Cinema: Old Wave Manhunt

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Harper. As a gum-chewing gumshoe named Harper, Paul Newman stirs awake, forces open his burnt-out baby-blue eyes, and begins to assess the odds against his peace of mind. His Los Angeles office is a rat's nest where the private eye sometimes holes up to sleep. The TV sits humming dumbly through a test pattern that testifies to a restless night. From a wastebasket Harper retrieves some sodden coffee grounds in a filter, brews and glumly drinks a stale, disgusting cupful. Moments later, he roars along the freeway in a rattletrap sports car that has one door and fender bumped out and prime-coated—this man has been in a few scrapes before.

Thus, with not a word spoken, Newman's game, rank and destination are established beyond doubt. He is hellbent for Bogart country, that raw, rich Big Sleep milieu; and this Warner Brothers revival of a grand old tradition gets him there in style. Based on Ross Macdonald's The Moving Target, and accelerated at a slick '60s pace by Director Jack Smight, Harper gives Newman his feistiest role since Hud.

Newman responds sharply as a cool and clean-cut Bogeyman who never drinks hard stuff in the morning, never chases broads except for business purposes. His wife, Janet Leigh, loves him, hates his job, wants to slow him down just long enough to settle her suit for divorce.

Harper goes hunting instead, and his first stop is at an Alhambra-sized mansion ruled from a wheelchair by Lauren Bacall, the wife or widow of a kidnaped millionaire. Right at home here, lynx-eyed Lauren lets her voice burn like a laser into Scenarist William Goldman's polished-steel dialogue. "I only want to outlive him; I want to see him in his grave," she says. "People in love will say anything," answers Harper.

While solving the kidnaping, he flushes a few other rare loony birds from the scented foliage of Southern California. All are played with just the right sort of strutty assurance. Mindless beauty is embodied by Pamela Tiffin as the victim's turned-on daughter and by Robert Wagner as a glamour-boy private pilot, both up to their pearly ears in self-parody. Arthur Hill adds knowing touches as the lovesick family lawyer, who hopes to bridge the years between himself and Pamela with the help of isometric exercises. Strikingly cast are Julie Harris as a ginmill songbird hooked on drugs, and Shelley Winters as a tubby former starlet whose sidelines include smuggling Mexican migratory workers into the U.S.

Hired killers, bagmen, juvenile cops, mysterious servants and religious nuts tumble over one another in Harper, and the convoluted plot demands an audience's unwavering attention. By combining flamboyant suspense with a sunbaked slice of life and lots of good mean fun, Director Smight makes every clue a pleasure to follow.