I'm a little surprised that
Harper (1966) is the one that got closest to cracking the Top 100. I like it fine and it is a good example of the private dick genre transitioning from the hardboiled '40 and '50s into the counterculture of the 1960s before the renaissance of the Watergate 1970s, but its tone is a more than a bit hit and miss and, to my taste, doesn't hold up especially well past the star power of Newman. It does have an amazing cast: Lauren Bacall, Janet Leigh, Shelley Winters, Robert Wagner, Robert Webber, Julie Harris, Pamela Tiffin, Harold Gould, Strother Martin...but despite a script by William Goldman adapting the first Ross Macdonald Lew Archer novel, the mix of humor and jeopardy doesn't quite come together. A lot of good scenes, not enough tying them together. The somewhat superstitious Newman changing the character's name from Archer to Harper because he had enjoyed success with other H pictures in
The Hustler and
Hud may have thrown a voodoo curse over it?
I think the comedic tone they were going for is similar to what
"The Rockford Files" turned out to be on television in the 1970s. Jim Garner had a poke at that himself in the 1960s with
Marlowe (1969), a very swinging '60s adaptation of Chandler's
The Little Sister, probably best known today for a couple scenes where Bruce Lee plays one of the henchmen Philip Marlowe must dispatch. It has some of the exact same tone problems that
Harper has.
Harper was just successful enough that it did spawn a belated sequel nine years later,
The Drowning Pool (1975). I happen to like that one a lot more than the original Lew Harper mystery. Another more than solid cast including Joanne Woodward, Melanie Griffith, Anthony Franciosa, Murray Hamilton, Gail Strickland, Andrew Robinson, Paul Koslo, and Richard Jaeckel. It is certainly not up to the level of the top tier of 1970s detective flicks -
Chinatown, The Long Goodbye, Night Moves - but it sits comfortably on the second tier with
The Big Fix and
The Late Show. And there is yet another movie that is not an official
Harper sequel but is a spiritual successor starring Newman called
Twilight (1998) - sorry, Kids, no shiny vampires. That cast is a big wow with Gene Hackman, Susan Sarandon, James Garner, Reese Witherspoon, Stockard Channing, Giancarlo Esposito, Liev Schreiber, John Spencer, and M. Emmet Walsh! Newman's mostly retired private detective Harry Ross could just as easily have been an aged Lew Harper/Archer shifting through lies and corruption one last time. I like
Twilight more than
Harper, too.
But a couple of you MoFos must have had
Harper pretty high for it to finish at #101.