Harper

 

Director Jack Smight

Smight on the set

Screenwriter William Goldman

HARPER                    B                                                                                                                 USA  (121 mi)  1966  ‘Scope  d: Jack Smight

Just an infinitely lingering disease…                                                                                          —Susan Harper (Janet Leigh), referring to Harper walking out the door as she angrily sticks a fork into the egg yolks she had been cooking for him

Your husband keeps lousy company, Mrs. Sampson, as bad as there is in LA.  And that’s as bad as there is.                                                                                                                                          —Lew Harper (Paul Newman)

By the mid 60’s the private eye genre was dead in the water after Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and this film more or less revived it, as it was relegated to television shows like 77 Sunset Strip, Peter Gunn, Hawaiian Eye, Honey West, and Johnny Staccato, which are just a few of the better known shows that began in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.  The template for Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) and Polanski’s CHINATOWN (1974), with Elliot Gould and Jack Nicholson channeling Newman, not Bogart, in these mood driven private eye flicks set in Los Angeles where the larger-than-life atmosphere of the seamy city itself swells to become one of the leading characters.  It would be hard not to mention Lee Marvin in John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), whose single-minded purpose he shares, similarly offering a nihilistic sense of despair in one of the most extraordinarily bleak visions of Los Angeles.  Curiously, Johnny Mandel wrote the musical score for both.  One could add Steve McQueen’s Bullitt (1968) or Eastwood’s DIRTY HARRY (1971) to that list as well, with both set in San Francisco, as this film predates the rebirth of cool and sophisticated crime thrillers, using arrogant, updated modernized characters who are sick of the world and sarcastically throw off memorable one-liners with ease, fully integrated into the complexities of wealth, corruption, and urban ennui.  Not exactly film noir, the film instead exploits the lifestyles of the wealthy, featuring the Beverly House in Beverly Hills (Legendary Beverly House, Where JFK and Jackie O. ...), later used as the home of movie producer Jack Woltz (John Marley) in THE GODFATHER (1972), with Italian style columns and statues leading to the backyard pool, creating an idealized picture of decadence for Lauren Bacall, the crippled wife of millionaire Ralph Sampson, Harper (1966) -- (Movie Clip) A Poor Thing But Mine Own YouTube (3:48), or Harper’s car, an old beat up black-top gray/silver Porsche 356 A Speedster (one of only 140 made), perhaps a 1956 model which was the predecessor to the 911 series, which he can take for a spin off road at a moment’s notice.  In addition, there is prevalent use of Malibu beach on Southern California’s Pacific Coast Highway, but also fully integrated after hours joints that highlight the quirkiness of the youth movement in the mid 60’s, with the Shindig! and Hullabaloo style dancers.  Paul Newman plays gum chewing Lew Harper, changing the last name from the Ross Macdonald novel of 1949, The Moving Target (they only bought the rights to one book, not the character franchise), where private investigator Lew Archer, unlike Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, was not so much a man of action as he was a cerebral thinker who figured things out by listening to people, often times feigning a character in order to interact with unsuspecting witnesses.  Following the success of earlier movies THE HUSTLER (1961) and Hud (1963), it was Newman who endorsed the name change from Archer to Harper, continuing a series of 60’s movies beginning with the letter “H,” which also included HOMBRE (1967).  One quirky gesture to his personality is creating characters on the phone when he calls his separated wife, Janet Leigh, who is tired of his false promises and quick disappearances and wants a divorce, but by using a fake personality he can actually hear her voice and talk with her awhile, even if it’s something nonsensical that he completely made up.  This is an endearing aspect to his nature, as otherwise he’s all business.  

