Post by Eddie Love on Jul 25, 2010 12:38:04 GMT -5
Raymond Chandler famously wrote of Dashiell Hammett that he “took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley... [He] gave murder back to the kind of people who do it for a reason, not just to provide a corpse.” One could say Ross MacDonald later took murder out of the alley and deposited it at the Rotary Club, the PTA and the Chamber of Commerce. Where Chandler and Hammett's tales often took place at the nexus of the rich and powerful and the underworld, MacDonald and his detective Lew Archer (named for Sam Spade’s doomed partner) haunted the landscape America’s comfortably middle class. The cases often involved a troubled young person whose problems, we learn in the climax, can be traced to some event in their parent's affluent post-war lives.
As the series went on, the dark secrets of the solid citizens of Santa Theresa (the fictional counterpart to Santa Barbara) became more psychologically intense in classics like BLACK MONEY, THE ZEBRA-STRIPED HEARSE and best of all, THE CHILL. As the books became more powerful, MacDonald’s reputation rose, and by the 70s he was considered the premier American writer of crime fiction. I’m not sure where he stands in the pantheon today; my feeling is he’s slipped, possibly even replaced by the out of nowhere dark horse Jim Thompson. By today’s standards, the books may seem pretty square. But in his heyday he enjoyed a reputation among literary types that was unrivaled until the Elmore Leonard boom of the 80s. (The spirit of Archer lives on today in the novels of Sue Grafton who adopted the Santa Theresa setting as well as the essentially realistic look at California's middle class.)
When Archer came to the screen in 1966 it was in an adaptation by William Goldman of the first novel in the series, THE MOVING TARGET. (Legend has it that the title was changed to HARPER in deference to Paul Newman’s “lucky ‘H’” – having starred in HUD and THE HUSTLER, though Goldman denies this.) The dark motivations and hidden pasts that haunt later Archer novels aren’t really present here. The story concerns Lew’s efforts to find a missing businessman, but there’s also kidnapping, drug addition and a timely by today’s standards subplot about the human trafficking of cheap illegal labor.
While the picture’s a glitzy all-star affair, it's mainly a vehicle for Paul Newman and he’s clearly having a blast. If you’re used to the low-key cool of 60s icons like Connery, McQueen or Delon, then you may be surprised by how loose Newman is here. He mugs, he rolls his eyes, he grimaces and grins to himself as if amused by some personal joke. At times it’s more in the mode of a comically ironic Bill Murray performance than Bogart. And it’s great. I’m a Newman fanatic, and while he’s in plenty of better films, I love watching this one, as his buoyant mood is infectious.
With a nod to THE BIG SLEEP, Lauren Bacall is the rich client who hires Lew, and along the way there’s also Arthur Hill as his square buddy and 60s looker Pamela Tiffin as the missing man’s daughter, who Hill improbably pines for. Strother Martin and Robert Webber are effective as the heavies. Shelley Winters is also on (and over) board as a kind of comic relief, the film’s one false note.
The two standouts in the supporting cast, though, are the great Julie Harris as a junkie and most surprisingly the fulsomely bland Robert Wagner as a pretty-boy pilot. He terrifically handles both the comic and darker side of his role, and Harris’ final scene with Newman is a knockout.
As the case escalates and the action becomes more intense, the tone of the piece changes in ways that may be frustratingly subtle for audiences today, but make no mistake, there’s a dark heart beneath HARPER's SoCal sunniness, even if the filmmakers seem a little loathe to spell out. At the end of THE MALTESE FALCON, the audience (and in the novel the character of Effie) come to the realization that Sam Spade is, if not an outright heel, emotionally disconnected. Here, in the final scenes between Harper and his estranged wife (a terrific Janet Leigh) we see that, for all Newman’s devil-may-care flippancy, he’s a shit like Spade.
But what’s really striking about HARPER when viewed today is Lew’s dedication to the case, which, at the end of the day, is only his job; there is no personal stake in it for him, other than money. As the Hill character puts it – “You were hired by a bitch to find scum.” Yet, Harper is consumed by it. You’d never see this today. The Hawkse-ian notion of a man doing his job – characters that a few years later Richard Brooks dubbed simply as PROFESSIONALS – is pretty much gone. These days, there’s always some personal motivation that has to be tacked on to get the audience to believe anyone would do a job that takes a personal or physical toll on them. Their partner’s been killed, or their wife, or girlfriend, what have you -- there’s some form of payback. (CASINO ROYALE is an exception to this – but only in as much as they want to get Bond on the hook for a sequel where – “It’s personal”! All the Brosnan Bond’s have a bit of this. The last film where 007 is simply doing his job is THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS.)
