BEFORE: Robert Wagner carries over from "Play it to the Bone", and it's going to take me a couple of days to link to that last boxing film, but this gives me a chance to drop in a few Paul Newman films. I had a Robert Redford chain earlier this year, so it only seems fitting to have a couple of films starring his frequent co-star. TCM ran this one last August, but I'm adding another Newman film that just ran last night, so the time a movie spends on my watchlist is now anywhere between two days and one year, depending on where it might fall in the chain.
THE PLOT: Lew Harper, a cool private investigator, is hired by a wealthy California matron to locate her kidnapped husband.
AFTER: Despite the difference in decade, I can't help but notice the similarities between this film and the current season of "True Detective", which also used the disappearance of a man as a jumping-off point. Both stories feature complicated plots and tricky motives, and both cases involve illegal immigrants, new-age religious cult leaders, a detective with an estranged wife and seedy clubs with horrible live music acts. I guess that's California for you, whether you're talking about the 1960's or the 2010's. The only thing missing here was the HBO series' focus on California land deals for a rail system, but honestly that's one of the more boring aspects of "True Detective" this season, am I right?
Actually, a lot of things here were meant to pay tribute to the detective films of the 1940's, particularly "The Big Sleep". This is based on a novel by Ross MacDonald titled "The Moving Target", in which the detective's name is Lew Archer, not Lew Harper. But you can see the nods to Bogart films, like in the casting of Lauren Bacall as the wife who reports her husband as missing. I guess a detective story is a detective story, no matter the decade. I recently picked up two other films from the late 60's/early 70's that seem to pay similar homage, "Marlowe" and "The Long Goodbye".
But Harper himself doesn't seem much like the Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe type - in fact, he reminded me more of Chevy Chase's wisecracking Fletch character, though a less comedic version, since he slipped easily into phony voices or whatever aliases he needed to get information out of someone. So overall, this was like Fletch appearing in "True Detective", season two, and that just seems a little odd.
Plus, it's a really complicated case ("lots of ins and outs, man," as Lebowski would say). Even after everything was revealed about who kidnapped Ralph Samson, I could tell you who but I really didn't understand why. Plus they pull a freeze-frame ending at the worst possible time, so there's a huge unresolved thingie. (It's funny, "True Detective" also got slammed this season for having a freeze-frame ending in one episode.)
Gotta go, the penultimate episode of "True Detective" is on in just 10 hours, and I've got to prepare by re-reading my notes from last episode. Honestly, the show's been moving at a snail's pace, with one or two notable exceptions, so I'm really not sure they're going to be able to tie things together with the time they have left. If they manage to do it, that will be quite an accomplishment. Hmm, if this film was really the inspiration for Season 2 of "T.D.", and I make some quick assumptions based on the plot of "Harper", then that means the killer is...Wow, I really did not see that one coming, and that character was right there all along, hiding in plain sight. Holy crap.
Also starring Paul Newman (last seen in "Torn Curtain"), Lauren Bacall (last seen in "How to Marry a Millionaire"), Arthur Hill (last seen in "I Was a Male War Bride"), Julie Harris, Janet Leigh (last seen in "Psycho"), Robert Webber (last seen in "Midway"), Shelley Winters (last seen in "Cover Girl"), Harold Gould (last seen in "Patch Adams"), Strother Martin, Pamela Tiffin.
RATING: 4 out of 10 broken yolks
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