Screenwriter William Goldman had long been an admirer of Ross Macdonald (the pseudonym used by Kenneth Millar), especially his Lew Archer novels, filled with melancholy at a disappointing world, writing eighteen Archer novels between 1949 and 1976, and a handful of short story collections, but despite being one of the most prolific and admired of all twentieth-century American crime novelists, his work remains largely untouched by filmmakers.  Known for adding psychological depth to the detective genre, Goldman offered to write an adaptation, where this early script was tight and amusing, with Newman acknowledging that Harper was one of his favorite characters to play, becoming a box office hit, eventually earning Academy Awards for his screenplays of BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969), the likeable buddy movie with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (1976), a Woodward and Bernstein journalistic exposé of the Watergate era.  “Well, you’re not very hip... but you’ve got cop’s eyes.”  While completely unconvincing as an addict, jazz singer Betty Frayley’s (Julie Harris) description of Harper lures him into a kidnapping scheme, Harper (1966) -- (Movie Clip) You've Got Cops' Eyes - TCM  YouTube (4:14), where Lauren Bacall’s drunk but filthy rich husband goes missing, and she could care less, as she’s more interested in inheriting his millions, so she hires Harper to find him, not exactly losing a tear over it.  Add to the equation Miranda (Pamela Tiffin), the scantily clad, drop dead gorgeous daughter who’s not exactly broken up over daddy’s disappearance either.  Instead she’s dancing on the diving board without a care in the world as poolboy gigolo and Sampson’s personal pilot Allan Taggert (Robert Wagner) looks on with a mixture of boredom and cynicism, apparently a reflection of that LA state of mind, Harper (1966) -- (Movie Clip) I'm A Very Modern Type Fellow YouTube (3:10).  From this family love fest Harper must determine the rest, starting with an utterly captivating performance by Fay Estabrook (Shelly Winters), an aging movie star who can’t stop drinking and eating, a lethal combination in show business, (“She got fat” revels Wagner) but her charming performance pokes fun at her own weight problem.  Harper feeds her liquor to get a good look around her house, as she’s a drinking partner of the missing husband and the gauche astrological designer of his gaudy bachelor pad on the side.  But he runs into her slimy gun toting husband Dwight Troy (Robert Webber), making a hasty retreat.  Not so complex as it is perpetually perplexing, there are enough twists and turns here to keep anyone’s head on a swivel, but it reveals a dense landscape steeped in murky atmosphere.  As he gets closer to the scene of the crime and its major players, Harper discovers what he’s always suspected, a world of greed and corruption have replaced long-lost dreams and ambitions, where Los Angeles becomes associated with a vibrant sense of artificiality and empty sterile space, little more than a façade for what’s lurking underneath. 

In a contemporary homage to Humphrey Bogart and THE BIG SLEEP (1946), which incidentally also starred Lauren Bacall, director Jack Smight was mostly a director of television dramas, which impressed Newman enough to want to work with him, but others found him lacking confidence on the set, requiring the constant presence of his reassuring wife, but it was a strong cast and a well-written story, packed full of scintillating dialogue, where the cynical and overly detached Newman is effortlessly cool with his constant wisecracks, literally carrying the picture in a film that helped establish his reputation as one of the screen’s biggest stars, never getting rattled, even as he constantly finds himself drawn into a complicated web of deceit in an underworld of trouble.  But there are little compassionate touches that make him feel more familiar, like living out of his office, where he dunks his head in a sinkful of ice cubes to rouse himself awake in the opening sequence, something he repeated in THE STING (1973), or re-using day-old coffee grinds out of the garbage when he discovers he’s run out, so he’s an ordinary guy in that sense, ill-equipped to be living on his own, but by the time he steps out the door he looks like a million bucks.  The role became so associated with Newman that he would play Harper nine years later in THE DROWNING POOL (1975).  Having won a Tony for his lead role in the original Broadway production of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, the straightlaced Arthur Hill as gun-toting lawyer Albert Graves is Newman’s best friend, an old war buddy, seen doing isometric exercises at his desk when introduced, normally smart and dependable, but he has a weakness for Miranda, with Harper acknowledging he’s old enough to be her grandfather.  Imaginatively shot in ‘Scope by Conrad Hall, who disliked the artificial style of Hollywood lighting, favoring a naturalistic or impressionist approach, making clever use of offbeat locations as well as dangerous and eccentric characters, including Strother Martin as the leader of nutty religious order “Temple Of The Clouds” that covers as an illegal human trafficking operation, Harper (1966) -- (Movie Clip) Disciples For Supper YouTube (4:04). Equally clever, the man who hired Phillip Marlowe in THE BIG SLEEP was confined to a wheelchair, as is Lauren Bacall, the one hiring Harper in this film.  The addition of Janet Leigh in the ex-wife scenes may seem superfluous, as they were not in the novel, and this sort of thing would never have happened in 40’s film noir, but they add a mysterious vulnerability to Harper’s personality, as we see his continued devotion to her, not ready to let her go, still in love, apparently, whatever that’s worth, and he’s perfectly willing to try to repair the damage, though that train left the station ages ago, and all he’s left with is just a pipe dream.  This humanization of his world-weary character offers a sense of moral decency, beautifully contrasted against an underground cesspool of criminal entrepreneurs, where Los Angeles is seen as a feverish den of illicit immorality, all supposedly tucked carefully out of sight, where Harper is forced to look head-on into the gloom and doom of society’s lost ideals.  Paul Newman’s last line in Hud (1963) would seem appropriate here:  “This world is so full of crap, a man’s gonna get into it sooner or later whether he’s careful or not.”    

