Harper (1966)

February 23, 1966, release date

Directed by Jack Smight

Screenplay by William Goldman

Based on The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald

Music by Johnny Mandel

Edited by Stefan Arnsten

Cinematography by Conrad L. Hall

Paul Newman as Lew Harper

Lauren Bacall as Elaine Sampson

Julie Harris as Betty Fraley

Arthur Hill as Albert Graves

Janet Leigh as Susan Harper

Pamela Tiffin as Miranda Sampson

Robert Wagner as Allan Taggert

Robert Webber as Dwight Troy

Shelley Winters as Fay Estabrook

Harold Gould as Sheriff Spanner

Martin West as the deputy

Roy Jenson as Puddler, the bouncer at the Piano bar

Strother Martin as Claude, the priest at the Temple of the Clouds

Distributed by Warner Bros.

Produced by Warner Bros.

There’s a lot to like about Harper, not the least of which is Paul Newman in the starring role. He’s a lot of fun to watch, so much so that I also saw The Drowning Pool, in which he plays the same character in another story also based on a Ross Macdonald novel. It seems obvious—at least to me—that he enjoys his work and has a lot of fun doing it. In some respects, he reminds me of Lloyd Nolan in the Michael Shayne roles. The list of stars in supporting roles in Harper is impressive and adds to the fun.

The film starts with Lew Harper, a down-on-his-luck private investigator, beginning his day. The opening credits appear over his morning ritual. He is in bed ignoring an alarm clock and then finally turning it off. The camera pulls back to reveal a small, cramped one-room apartment. The television, on a mobile pushcart, is still on but with a test pattern from the 1960s. (Remember those from the earlier days of television?) Harper gets out of bed, turns off the television, pushes it out of the way, and opens the shade on one of his windows. He finds the sunlight so blinding that he doesn’t bother with the others. He reuses coffee grounds that he retrieves from a wastebasket to make some bad coffee. When he leaves his living quarters, we learn that he is residing in his office: The front door that shuts behind him is an office door showing the lettering of his name and business.

Harper drives off in a beat-up convertible in need of a paint job to meet with Elaine Sampson, who wants Harper to find her husband Ralph. The initial meeting between Harper and Sampson is a bit cryptic and mysterious. Elaine Sampson doesn’t much care about bringing her husband back; she just wants to make sure that he isn’t squandering his (their) money. Some of their conversation is amusing, and Lew Harper gets to show his cynical humor:

• Elaine Sampson: “. . . Actually, I have no intention of divorcing him [her husband Ralph]. I only intend to outlive him. I only want to see him in his grave.” [short pause] “What a terrible thing to say.”

• Lew Harper: “People in love will say anything.”

(This blog post about Harper contains some spoilers.)

Later in the film, Harper tracks Fay Estabrook, someone he wants to question about Ralph Sampson’s whereabouts. He finds her at the Bel-Air Hotel. Once again, Harper gets to show a bit of humor in the following exchange with the bartender in the hotel’s lounge:

• Lew Harper: “Give me another one of those, will you?”

• Bartender at the Bel-Air Hotel: “It’s two after six. We don’t serve domestic after six. Only imported.”

• Harper: “Terrific.” [throws some bills on the bar] “Keep the change.”

• Bartender: “There is no change.”

• Harper: [looks up at the bartender] “Keep it anyway.”

Once he introduces himself to Fay Estabrook, Harper goes to great lengths to keep her attention long enough to get information from her, even go-go dancing with her when the band starts to play in the hotel lounge.

The story has so many elements of noir. In addition to Ralph Sampson’s disappearance, the film features murder, smuggling of illegal immigrants and narcotics, blackmail, torture, and a religious cult called Temple of the Clouds. Harper himself is something of a throwback to the detectives of the 1940s, a bit like Sam Spade, because he has his own peculiar code of ethics, which apply only to his business. For Harper, that means seeing an assignment to the bitter end. It doesn’t apply to his wife, however, who wants a divorce but is willing to consider reconciliation when Harper shows up on her doorstep looking for some carnal comfort. The next morning, when he leaves her stranded because he is a cad and because he insists on seeing the assignment through, she realizes that her decision to divorce Harper is the right one.

Some of the most interesting features of the film admittedly do not have much to do with noir. In addition to the occasional humor, the film uses Technicolor to its advantage. The color in Harper is not garish at all, which is sometimes true of other Technicolor films from the 1960s; rather, it is muted and subdued. At times, color fills the screen, making some shots feel cramped almost to the point of suffocation.

