After nearly a decade, Paul Newman returned to play Private Investigator Lew Harper a second time, and lost his way right from the start moving the action from novelist Ross Macdonald’s So. Cal. to mossy New Orleans. The plot has something or other to do with land, oil & love roundelays, but the real purpose of the exercise (and it does feel like exercise) was to piggyback on the success of the original HARPER to help First Artists, the financially troubled production shingle Newman had started up with Sidney Poitier, Barbra Streisand, Dustin Hoffman & Steve McQueen. As detective mystery, it’s no more than okay: director, writers, tech work, awfully oblique for the genre*, and it was equally disappointing as a quick financial windfall.* Yet, thanks to the 9-yr gap between Harper films, it offers an all but unique opportunity to directly compare & contrast the generational change in production standards between the final days of Old Hollywood and the looser cinematic practices of the ‘70s. Really jarring to watch them one after the other. And it probably helps to clarify the differences (especially in mores & technique) in having such mediocre product to evaluate. (See HARPER Write-Up below.)
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Though it doesn’t have HARPER’s all-star cast, DROWNING holds it’s own with old stars Joanne Woodward, underrated James Franciosa, eternal Richard Jaekel, and newer personalities like middle-aged sleazeball Murray Hamilton & teenage Melanie Griffith who’d just made a far better mystery/detective pic in NIGHT MOVES/’75. The rare Arthur Penn film to improve with age.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *In detective fiction, the story can be as oblique as needed, but not the writing or filmmaking.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *More than anything, Newman, ridiculously fit, ridiculously handsome, loathed being used on screen as ‘a piece of meat’ (his phrase). Yet here, and not only in the big ‘drowning pool’ suspense sequence (lousy, BTW), he shows more skin than he ever had . . . or would. Another clue to the film’s real purpose as a cash cow.
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