal split: Eddie Harrison of film-authority.com wrote that the genial first half takes an abrupt dark turn with a murder that is not well integrated into the film's mood, and that the finale involving a radio-controlled van full of explosives feels cut from different cloth than the opening.⁹ A 2021 review of the Indicator Blu-ray described the film as a box office failure that marked the beginning of Dreyfuss's commercial decline.⁶

Legacy

The film is remembered as an early example of the 1970s neo-noir that updated the classic private-eye formula for the post-1960s generation. Screen Slate's retrospective placed Moses Wine alongside Elliott Gould's Marlowe in The Long Goodbye as a wounded idealist detective, and described the film's portrait of a vacuous late-1970s Los Angeles in which aging activists sing protest songs around private swimming pools.¹⁰ Two other theatrical films titled The Big Fix, released in 1947 and 2011, have no connection to this movie.¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026