The details in the film that did start to grate on me were the running jokes about Fay Estabrook once being a beautiful starlet who got old and fat. Shelley Winters does a great job in the role of Estabrook, and these references about the character’s shortcomings make the film seem a little mean-spirited. And I suppose Harper doesn’t break any new ground. The main character is a struggling private investigator, looking for a big payoff and treating women badly, all in the pursuit of his own version of justice.

I still enjoyed the film. I found it intriguing that all the different elements seem like they have nothing to do with one another, but the plot eventually reveals that all of them, even the Temple of the Clouds, are interrelated. It’s one of those movies where paying attention to the details makes a big difference.

The DVD that I watched came with audio commentary by William Goldman, the screenwriter. I found his observations interesting and well worth a listen. He made the point that Paul Newman, in the title role, has to carry the film and does a great job. I couldn’t agree more. And it is a great story. Lew Harper finds more than one mystery to solve and survives them all.

I wondered if the music (“The Big Heist” by Henry Mancini) for the opening sequence of Harper was the same as the music used in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) for the scene in which Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak are deciding what to shoplift at a five and dime store in Manhattan. If you know, please leave a comment.

Mystery Street (1950)

July 28, 1950, release date

Directed by John Sturges

Screenplay by Sydney Boehm and Richard Brooks

Based on a story by Leonard Spigelgass

Music by Rudolph G. Kopp

Edited by Ferris Webster

Cinematography by John Alton

Ricardo Montalban as Lieutenant Peter Moralas

Sally Forrest as Grace Shanway

Marshall Thompson as Henry Shanway, Grace’s husband

Bruce Bennett as Dr. McAdoo, of Harvard Medical School

Willy Maher as Tim Sharkey

Elsa Lanchester as Mrs. Smerrling, the landlady

Jan Sterling as Vivian Heldon

Edmon Ryan as James Joshua Harkley

Betsy Blair as Jackie Elcott

John Maxwell as Detective Kilrain

Ralph Dumke as the tattoo artist

Willard Waterman as the mortician

Walter Burke as the ornithologist

Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

A few things about Mystery Street really popped out at me, beside the fact that it is one of the first films to be shot in Boston and the greater Boston area. First was the use of forensic science. Even though I’m used to watching shows like Law and Order: SVU, I was still intrigued by the state of the art in 1950. Lieutenant Peter Moralas and Dr. McAdoo work together using hair strands, examination of skeletal remains, facial recognition (matching the photos of women known to be missing at about the time of the murder and the dumping of the body), among other forensic techniques. Without computers, the work is painstaking and slow, but it still involves a lot of science, and the magic of cinema compresses the timeline so viewers don’t have to experience the passage of time. I found it fascinating to learn that forensic science has a longer history than modern viewers might imagine.

Another detail that popped out at me was the yellow Ford owned by Henry Shanway and the way that it was dumped in the pond. (By the way, Mystery Street is filmed in black and white, but Shanway’s car is referred to so often in the film as the yellow Ford that it’s almost hard not to imagine the car in color!) I remember a very similar scene in Psycho (1960) when Janet Leigh’s car is dumped in the water by Anthony Perkins. The yellow Ford is pulled out of the water as part of the plot and the investigation in Mystery Street, but in Psycho, as I recall, it’s pulled out behind the closing credits. But the similarities still made me wonder if Hitchcock saw Mystery Street and did a bit of creative borrowing.

Lieutenant Peter Moralas, from the Barnstable (Massachusetts) Police Department, is in charge of the investigation because Vivian Heldon’s skeleton is discovered on the dunes of Cape Cod. (By the time her body is discovered, the skeleton is all that’s left.) Moralas mentions that he works in “the Portuguese district.” I take that to mean southeastern Massachusetts, an area known today as the Southcoast. The Southcoast area of Massachusetts and Rhode Island had, and still has, many Portuguese immigrants and people of Portuguese descent. But a lot of the police investigation and most of the forensic work in Mystery Street take place in Boston and the Boston area because that’s where Vivian lived before she was murdered. Dr. McAdoo works at Harvard and helps Moralas—and Harvard University gets film credit for allowing some on-location filming.

(This blog post about Mystery Street contains spoilers.)