Watch Harper Full Movie Online Free With English Subtitles  entire film may be seen on Fshare TV (2:00:48)

Written On the Wind

 

1953 Allard J2X roadster classic

1955 Woodill Wildfire roadster

Lauren Bacall on the set of Written On The Wind

Dorothy Malone

Dorothy Malone with her Oscar

Lauren Bacall, Rock Hudson carrying Robert Stack, Robert Keith

WRITTEN ON THE WIND          B                                                                                        USA  (99 mi)  1956  ‘Scope  d: Douglas Sirk

Our night of stolen bliss was written on the wind.                                                                        —movie theme song by The Four Aces, The Four Aces - Written on the Wind (1956) - YouTube (2:59)

A trashy soap opera probably viewed much differently when it was released, something of a shocking provocation, resorting to hyper-expressive theatricality while offering damning commentary on obscene wealth with no moral compass, leading to misguided love gone terribly wrong in the great state of Texas, a B-movie companion piece to the sprawling oil epic of George Stevens’ GIANT (1956), both set in Texas, both starring Rock Hudson, yet this film is overwhelmed by the endless presence of oil derricks, as far as the eye can see, the only real landscape of the film, ultimately becoming a prominent phallic symbol that stands for virility and manhood, so obviously overused that it truly becomes laughable.  Watching this film in a crowded theater, the patrons will be howling with delight, as this isn’t just over the top, but perversely over the top, so artificially exaggerated that, though made decades earlier, it becomes a wildly subversive parody of popular primetime soap operas like Dallas (1978–1991), Knot’s Landing (1979-1983), or Dynasty (1981–1989), which are already driven by formula and cliché’d stereotype.  Tennessee Williams has got nothing on this ultra repressive drama, as Sirk never shied away from taboo subjects, with this film featuring alcoholism, promiscuity, murder, adultery, impotency, and more, with a dark undercurrent of incest and homosexuality.  According to Sirk, “There’s a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.”  Sirk’s critical reputation rests heavily on four 1950’s melodramas, All That Heaven Allows (1955), WRITTEN ON THE WIND (1956), THE TARNISHED ANGELS (1957), and IMITATION OF LIFE (1959).  Largely dismissed and overlooked as “women’s pictures,” they exist in the delirium and hysteria of artifice and exaggeration, where Sirk’s visual style points to the psychological parameters of the characters’ lives, providing wry commentary on the stifling complacency of American bourgeois culture in Eisenhower’s era of the 1950’s while offering a scathing critique of the rich and spoiled.  Suggesting freedom has its limits, this film features an oil-rich family with insatiable appetites, including two hideously self-destructive children, spoiled rotten by Daddy’s millions, where they are laughably repulsive, turned into deranged psychopaths, having no moral boundaries whatsoever, greedily excessive in everything they do.  Their immense antebellum estate starts to resemble a prison, as the giant staircase and ornate décor comes to dominate the screen compositions, often shot through mirrors and reflections, where the children are forever making jail breaks before returning back to the horror-filled disapproval of their patriarchal father who they are forever disappointing.  Based on Robert Wilder’s often out-of-print 1946 novel by the same name, never widely known, George Zuckerman, a purveyor of low-budget schlockmeister films who owned the rights to the novel, adapted the screenplay, while Russell Metty shot the film using a wildly exaggerated Hollywood studio style.  The lurid story is actually based on the death of millionaire tobacco heir Zachary “Smith” Reynolds, a 20-year old playboy with no interest whatsoever in the family business, yet he retained an inexhaustible allowance as the youngest son of tobacco magnate R. J. Reynolds.  An aviator as a hobby, Smith pursued Broadway actress Libby Holman around the world in his plane, literally stalking her until she agreed to marry him in 1931.  At an alcohol-fueled 4th of July birthday party the next year at the family estate that lasted for days, Libby announced she was pregnant, and in the drunken confusion Smith was shot in the head, with Libby and Ab Walker, her close friend (rumored to be her lover), indicted for murder.  The story made front page news, creating a scandal, with his family quietly persuading authorities to drop the charges, as his death was ruled a suicide.  His fondness for aviation and the mysterious circumstances of his death are transferred to this film, with the family tobacco fortune transformed to oil tycoons while the setting is relocated from North Carolina to Texas.

