Unwatched Movie Fest #3: Jack Smight's Harper

 Harper

Paul Newman, Julie Harris, Arthur Hill, Janet Leigh, Robert Wagner, Lauren Bacall. Dir. Jack Smight, Warner Bros., 1966

Paul Newman, pretty much the top box office draw of the mid-'60s, flexed his star power on the development of mystery novelist Ross McDonald's shamus, Lew Archer, into a movie character, requiring the detective's surname start with an "H," as the movies The Hustler and Hud were great successes for him. (He went on to do another two "H pictures," Hombre and Hudsucker Proxy.) So Lew Archer became Lew Harper and this 1966 homage to the classic PI noirs of the '40s birthed a new generation of detective movies, spanning everything from Klute to Altman's The Long Goodbye to the farce Murder By Death.

Of the best-known literary private dicks, Lew Archer, despite being LA-based has never struck me as much better than an imitation of Chandler's Phillip Marlowe, Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, and John D. MacDonald's Travis McGhee in one. That's pretty sad, when you consider Lew Archer preceded Travis McGhee into print by close to a decade. The other three define the classic knight-errant embodied by the private detective. They're warrior-poets, philosophers without honor in their own land. They drink hard, they shoot hard, and they love hard. If being a neanderthal in the bedroom is a part of all three, it's that - a part of a complex character. In Lew Harper, being a neanderthal in and out of the sack IS his character.

Which is my big problem. I generally love mid-'60s stuff like this. I don't, as a rule, practice presentism when watching these movies, preferring to just take it all in as an artefact of its time. I hate reviews that discuss the politics of the movie,'s characters, as if they were actual people and the film some kind of reality programming. That's your cue I'm about to give one.

At pretty much every turn, Newman's Harper dismisses, insults, gaslights, threatens, manipulates, lies to, and patronizes more or less every female character he meets. He's tall, lanky, suave, confident, stylish - Harper embodies a certain kind of man's man from that era, as does Robert Wagner's Allen Taggert, chivalrous and chauvinist. That kind of apotheosis of manhood would be swept away in the coming years, to where much of Harper's and other male character's sensibilities feel foreign to me.

It's unfortunate, as there is almost nothing but good stuff to say about the movie, otherwise. Harper is considered a classic, and deserves to be. It's a good movie. It's also a chauvinist movie celebrating a chauvinist character and, if that played in '66, it did not play as well with me in 2021. (And I'm no one's idea of a male feminist.)

It's not as if the film revolves around its chauvinism, or as if Harper or the other male characters are cruel to women. Except, of course, when they are, as when Harper gaslights Shelley Winters, playing a onetime glamor gal who gained too much weight for Hollywood, plying her with booze and flattery to get information and a look through her house. His later acknowledgment of what he did couldn't lessen my displeasure in understanding the whole sequence once played as comic, with Winters, whose career did suffer due to her weight, apparently in on the gag. It's an unpleasant sequence, to me, no matter how I tried to come at it.

It sucks that these things are true. As I've mentioned before, Harper has much to recommend it, including another crackerjack performance by Newman of a man I want to like, but don't, like Hud. The picture looks great, with cinematography by Conrad Hall, who also shot Newman in Cool Hand Luke and The Road to Perdition. Screenwriting legend William "Princess Bride" Goldman, working on his first produced screenplay, keeps the action moving, the dialogue crisp, and Harper funny. "I used to be a deputy sherrif but then I passed my literacy test," is good dialogue then or now.

At the time of its release, the PI had tilted at his last windmill in Hollywood. The classic shamus-pictures that ruled the '40s and early '50s turned out to make great serialized TV and departed the big screen in favor of the small. In Harper's wake, Hollywood found more than a little life in the genre. Actors as diverse as Denzel Washington, Elliott Gould, Powers Boothe, Richard Dreyfuss, and Kathleen Turner have taken at least one pass at the form.

Harper, the fulcrum movie, a look back that ended up looking forward, suffers in comparison to both the preceding and succeeding generations, largely because its chauvinism pins it in time in a way earlier and later films are not pinned. Everything else about Harper is what gets me to enthusiastically recommend movies. In this case, it's still recommended, but cautiously.