There are nagging undercurrents in HARPER that suggest the kind of dark themes that found full flower in MacDonald’s later books. But mostly it’s an irresitibly cool 60s entertainment. It’s dated pretty well, though you do need to make allowances when you see people dancing in “hip” nightspots or when Lew hurls a homophobic slur.
Even though private eyes where a mainstay of television in the 70s, they were also in vogue on the big screen with classics like CHINATOWN, THE LONG GOODBYE and NIGHT MOVES, seeing Hollywood’s new breed taking on the benighted hero of the past as a tool for examining Vietnam and Watergate era America. In this environment Harper returned in THE DROWNING POOL some nine years after HARPER with his 60s cool traded in for 70s cynicism.
The action is transplanted to New Orleans and we lose the Southern California mystique that informs MacDonald’s work. It isn’t as jarring as seeing Robert Mitchum’s Phillip Marlowe
haunt the street of present day London in the remake of THE BIG SLEEP as there’s great location shooting throughout. This time the case involves a woman from Lew’s past who wants him to investigate a blackmail notice she’s received. There’s also political corruption, drug addition and a timely by today’s standards subplot about shady oil business dealings in the Gulf Coast region.
Newman’s Harper is older and more laid-back here, but he’s the same amiable smart aleck. (This seems like a warm up for THE COLOR OF MONEY where Paul would go deeper with the idea of re-visiting a role.) There are also shades of THE LONG HOT SUMMER with Joanne Woodward and Tony Franciosa breaking out their Southern drawls and when Harper finds a suicide near the film’s end it echoes THE HUSTLER. There are pointed allusions to HARPER as well, when another character finds themselves in the quandary Lew faced at the end of the earlier film.
THE DROWNING POOL is an underrated picture, perhaps because it was overshadowed both by its more popular predecessor as well as the other landmark detective films of the period. It has that gritty 70s flavor, and as shot by Gordon Willis, looks great. The scenes between Newman and his wife are marvelously effective when you consider they were about the most famous married celebrities of that time. And Melanie Griffith plays Woodward’s daughter in a remarkably unaffected performance, that some may find wooden and unschooled, but I think has the same breathy naturalism that later made her a star.
The picture is darker, less entertaining than HARPER, but the solution unfolds with the kind of impact that’s closer in spirit to a MacDonald novel. There’s also a great action set piece that evokes the novel’s title. The final half hour of this film is really sensational.
I wish that Newman had revisited Lew Harper again in the 80s or 90s. Indeed, on the DVD’s commentary track for HARPER, William Goldman makes the bombshell revelation that he wrote a follow-up adaptation of THE CHILL - maybe the best American detective novel ever. It never happened. Why? So Paul and Jack Smight could re-unite for THE SECRET WAR OF HARRY FRIGG? Oh, the pangs.
As the series went on, the dark secrets of the solid citizens of Santa Theresa (the fictional counterpart to Santa Barbara) became more psychologically intense in classics like BLACK MONEY, THE ZEBRA-STRIPED HEARSE and best of all, THE CHILL. As the books became more powerful, MacDonald’s reputation rose, and by the 70s he was considered the premier American writer of crime fiction. I’m not sure where he stands in the pantheon today; my feeling is he’s slipped, possibly even replaced by the out of nowhere dark horse Jim Thompson. By today’s standards, the books may seem pretty square. But in his heyday he enjoyed a reputation among literary types that was unrivaled until the Elmore Leonard boom of the 80s. (The spirit of Archer lives on today in the novels of Sue Grafton who adopted the Santa Theresa setting as well as the essentially realistic look at California's middle class.)
When Archer came to the screen in 1966 it was in an adaptation by William Goldman of the first novel in the series, THE MOVING TARGET. (Legend has it that the title was changed to HARPER in deference to Paul Newman’s “lucky ‘H’” – having starred in HUD and THE HUSTLER, though Goldman denies this.) The dark motivations and hidden pasts that haunt later Archer novels aren’t really present here. The story concerns Lew’s efforts to find a missing businessman, but there’s also kidnapping, drug addition and a timely by today’s standards subplot about the human trafficking of cheap illegal labor.
While the picture’s a glitzy all-star affair, it's mainly a vehicle for Paul Newman and he’s clearly having a blast. If you’re used to the low-key cool of 60s icons like Connery, McQueen or Delon, then you may be surprised by how loose Newman is here. He mugs, he rolls his eyes, he grimaces and grins to himself as if amused by some personal joke. At times it’s more in the mode of a comically ironic Bill Murray performance than Bogart. And it’s great. I’m a Newman fanatic, and while he’s in plenty of better films, I love watching this one, as his buoyant mood is infectious.
