THE ONLY FEATURE ever directed by all-purpose film and TV actor Robert Culp, this little-remembered 1972 crime drama reunited him with Bill Cosby. They'd been the small screen's first larky white-black action team, in the popular mid-'60s series I Spy. But Hickey and Boggs wasn't popular, and it was far from larky. The two actors play partners in a Los Angeles private detective firm so down and nearly out that they're lucky the landlord hasn't changed the office locks yet. A windfall arrives when they're hired to find a mystery woman who's dropping $1,000 bills around town from a previously stolen, long-missing stash. What emerges as a "$400,000 caper" with no end of eccentric, competing covetors – drag-inclined gay men, a hard-luck Latino nuclear unit, high-end mobsters, a black power clique, burly hit men, and irritable cops (including a very young, high-strung James Woods) – can only point in one narrative direction: tragedy for all. This is very much of a piece with such better-known, sun-baked '70s noirs as Chinatown and Arthur Penn's Night Moves. The air of mixed resignation, horror, impotence, wistfulness, and laconic humor is familiarly indelible; a large scroll of characters are etched in quick, absolutely vivid terms; the script by Walter Hill (several years before he'd get his first directorial shot) is terse yet vivid. Culp exerts such understated control that you can see why Hickey and Boggs got overlooked and/or dismissed as a rather depressing, not-quite-thrilling-enough thriller at the time. But it's a great deal more than that – among other things, one of the great buzzed-at-high-noon portraits of L.A. as a town of the disappointed and the casually depraved, each mere miles away from the gated winner's circle. There are striking moments of violence here, notably a quiet, elaborately choreographed shoot-out in an empty stadium. The most startling sequences, however, are killingly small: Cosby's pathetic attempts to win back a furious ex-wife (Rosalind Cash), and Culp's own masochistic wallow at the feet of what must be the most emotionally harsh stripper act in film history. Cutting himself no special slack, Culp brings out remarkable performances across the board, with Cosby's expressively dour turn a revelation. This portrait suggests something uncomfortable and true about an entertainer whose Mr. Jell-O-versus-Mr. Crankypants schism was apparent long before his recent National Association for the Advancement of Colored People dustup. See Rep Clock for show times. (Dennis Harvey)