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DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 3, No. 23 |
 Exit Lew Archer; Enter Lew Harper? |
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Ross Macdonald's 'The Moving Target' in 1966, something strange happened to the best American private eye character since Chandler's Philip Marlowe |
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This is No. 8 in Ron Miller's series comparing some of the classic mysteries with their film and TV adaptations. |
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Mystery fans often get all excited when they learn
that Hollywood plans to bring one of their favorite detective
characters to the motion picture or TV screen. Perhaps that's
because we enjoyed William Powell and Myrna Loy so much as Dashiell
Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles in MGM's "The Thin Man"
series--or Humphrey Bogart as Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe
in "The Big Sleep."
But as much as Agatha Christie fans love David Suchet as Hercule
Poirot and Joan Hixson as Miss Marple, we have to remember the
movies and TV also gave us Tony Randall as Poirot and Margaret
Rutherford as Miss Marple, not to mention Edward "The Equalizer"
Woodward as Sherlock Holmes.
In other words, Hollywood often gets it wrong every bit as much as it gets it right. And that's being pretty generous to Hollywood, if you ask me.
Still, the fans of mystery writer Ross Macdonald were pretty enthused when they learned that Lew Archer, his private eye character in a long string of best-selling novels, was going to be played by one of Hollywood's most adored leading men--Paul Newman--in a big budget, all-star version of the first Archer novel, "The Moving Target," in 1966.
Looking back on Macdonald's stature in the mystery genre, this was an extremely important development. It told the fans that Hollywood perceived Macdonald's Archer as an "A"-picture property. You don't see the studio hotshots rounding up the biggest stars for a major studio version of a mystery novel very often. And they seldom assign the hottest writer in Hollywood--in this case, William Goldman--to adapt a mystery novel for the screen unless they really want to make a classy picture.
That's why the first Ross Macdonald screen project seemed to have nothing but promising signs.
But some rude shocks were in store. In fact, the movie turned out to be a calamity on celluloid for hardcore Macdonald fans, despite all the good reviews from critics who had never read a Lew Archer mystery--and the very good box office returns.
No doubt the greatest shock came when actor Newman, apparently acting on a superstitious whim, insisted that they change the name of Macdonald's detective hero from Lew Archer to Lew Harper. Why spit in the eye of Macdonald's legion of readers? As legend has it, Newman had such success with his 1963 film "Hud" that he thought there was some kind of magic in having a single-word title that began with the letter "H."
Result: "The Moving
Target" became "Harper" and the name on Lew Archer's
office door was repainted to say "Lew Harper."
(Archer remained Archer when television got around to him a few
years later, but the actors who played him in separate projects--Peter
Graves and Brian Keith--were as miscast as Newman was.)
In the mystery world, "The
Moving Target" is a seminal work. It now seems to be the
book in which the baton as most respected mystery writer in America
was passed from the former king, Raymond Chandler, to the heir
apparent, Ross Macdonald.
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heir to Raymond Chandler's status as America's premier detective novelist. |
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Macdonald was born in Los Gatos, California, but was raised in the Canadian province of British Columbia. His real name was Ross Millar and he was attracted to the mystery genre as a young man, especially the novels of Raymond Chandler. Married in his youth to a writer who later became the popular mystery novelist Margaret Millar, Macdonald published his first mystery novels after serving in World War II. He gradually began developing a detective hero clearly modeled on Chandler's Philip Marlowe.
In "The Moving Target," Lew Archer has already left his police job in Long Beach, California, and begun working as a private detective, mostly doing the grut work of evidence-gathering for divorce cases and the like. He operates in the same Los Angeles-Southern California milieu as did Chandler's Marlowe. He has the same cynical view of his turf, seeing it as a boomtown environment for profit-driven urban sprawl. Through his first-person narration, Archer lets us know the L.A. area of the late 1940s, the period of "The Moving Target," is mostly run by corrupt rich people and the racketeers and crooked cops they manipulate. These rich powerbrokers usually live a decadent lifestyle in grotesquely large homes in suburbs like Santa Teresa--the community most readers recognized as Santa Barbara. In all this, Macdonald was following the lead of Chandler, whose Marlowe saw the same sort of post-war Babylon being built in the smoggy valleys and sun-drenched beach towns of Southern California by all the wrong people.
