Subtitles:

English (SDH), none

Extras:

Screenwriter William Goldman has claimed that Paul Newman agreed to do Harper, the film that established the grateful writer's career, only because he was working unhappily on Lady L. (1965) in Europe, and was looking for something as unlike that film as possible. He stars as Lew Harper, a hip L.A. private dick whose business has gotten so bad that he's re-using his coffee grounds. At the suggestion of his friend, attorney Albert Graves (Arthur Hill), the detective takes on the investigation of the disappearance of the wealthy husband of waspish cripple Elaine Sampson (Lauren Bacall). After finding a photograph of former actress Fay Estabrook (Shelley Winters), Harper locates the alcoholic actress in a bar, plies her with booze, and takes her home to search her apartment while she's unconscious. There he takes a call which leads him to another bar to meet Betty Fraley (Julie Harris), a singer with a heroin problem. To curtail his inquisitive behavior, some large and unpleasant gentleman beat him up outside the saloon. Hoping for sympathy from his soon to be ex-wife (Janet Leigh), who has just filed divorce papers, the weary detective is much more successful than he has any right to expect.

The man with the barbed wire soul turned himself into the first of the compassionate private eyes when Paul Newman took on the role of Lew Harper, a private eye trying to find a missing millionaire amidst the lush life and low life of Los Angeles in Harper (1966). The result was a memorable success - one of Newman's biggest hits of the '60s and a film that helped establish his reputation as one of the screen's coolest stars.

Harper entered the world as Lew Archer, the hero of a series of books started by mystery writer Ross Macdonald in 1949 with The Moving Target. The series has been hailed for adding psychological depth to the detective genre and made Macdonald one of the best-selling authors of mystery novels. As a result, he has been consistently ranked among such giants as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. In fact, one critic dubbed Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald the "Holy Trinity of hardboiled detective fiction," with Macdonald as the Holy Ghost, a title that stuck.

That didn't stop Newman from changing the name of Macdonald's most famous detective, however. Struck by his success in two films beginning with the letter "h" - The Hustler (1961) and Hud (1963), Newman asked that the private eye's name be changed from Archer to Harper. Aside from that, the film remained true to Macdonald's vision and helped bring him new readers. The role became so associated with Newman that he would play Harper nine years later in The Drowning Pool (1976).

Gary Tooze

February 25th, 2018