ONLY CREAM AND BASTARDS RISE..........WHY WE CAN'T GET ENOUGH "HARPER"......

Harper (1966)   Once upon a time, my kiddies, there were screenwriters who wrote entire scripts worth of pithy, to-the-point, quotable dialogue.......

              .......and not just a handful of dumbed-down sarcastic one liners to pepper up the trailer.

               Novelist William Goldman was among them and this script, taken from the Ross Macdonald private eye tale "The Moving Target", was his first produced screenplay.

               Oh how we do adore this movie, which resurrected the 1940's Borgart-ish, wisecracking P.I. and plopped him down into both the uppercrust of lower depths of 1960's Los Angeles.

               What's not to love......

               Paul Newman......punctuates every weaponized line of Goldman dialogue with a gallery of self-amused smirks, grimaces,and eye-rolls.  And the cast of characters surrounding him seem to have no clue as to how much they're amusing him.......

                Robert Wagner and Shelly Winters......have a huge amount of fun exaggerating the standard templates of their most familiar roles.......the too-pretty-for-his-own-good smoothie and the gone-to-seed floozy

                Robert Webber  More perfect casting......using this sturdy, stalwart leading-man-handsome character actor as a cheerful, grinning, vile sadist.

                Strother Martin   Another master character actor working his familiar persona......the simpering, wimpering slimeball who can barely hide his nefarious ulterior motives. One year after this film, he firmly secured his place as a film icon.......once again as a villain tormenting Paul Newman in "Cool Hand Luke"......(his classic delivery of the line, "What we have here is a failure to communicate" eventually makes him hip enough to host 'Saturday Night Live')

                Janet Leigh.......adding to her gallery of brief but indispensable supporting roles as Newman's long suffering, bitterly estranged wife......(perfectly visualized by her murdering of the sunnyside-up eggs she's cooked him for breakfast....)

 

                Newman's Lew Harper cracks the case of a missing millionaire.....but only after the film, like its 1940's noir ancestors,  piles up a fairly sizable body count all over  LaLa land.....or as Newman describes these people in one of the script's best lines......"as bad as there is in L.A.....and that's as bad as there is...."

                 For the crisp dialogue and a top cast at the peak of their game.......this Private Eye beats any CGI hands down. 5 stars (*****), a FIND OF FINDS.