A story of frustrated desires and long-standing resentments, with a stellar cast of Dorothy Malone, who’s stuck on Rock Hudson, who’s in love with Lauren Bacall, who marries Robert Stack, who becomes obsessed with drinking himself to death, this is a mystifying choreography of detoured love gone wrong, yet absent Bacall, the same players are utilized again in Sirk’s next picture, THE TARNISHED ANGELS (1957), which may be his darkest (in black and white) and most devastatingly bleak.  This may be his raunchiest, where only exploitation films match the titillating taglines of sensory overkill in this film, like “Money can’t buy you love, but it can buy fancy cars and a whole lot of alcohol,” “The story of a family’s ugly secret and the stark moment that thrust their private lives into public view!” or “Come for the hot rods and dysfunctional sex-crazed alcoholic Texas oil billionaires, stay for the Cha-Cha-Cha,” Mambokat Mash-Up! Rock Hudson & Dorothy Malone dance ... YouTube (38 seconds), so it defies belief that it opens with such a sappy song over the opening credits, The Four Aces - Written on the Wind (1956) - YouTube (2:59).  Yet what follows is equally mindblowing, as it recalls the death of James Dean the year before at the age of 24, still fresh on the minds of the public, dying in a car crash while driving his 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder to a road race in Salinas.  Robert Stack is Kyle Hadley, millionaire son of Texas oil magnate Jasper Hadley (Robert Keith), owner of all the surrounding oil wells in the vicinity, with his Hadley label identifying the company, the oil tanks, their fleet of cars, and even the name of the town.  As if breaking from the mold, Kyle is seen at the outset recklessly driving a 1953 bright yellow Allard J2X roadster classic (1953 Allard J2X — Audrain Auto Museum) while chugging down a fifth of corn liquor, screeching to a halt when he pulls up to his home, shattering the empty bottle against the brick exterior before stumbling into the house, leaving the door swung wide open.  With leaves blowing into the main entryway, a shot rings out, with Kyle stammering back out the door carrying a gun, falling to his death.  The film backtracks a year and is largely told in flashback, starting in a high-rise advertising office in New York City, with Bacall as Lucy Moore setting up an advertising display as the new executive secretary.  Hudson as Mitch Wayne wanders in, immediately taken by her, but he plays second fiddle to best friend Kyle Hadley, who they meet for lunch, with Kyle making all the right moves, flying her down to Miami Beach with Mitch in tow, hoping to knock her off her feet with all the deluxe accoutrements, but she skips out, refusing to be just another token purchase.  Racing to the airport he hopes to catch her, finding her on the plane ready to embark, but pulls her off, hoping she’ll give him a second chance, proposing love and marriage right there on the spot.  It’s a bit mesmerizing with the accelerated speed of it all, with Mitch looking on in bewilderment, having seen it all before, apparently, growing up in the Hadley home, where the two are like brothers, while the uncontrollable wild seed of the family is Kyle’s nymphomaniac tramp of a sister Marylee (Dorothy Malone), who drives a 1955 flashy red Woodill Wildfire roadster (1955 Woodill Wildfire Roadster - Heacock Classic Insurance), dressed in hot pink dresses and blazing, platinum hair, picking up guys in dive bars, constantly degrading herself with tawdry encounters with lower class men, only to force her family to come rescue her from scandal.  Seen throughout the film dancing wildly to rock music, viewed at the time as corrupting America’s youth, it was also blamed for juvenile delinquency, which was all the rage in 50’s films.  Mitch is the calming influence, used to getting Kyle and Marylee out of trouble, as he’s the one sent in to handle the dirty business.  A geologist by trade, his job is finding where to dig for oil, an invaluable asset to the company, loved and admired by Jasper Hadley as the son he wished he had, as his own two kids are nothing but trouble.  Flipping the script on the American Dream, Sirk reveals the muddy underside of wealth and success, not only suggesting emptiness, but moral rot, literally opening Pandora’s Box.         