In "The Moving Target," Archer's personal life is pretty much a ruin. His wife has dumped him and his business barely supports him, let alone the once-mandatory sexy secretary private eyes were supposed to have--like Sam Spade's Effie Perrine or Mike Hammer's Velda. So, like Marlowe, Archer frequently winds up helping people he really doesn't like or respect because he doesn't have much choice in the matter.
In the opening chapter of "The Moving Target," an offbeat case comes Archer's way. He's hired to find the wealthy missing husband of Mrs. Sampson, a handsome woman of middle years who's an invalid due to a fall from a horse. Mr. Sampson has been gone only a few days and the police haven't been called. Mrs. Sampson suspects her husband is on a bender and probably shacked up with one of his lady friends. She wants Archer to find him, bring him home and do it quietly--before he starts giving money away to the religious crackpots who litter the L.A. landscape.
The opening of "The Moving Target" is uncannily like the opening of Chandler's first Philip Marlowe novel, "The Big Sleep." Marlowe goes to the manorial estate of an invalid man who also has a missing person for him to find. His client also has a young, beautiful daughter who's hot to trot. So does Macdonald's Mr. Sampson. And so on.
Ultimately, Archer learns that Sampson has been snatched and is being held for ransom by a motley crew of gangster wannabes and typical Southern California low-life flakes. The wider his investigation goes, the more corruption he finds among Sampson's cronies, family members and friends. Even Mrs. Sampson is sort of hoping the old boy is found dead because that will uncomplicate her life a great deal and leave her richer than she'd ever hoped to be.
In short, it's one of those cases that make a noble private eye want to throw up--if he could find time to while chasing down all the potential bad guys and gals.
"Harper," the movie version, starts out well enough with a nice bit of behind-the-credits character building. We see Newman's Lew Harper wake up in his small, cluttered L.A. apartment, badly needing a cup of coffee, but finding he has no alternative but to fish yesterday's coffee grounds out of the garbage can and recycle them with fresh hot water. The message: This is not a very successful private eye.
But there's a problem: Newman is so handsome, so well-groomed and so lean and fit that we don't believe it for a minute. This looks like a man who spent the previous day posing for the cover of GQ magazine, holding a tennis racket with a sweater knotted around his neck and all decked out in spotless, well-pressed whites.
Then we follow "Harper" up the freeway to the "Santa Theresa" turnoff (They couldn't even spell Archer's town without adding a lucky "H"!) and eventually to the Sampson mansion. He drives his Porsche convertible through the huge iron gate, up the long winding driveway and across the palatial grounds, where he stops briefly to make a clucking noise as he sees the Olympic size pool, braced by rich tropical landscaping, and the sexy girl diving into the water way off in the distance.
They keep giving us these little hints that "Harper" is a borderline economic failure, like the door on the driver's side of his Porsche that has just a primer coat of paint on it. (Lew Archer arrived at the Sampson place in a taxi cab, but Newman probably insisted "Harper" couldn't possibly NOT have his own "wheels." (Newman, after all, was a racing fan and later an actual competitive driver.)
It's charming to find that Mrs. Sampson is played by Lauren Bacall, who played the trouble-prone older daughter of the invalid client in "The Big Sleep" back in 1946. By 1966, Bacall had solid gold credentials as a mystery player, having married and worked often with the late Humphrey Bogart in various noir projects for film, radio and television. Ironically, "The Big Sleep" almost wasn't released because the studio brass thought Bacall was incompetent in the role. But they reshot her scenes at the insistence of Bogart and director Howard Hawks and she ultimately earned excellent notices. By 1966, Bacall was so good at playing twisted, but sexy matrons that nobody else could have played Mrs. Sampson any better.
