Harper
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Movie Reviews of Harper
Movie Review: "He's fuzz, Puddler. Private."
Summary: 3 Stars
Not a classic, but fun and Paul is clearly having a blast.
On the commentary track Goldman covers much of the anecdotes and opinions those who've read his books are familiar with. The bombshell is his revelation that he wrote a follow-up adaptation of The Chill - maybe the best detective novel by an American. It never happened. Why? So Paul could make The Secret War of Harry Frigg? Oh, the pangs.
Movie Review: The Cringing Sixties
Summary: 1 Stars
The social ferment of the '60s was a great stimulant to pop music--but for Hollywood movies, not so much. Maybe because it took a heck of a lot more money to produce a movie than an LP. Movie producers with big bucks on the line shied from anything radically new, 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.
Sadly, "Harper" is one of those. It's a tedious, embarrassing mid-sixties updating of the whole Raymond Chandler L.A.-noir genre, 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 Byrds-era psychedelic '60s--is "Harper" all over. Lauren Bacall's classic narcotized, narcissistic poor little rich girl, in "The Big Sleep," is updated here to a vacant hipster-chick doing (ouch) the boogaloo in a bikini at the end of a diving board. Newman's Harper trades 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.