While marriage seems to have calmed the nerves of Kyle, no longer sleeping with a gun under his pillow, he remains sober the first year, which comes as a major surprise, while Lucy is welcomed into the family, adored by Jasper Hadley, who remains suspicious about his son.  Marylee’s promiscuity, on the other hand, is lethal, sexually charged like a ferocious animal, completely lacking in remorse, willing to cross every moral line to get what she wants, eventually reaping disastrous consequences for the entire family.  Her obscenely flirtatious portrayal earned her an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress, Oscar-winner Dorothy Malone in Written on the Wind YouTube (2:20), while later receiving top billing in the first prime time soap opera, Peyton Place (1964-69).  Both Lucy and Mitch are measured and level-headed, given intellectual interiority, while Kyle and Marylee are carelessly impulsive daredevils, never giving a thought to their actions, operating on primal instincts, desperately lost and alone, terribly insecure, filled with self-pity, literally without friends, so they draw attention to themselves by forcing their way into other people’s lives.  Much is made of Marylee’s childhood memories, with fond recollections of going “back to the river,” with suggestions of nudity and free-wheeling sex, which certainly drives her unabashed need to be with Mitch, literally wanting to possess him all to herself, like a prized trophy, yet on Kyle’s drunken benders he makes similar references to the good times, where a homoerotic connection between he and Mitch is pretty clear (then throw sex-crazed Marylee into the mix!!), but he grows deliriously out of control and untrustworthy when he learns he may be impotent (while fixated on having a child), as if any stain on his manhood is certain death to a boy from Texas, where virility is all that matters.  That starts his nonstop drunkenness, utterly incapable of anything else but drinking his troubles away.  Mitch’s blatant rejection of Marylee sends her into high gear, planting Iago-like seeds in the mind of her hysterical brother, suggesting Mitch is having his way with his wife.  Like a bull in a china shop, he grows seething with anger and resentment, on a warpath destroying everything in his way.  So when Lucy announces she’s pregnant, rather than express anticipated joy, he just assumes the worst, that Mitch has been cheating on him, accusing his best friend of lies and betrayal, turning on him with a vengeance, while slapping his wife senseless, without a care in the world, completely out of his mind, capable of doing anything, which is what’s behind that drunken ride shown at the outset of the film.  While he’s raving mad, searching for a gun his father always hid, the ultimate showdown is cast in ambiguity and intrigue, entering a bottomless domain where rationality ceases to exist, literally a shadow world.  What follows is Marylee playing her trump card, implicating Mitch in his murder unless he promises to stay with her, a truly reptilian reaction to her own brother’s death.  It was Marylee’s promiscuity that likely caused her own father’s fatal heart attack, returned home by the police after another scandalous affair, heard with the volume turned way up in her room, filling the entire house, a hellcat provocatively performing a demonic mambo dance, a gyrating picture of sin, disgusting her father who is sick of her excesses, using rapid intercutting to show he died while climbing the stairs trying to reach her room, while her slanderous meddling into her brother’s affairs got him killed as well, so she has Hadley blood on her hands, left longingly stroking a model oil derrick that was in her father’s office, a perverted symbol of her own foul wretchedness.  There’s a bit of pandemonium as newspapers get a whiff of scandal, creating chaos in the courtroom, but like other Sirk films, the world shifts on its axis and there’s a tacked-on happy ending revealing the virtuousness of noble heroes, which may be what audiences want, but feels like a fatal exercise in futility, as nothing makes up for the sniveling snakes these two children turn out to be, audaciously bad to the bone, emphasizing the amorality of the super wealthy, existing in a class all their own, incapable of connecting to another living soul, cold as ice, synonymous with human depravity, totally outside the laws of man, existing only for themselves, living in a world of their own making that answers to no one, constructing their own personal highway to hell.