For most of "Harper," Goldman followed the complex Macdonald plot pretty closely, making understandable changes needed to update the 1948-49 period of the novel. For one thing, he changed has been silent movie star Fay Estabrook into a failed 1950s starlet who "got fat" and saw her acting career go to blazes. This worked very well once they cast Shelley Winters in the role. Winters, too, was a former starlet who "got fat," but she also got to be one hell of a dramatic actress--and she steals every scene she's in with Newman.
But then Goldman throws something at us that's really off the wall and seems to serve no purpose but to antagonize Lew Archer fans. Example: He writes in the detective's ex-wife, who can't stand "Harper" anymore, but still sleeps with him when he's really in a jam. Though Janet Leigh does her best with this part, it has no place in the story unless somebody decided a romantic lead like Newman couldn't possibly go through a whole movie without making out with somebody.
If you're a fan of a detective hero like Sherlock Holmes, you don't want some screenwriter giving him a sex life he isn't supposed to have. That's the way the Janet Leigh scenes play in "Harper." They're extraneous nonsense.
Director Jack Smight had some nice casting ideas for "Harper" that helped make the movie a box office hit, like putting former teen idol Robert Wagner in the role of the double-dealing playboy who hangs around the Sampson estate, supposedly to keep Sampson's hot-pants daughter Miranda (Pamela Tiffin) from bothering the gardeners and pool boys. But then Goldman wrote in some tacky "sidekick" gags for Wagner to play while accompanying "Harper" here and there. It messes up the character and makes him too likeable for the way he turns out in the final reel.
Another offbeat casting choice was picking Julie Harris to play a night club blues singer who's all wrapped up in the sinister goings on. Anybody who remembered Harris from "I Am A Camera" in 1955, playing the same character Liza Minnelli won an Oscar playing in "Cabaret" nearly 20 years later, certainly wasn't surprised that she could play a singer--and, fortunately, we didn't have to hear much of her singing in "Harper." The result was a really interesting performance, even though Goldman also reshaped her character away from Macdonald's original concept.
Screenwriter Goldman's final touch was to leave us in doubt about whether or not "Harper" was going to turn in the ultimate villain to the police. Macdonald had the bad guy turn himself in, but that wouldn't have played quite as cynically as moviegoers wanted their stories in the late 1960s when we were already firmly involved in the Vietnam war and nobody seemed to want to fess up to anything bad they'd done lately.
If there's one overwhelming bad thing about "Harper," though, I'm sure most true Ross Macdonald fans will say it's the casting of Paul Newman. His performance is all charm, smart-ass remarks and Hollywood charisma. He either hadn't yet come to understand what he could do in the area of dramatic nuance--or else he didn't think "Harper" needed his best effort. He might have been right from a purely commercial point of view since "Harper" was a big hit and eventually prompted a sequel, "The Drowning Pool," a decade later.
At the time I first saw "Harper," I loved it. But I hadn't read Macdonald yet and I didn't know how important Lew Archer is to the American detective genre. Like Chandler's Marlowe, Macdonald's Archer is a philosopher/poet of crime. His insights into the human condition lift the Archer novels out of the mystery genre and into the realm of serious contemporary fiction. And, like Chandler, Macdonald was close to being right about everything, now that we have the perspective of the years.
There are still lots of good reasons to see "Harper." Johnny Mandel's jazz score is marvelous and Conrad Hall's camerawork is superb, especially whenever Pamela Tiffin shows up in a bikini to do The Froug on a diving board, reminding us how special certain spectacular young women and the dance crazes of the 1960s went together.
But a real mystery fan
will get a lot more out of reading "The Moving Target,"
an important book in the history of mystery that helped launch
the long, brilliant career of Lew Archer. That's Archer,
damn it!
© 2002 by Ron Miller.
The Ron Miller caricature is © 2001 by Jim Hummel. The book
cover reproduction is from the Fontana/Collins paperback edition.
The "Harper" illustration is © 1991 by Warner
Home Video, Inc.
Ron
Miller is the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the
official companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series.
He currently teaches "The Curious History of Mystery"
at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Washington.
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