With a nod to THE BIG SLEEP, Lauren Bacall is the rich client who hires Lew, and along the way there’s also Arthur Hill as his square buddy and 60s looker Pamela Tiffin as the missing man’s daughter, who Hill improbably pines for. Strother Martin and Robert Webber are effective as the heavies. Shelley Winters is also on (and over) board as a kind of comic relief, the film’s one false note.
The two standouts in the supporting cast, though, are the great Julie Harris as a junkie and most surprisingly the fulsomely bland Robert Wagner as a pretty-boy pilot. He terrifically handles both the comic and darker side of his role, and Harris’ final scene with Newman is a knockout.
As the case escalates and the action becomes more intense, the tone of the piece changes in ways that may be frustratingly subtle for audiences today, but make no mistake, there’s a dark heart beneath HARPER's SoCal sunniness, even if the filmmakers seem a little loathe to spell out. At the end of THE MALTESE FALCON, the audience (and in the novel the character of Effie) come to the realization that Sam Spade is, if not an outright heel, emotionally disconnected. Here, in the final scenes between Harper and his estranged wife (a terrific Janet Leigh) we see that, for all Newman’s devil-may-care flippancy, he’s a shit like Spade.
But what’s really striking about HARPER when viewed today is Lew’s dedication to the case, which, at the end of the day, is only his job; there is no personal stake in it for him, other than money. As the Hill character puts it – “You were hired by a bitch to find scum.” Yet, Harper is consumed by it. You’d never see this today. The Hawkse-ian notion of a man doing his job – characters that a few years later Richard Brooks dubbed simply as PROFESSIONALS – is pretty much gone. These days, there’s always some personal motivation that has to be tacked on to get the audience to believe anyone would do a job that takes a personal or physical toll on them. Their partner’s been killed, or their wife, or girlfriend, what have you -- there’s some form of payback. (CASINO ROYALE is an exception to this – but only in as much as they want to get Bond on the hook for a sequel where – “It’s personal”! All the Brosnan Bond’s have a bit of this. The last film where 007 is simply doing his job is THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS.)
There are nagging undercurrents in HARPER that suggest the kind of dark themes that found full flower in MacDonald’s later books. But mostly it’s an irresitibly cool 60s entertainment. It’s dated pretty well, though you do need to make allowances when you see people dancing in “hip” nightspots or when Lew hurls a homophobic slur.
Even though private eyes where a mainstay of television in the 70s, they were also in vogue on the big screen with classics like CHINATOWN, THE LONG GOODBYE and NIGHT MOVES, seeing Hollywood’s new breed taking on the benighted hero of the past as a tool for examining Vietnam and Watergate era America. In this environment Harper returned in THE DROWNING POOL some nine years after HARPER with his 60s cool traded in for 70s cynicism.
The action is transplanted to New Orleans and we lose the Southern California mystique that informs MacDonald’s work. It isn’t as jarring as seeing Robert Mitchum’s Phillip Marlowe
haunt the street of present day London in the remake of THE BIG SLEEP as there’s great location shooting throughout. This time the case involves a woman from Lew’s past who wants him to investigate a blackmail notice she’s received. There’s also political corruption, drug addition and a timely by today’s standards subplot about shady oil business dealings in the Gulf Coast region.
Newman’s Harper is older and more laid-back here, but he’s the same amiable smart aleck. (This seems like a warm up for THE COLOR OF MONEY where Paul would go deeper with the idea of re-visiting a role.) There are also shades of THE LONG HOT SUMMER with Joanne Woodward and Tony Franciosa breaking out their Southern drawls and when Harper finds a suicide near the film’s end it echoes THE HUSTLER. There are pointed allusions to HARPER as well, when another character finds themselves in the quandary Lew faced at the end of the earlier film.
THE DROWNING POOL is an underrated picture, perhaps because it was overshadowed both by its more popular predecessor as well as the other landmark detective films of the period. It has that gritty 70s flavor, and as shot by Gordon Willis, looks great. The scenes between Newman and his wife are marvelously effective when you consider they were about the most famous married celebrities of that time. And Melanie Griffith plays Woodward’s daughter in a remarkably unaffected performance, that some may find wooden and unschooled, but I think has the same breathy naturalism that later made her a star.
The picture is darker, less entertaining than HARPER, but the solution unfolds with the kind of impact that’s closer in spirit to a MacDonald novel. There’s also a great action set piece that evokes the novel’s title. The final half hour of this film is really sensational.
I wish that Newman had revisited Lew Harper again in the 80s or 90s. Indeed, on the DVD’s commentary track for HARPER, William Goldman makes the bombshell revelation that he wrote a follow-up adaptation of THE CHILL - maybe the best American detective novel ever. It never happened. Why? So Paul and Jack Smight could re-unite for THE SECRET WAR OF HARRY FRIGG? Oh, the pangs.