Ricardo Montalban (a Hispanic actor) plays a Hispanic character who likely would have experienced prejudice in 1950s Massachusetts. Moralas, as a minority detective, is the target of some prejudice from Harkley, the principal murder suspect, when Moralas goes to Harkley’s office with a search warrant looking for the murder weapon. Harkley tells Moralas that he is used to respect because his family has been in the country since before there was a United States, and he guesses from Moralas’s accent that Moralas’s family is a more recent arrival. But Moralas holds his ground and tells Harkley that he is used to respect, too, even if his family hasn’t been here for even 100 years.

Mystery Street has some memorable female characters who are integral to the plot, although they are not given top billing. Jackie Elcott is a friend of Vivian Heldon’s; they live in the same rooming house owned by Mrs. Smerrling. Jackie is the one who reports Vivian missing. She collects Vivian’s suitcase from her room after she reports her disappearance, and she makes it plain to Moralas that she didn’t open it: She is a woman of principle. She connects the gun that Mrs. Smerrling shows her with Vivian’s murder after she reads more about the crime in the newspaper, although she doesn’t know how the gun landed in Mrs. Smerrling’s possession.

Elsa Lanchester is great as Mrs. Smerrling, the landlady, but I did wonder what made her think she could get away with blackmailing Harkley. The gun isn’t in Harkley’s office when Moralas goes there to look for it because Mrs. Smerrling steals it when she attempts to blackmail Harkley. And I wondered why she hides the baggage claim ticket in the birdcage. No one wants to pay any attention to the bird, but the ticket is in plain sight in the cage. Without her and her less-than-upstanding intentions, however, the story would not be as interesting and maybe a bit less noir. Mrs. Smerrling steals every scene with Moralas as he tries to ferret out the truth about Heldon’s murder. She adds some humor that even Moralas can appreciate.

Yes, Vivian Heldon is killed near the beginning of the movie, but she is the one who gets the plot going. She demands to see Harkley, and she pays the price for insisting that he meet her. After Harkley shoots her on a deserted Cape Cod road, a car approaches unexpectedly. To hide what he has done, Harkley embraces Heldon’s dead body and pretends to kiss her. When he picks up her body to leave it on the sand dunes, he hits her head on the car door. The scene is rather shocking, even today, although I did find myself a bit distracted wondering what happened to all the blood while he was embracing the body and dumping it afterward. Did Heldon really have time to bleed out while she was still in Shanway’s car?

Henry Shanway is the luckless patsy who is drawn into Vivian’s plan to get to the cape and talk to Harkley. Shanway meets her in Boston, after a night of heavy drinking at The Grass Skirt, where Vivian works as a dancer. He is drinking because his wife just lost their first child in childbirth. Just before Vivian convinces him that she can help him move his car out of a no-parking zone, he says, “I’m always where I shouldn’t be. I’m also not where I ought to be. You know, ever since Adam, man’s been crying ‘Where am I?’ ” He poses a philosophical question, but he has no answers. He succumbs to fate and lets Vivian provide her own answers.

I think that’s the best way to enjoy Mystery Street: Give in and let the plot and the female characters take control. Sure, some details might strain one’s suspension of disbelief a bit, but the story and the murder investigation are still compelling. All the characters ring true, and I can’t remember the last time I saw a film with so many strong female characters. Each one—Vivian Heldon, Jackie Elcott, and Mrs. Smerrling—are very different and clearly defined. They are a lot of fun to watch while they (especially Mrs. Smerrling) keep Lieutenant Moralas and Dr. McAdoo guessing.

Act of Violence (1948)

December 21, 1948, release date

Directed by Fred Zinnemann

Screenplay by Robert L. Richards

Based on a story by Collier Young

Music by Bronislau Kaper

Edited by Conrad A. Nervig

Cinematography by Robert Surtees

Van Heflin as Frank R. Enley

Robert Ryan as Joe Parkson

Janet Leigh as Edith Enley

Mary Astor as Pat

Phyllis Thaxter as Ann Sturges

Berry Kroeger as Johnny

Taylor Holmes as Gavery

Harry Antrim as Fred Finney

Connie Gilchrist as Martha Finney

Will Wright as boat rental man at Redwood Lake

Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

I have seen Act of Violence twice now, and it’s even more moving on the second viewing. It’s a postwar film about ex-soldiers trying to adjust to civilian life. But it’s also about the effects of trauma on the people who love those ex-soldiers. The film doesn’t use the terms post-traumatic stress disorder and PTSD, but it could just as easily be about the problems of returning soldiers in any era. There are no easy answers, and the film doesn’t provide any.

