Harper
by Jack Smight
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Janet Leigh, Lauren Bacall, Paul NewmanDirector: Jack Smight
Brand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 121 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-11-14
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of Harper
Movie Review: The Cringing Sixties
Summary: 1 Stars
The '60s was a great stimulant to popular music--and vice versa--but for popular movies, not so much. Maybe because it took a heck of a lot more money to produce a Hollywood movie than an LP: ergo, lots more gatekeepers in Hollywood. Producers with big bucks on the line shied from anything really innovative, or fatally watered down anything true to what was going on out in the streets. Certainly lots of '60s movies just embarrassed themselves trying to be au courant: Peter Sellers movies like "The Party" and "What's New Pussycat" come painfully to mind.
"Harper," sadly, is one of those. It's an embarrassing, crushingly tedious mid-sixties updating of the whole Raymond Chandler-noir L.A. trope, with Paul Newman in an off-kilter performance failing to find a way to play a hip '60s version of Sam Spade cool. (Steve McQueen managed it beautifully a couple of years later in "Bullitt.")
That failure of translation--from Chandler's dead-pan '40s to hip Byrds-era '60s--is "Harper" all over. The narcotized, narcissistic poor little rich girl/sex kitten from "The Big Sleep" makes her appearance here doing (ouch) the boogaloo in a bikini at the end of a diving board. Newman's Harper tries trading drinks for info with Shelley Winter's blowzy booze-hound at the requisite dive-bar-with-character; soon they're out on the dance floor fruggin' (wince) with the kids. Dives-with-character don't HAVE dance floors, and they certainly don't have house bands that look like Tommmy James and the Shondells.
Really, I have no idea what movie most of the four and five star posters here are talking about. I saw "Harper" recently at the American Film Institute's fine theater outside Washington, and even though I'm a Newman fan and was in a sentimental mood following his sad passing, I walked out half way through. I just couldn't take it anymore.
Just rent "The Big Sleep" or "The Maltese Falcon" for the fifth time--or try "The Late Show" or "The Long Goodbye," more successful '70s turns on the same Chandleresque base material. But stay away from this one.
Summary of Harper
: Im Auftrag der reichen Mrs. Sampson sucht Privatdetektiv Harper ihren spurlos verschwundenen Ehemann. Scheinbar wurde der Million??r entf??hrt ??" und Harper trifft gleich auf mehrere Verd??chtige, denen er allesamt mehr als l??stig ist, darunter seine Auftraggeberin (Lauren Bacall), ein Anwalt mit nerv??sem Finger am Abzug (Arthur Hill), ein Swimmingpool-Gigolo (Robert Wagner), ein versoffenes Ex-Starlet (Shelley Winters), ein Jazz-Junkie (Julie Harris) und Harpers Ex-Frau (Janet Leigh). Paul Newman zeigt eine unvergessliche Leistung als Titelheld dieses Kassenkn??llers nach Ross MacDonalds Reiche sterben auch nicht anders. Newman hatte damals bereits 23 Filme gedreht, aber noch nie einen Detektiv gespielt ??" mit Ein Fall f??r Harper gab er dem Genre neue Impulse. In seinem cleveren Skript erweist sich William Goldman als Meister scharfz??ngiger Dialoge.The reason to see Harper is the kooky mid-Sixties design, the peculiar over-the-hill-gang supporting cast, and the crazy Rat Pack lingo written by famed screenwriter William Goldman. And, of course, Paul Newman fans will want to see their guy in the full flower of his anti-hero hero phase. Anyone seeking a decent adaptation of Ross Macdonald's great series of detective novels will, however, be sorely disappointed. Macdonald's Lew Archer is a melancholy knight who operates in an increasingly somber tangle of family crimes; the movie's Lew Harper is a wisecracking hepcat who mugs his way through an indifferent missing-persons investigation. (Frank Sinatra, who was offered the role, would have been a better fit than Newman.) The cast includes Lauren Bacall, Janet Leigh, Julie Harris, and Shelley Winters as various femmes, none of them especially fatale, and Robert Wagner has one of his better roles as a kind of cabana boy to the rich. Strother Martin pops up as a bearded guru with a love temple on top of a Southern California mountain. The director is Jack Smight, whose career was largely made up of TV work. This was the first Goldman script to be made into a film, based on Macdonald's novel The Moving Target; as Goldman states in an enjoyable DVD commentary track, the name Lew Archer was switched to Harper because of Macdonald's reluctance to sign away franchise rights to his private eye's name, not because Newman wanted to have another movie with an "H" title (after The Hustler and Hud). That clears up a long-running urban legend. Newman did make another Macdonald adaptation, The Drowning Pool, in 1975 again using the Harper name. For a much better mid-sixties cool private-eye picture, see Blake Edwards' Gunn. --Robert Horton
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