I loved the opening, with the music, the horns, playing over the MGM/lion trademark. I don’t think I have seen this kind of opening, with just “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presents” and the title card, in any other film noir (the credits don’t come until the end). Then the movie cuts to the beautiful urban cityscape of New York in the background; it is like a painting.

The dark night, the rain, the music, a man whose face we don’t see right away, the gun: all are classic film noir. Then the man (we still don’t know it’s Joe Parkson) boards a bus and we travel with him into bright light, daylight, and a small town (Santa Lisa, California) on Memorial Day, complete with a parade, a marching band, and horns that sound very different from the opener over the MGM/lion trademark. (I’m sure late 1940s postwar audiences would have been painfully aware of the significance of Memorial Day.) Joe Parkson is looking for Frank Enley and for revenge.

(This blog post about Act of Violence contains spoilers.)

Act of Violence doesn’t use any flashbacks. Instead, important plot points are revealed in painful conversations. Frank says to his wife, “Edith, a lot of things happened in the war that you wouldn’t understand. Why should you? I don’t understand them myself.” Later, after Joe Parkson has been to their house, Edith is blunt about what she wants from Frank: “I want to ask you something. When we packed up all of a sudden and came out here from Syracuse, three thousand miles across the country, was that on account of him [Joe Parkson]? Not collecting your terminal pay, dropping all our friends back East? It all was, wasn’t it, Frank? I know you went through some bad times in the war. I know some things must have happened that hurt you. I never asked. But I am asking now, Frank. I want to know.” Frank tells Edith that Joe was the bombardier on his missions. Edith is afraid that Joe will become violent when he returns looking for Frank. She wants to call the police, the army, but Frank stops her: “You don’t know what made him the way he is. I do.”

But Edith learns part of the truth from Joe Parkson: “Did he tell you that I’m a cripple because of him? Did he tell you about the men that are dead because of him? Did he tell you what happened to them before they died? . . . I was lucky. They thought I was dead and left me there. . . .” Edith refuses to believe Joe, but she leaves home in Santa Lisa to look for her husband Frank at the builders’ convention in Los Angeles, and he finally tells her what happened.

An exchange between Edith Enley and Ann Sturges, Joe Parkson’s girlfriend, is also blunt and painful:

• Ann: “Look, I’ve come a long way to stop this. Maybe nobody can. But I’m the only one that has a chance.”

• Edith: “What can you do? I’ve seen him [Parkson]. He’s vicious. He’s a killer.”

• Ann: “Is he? What about your husband? Do you call him a murderer?”

• Edith: “No. He didn’t mean it. He’s been sick with it.”

• Ann: “They’re both sick with it. And I want Joe to be well.”

Frank Enley’s PTSD flashback sequence was filmed perfectly, I thought. He enters a long tunnel, which is lit brightly (odd for a film noir). Is the bright light because he’s remembering clearly, truthfully? He hears snippets of the conversation from his time in the World War II prison camp in his mind. “You’ll find the tunnel in the north corner.” “Don’t do it, Joe.” By the time he comes to the end of the tunnel, he is distraught and shouting out loud in real time: “Don’t do it, Joe!” He heads to the train tracks and attempts suicide but jumps out of the way in the nick of time. From this point, Frank’s life spirals even more out of control (it first started spiraling out of control when he runs out of the builders’ convention after punching Joe Parkson). When Frank makes a conscious decision to set things right, his life seems to fall back into place.

Late in the film, Edith Enley tells her husband that she knows now he has faults and weaknesses. Is learning that Frank is just like any other man another “act of violence”? She describes learning this information as a shock and attributes it to her youth and naïveté. I think this is just one of many acts of violence portrayed in this film. Betrayal is another. Frank feels he betrayed his men; he in turn is betrayed by the Nazi officer in the prison camp.

The opening of this film, with only “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presents” and the movie title, and the closing credits were stupendous. The letters were composed of simple, clear, white blocks and lines. They reminded me of a white picket fence (a white picket fence can be seen behind the closing credits), of small-town America and innocence, and how that innocence is tenuous at best. Act of Violence is a thought-provoking and moving portrayal of veterans and their loved ones struggling to come to terms with the past. It could be the story of veterans returning from any war and the families they come home to in any era.