Hi-Fi P.I.

In Jazz Noir, David Butler writes, “Film noir provides an alluring range of images, situations and meanings with which a potential audience for jazz can attempt to interpret the music.”

This association is, however, largely retrospective. Classical film noir, the film noir of the 1940s, rarely featured jazz prominently.That aural association between private detectives and wailing saxophones came somewhat later, with the TV ‘tecs of the 50s: Johnny Staccato and Peter Gunn.

The first P.I. movie that I ever saw was Harper (1966), and I’ve loved Ross Macdonald ever since. Go figure. I must have been about nine years old and, while Paul Newman’s cruel blue eyes and short-sleeved shirts stayed with me, I misremembered the music.

For years afterwards, I was certain that the film’s theme tune was Dave Brubeck’s Take Five. It must have been Arthur Hill’s glasses that misled me.

Not Albert Graves...

A few years later, when I got Harper on video, I paid close attention to Johnny Mandel’s brassy, swinging score. I would whistle it on the way to school, hoping that some of Harper’s cool would rub off on the gawky teenage me (it didn’t). Listening now, Mandel’s music is perhaps a little too self-consciously trendy, a little too eager to draw in the sophisticates (ditto the film’s poster). But I still love it – that West Coast bluster is modish but still fun, nicely evoking the movie’s corrupt sun-drenched world. And when I whistle it, it still makes me want to be Paul Newman.

Thinking about the music of Harper led me to look up John Williams’ music for The Long Goodbye (1973). Very different in terms of glamour, I think Newman’s Harper and Elliot Gould’s Marlowe occupy similar roles, both moving through their mysteries one step removed, both bringing their mysteries to arresting and unexpected conclusions. Gould’s shabby chic is certainly a more achievable look – I was once flattered/appalled to be compared to him by a university friend. Trust me, I’ve cleaned my act up since then.

The throaty growl of Jack Sheldon is such a perfect match for the mood of this movie, all wet neon and dry scotch. He provides the vocals here, but he was a noted trumpeter in his day. And it’s no surprise that Sheldon featured as an instrumentalist on two Tom Waits albums: Foreign Affairs and One from the Heart. Those rambling rhymes with which Sheldon closes seem like a blueprint for the young Waits. However, unlike Waits’ drunken troubadour schtick, this isn’t performance or pastiche; it’s the essence of experience.

A notorious hell-raiser, Sheldon fits the stereotype of the hard-living jazzman to a tee. Born in 1931, he was part of the West Coast scene of the 50s, playing with Art Pepper, Stan Kenton, Wardell Gray, Curtis Counce and Gerry Mulligan, amongst others. Two parts musician, one part raconteur, Sheldon also carved out a career on TV, following an eccentric path that took in Dragnet, The Merv Griffin Show, Schoolhouse Rock and Family Guy. He even had his own short-lived show in the late 60s: Run Buddy Run. He was also a notorious hellraiser.

In 2008, his crazy life was the subject of a documentary entitled Trying to Get Good. I think I need to lay my peepers on that baby, oh yes I do… (fadeout on trumpet and double bass)

Peter Graves in The Underground Man

There’s never been a really satisfactory filmed version of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels. In the past, I’ve blogged about Paul Newman’s performances in Harper, The Drowning Pool and Twilight (here and here). Less well known are the TV movie and short-lived series based on the character, produced in the 1970s.

Peter Graves (Jim Phelps in Mission: Impossible) took the part of Archer in a 90-minute adaptation of The Underground Man in 1974. Tom Nolan’s biography of Macdonald records that the author was impressed with Graves’ interpretation.

“In thirty years of writing about Lew Archer, I never thought much about how he looked,” Macdonald told the LA Times. “Except that he was Californian, tanned, athletic. Then one night a few years ago, I saw Peter on Mission: Impossible and thought, ‘That’s Lew Archer; that’s the way he looks.’ It was really quite eerie when I was told Peter was playing Lew, because I had nothing at all to do with the casting.”

However, NBC showed no interest in picking up the pilot. Those who’ve seen the film tend to criticize Douglas Heyes’ screenplay, which fiddled with Archer’s character and compressed the plot. Macdonald later observed, “Paramount spent a lot of money on it, and hired some good actors, but the script seemed rather obscure and hysterical.”

Still, on the evidence of the video below, it looks like an interesting failure. It has an outstanding guest cast: Dame Judith Anderson, Vera Miles, Jack Klugman, Celeste Holm and Sharon Farrell are all actors I like to see onscreen. Though it’s difficult to get much sense of Graves’ performance from this clip, he seems to be playing Archer as a quiet, thoughtful listener. Much closer, then, to the character of the novels than Paul Newman’s cocky Lew Harper.

Most of all, I like the melancholic tone set by Marvin Hamlisch’s score. It’s a haunting, wistful melody that very effectively conjures the sense of yearning so distinctive to Macdonald’s work. Twenty-four years later, Elmer Bernstein would write a similar theme for Robert Benton’s Twilight, an Archer film in all but name.

I’m going to have to get hold of a copy of The Underground Man to satisfy my curiosity. There seem to be a few DVD-Rs knocking about on the net (though sadly, none of Brian Keith’s six-episode series Archer, which I’d also like to see). When I do get a copy, I’ll be sure to review it for Squeezegut Alley. Until then, if any of you remember this film, do get in touch!

Looking for Lew (part two)

Although most of my Fontana Ross Macdonald editions went to the charity shop (as explained here), a few escaped the cull. I kept The Drowning Pool for its photographic cover, a tie-in with the Stuart Rosenberg-directed movie.

The Drowning Pool, Fontana edition, 1975

Harper was made in 1966, its sequel The Drowning Pool a long nine years later in 1975. Perhaps the studio realized that its rights to the character were due to expire?

As you can see, Newman has matured in a way that nicely visualizes the character’s worldliness. This is the face of a guy who’s been around the block so many times he’s running low on petrol. Reading Macdonald, this is the face I always see in my head. Hair slightly greying, skin slightly lined. Newman in the 70s embodies Lew Archer perfectly.

It’s a shame the film is so bad. Harper is flawed but fun, but The Drowning Pool is an endurance test. Uncharacteristically, Newman delivers a broad unlikeable performance. In Harper, his arrogance seemed like youthful hubris; here, he recycles schtick which ill befits an older man.

Inexplicably, the action of the book is moved from California to Louisiana. Perhaps this explains why much of the film looks like it was shot through a lens doused in swamp water.

The back cover

Newman’s co-star is his wife Joanne Woodward. The film invents a past romantic history for their two characters which (I don’t want to reveal a plot twist) plays out very unpleasantly. My guess is that Newman only agreed to play this character again if his wife could be involved – perhaps that explains his lacklustre performance. Happily, Newman would have another crack at the character (obliquely) in the 90s. But that’s for another blog entry…

So, a stinker of a movie. But I still treasure the cover. Because that’s what Lew Archer looks like.

Moving targets.

Paul Newman started me reading Ross Macdonald. In 1966 Newman starred in a movie called Harper, based on Macdonald’s detective novel The Moving Target. Newman played private investigator Lew Harper as hip and cynical, in his words a cross between Humphrey Bogart and John F Kennedy. He made short sleeved shirts under jackets seem the epitome of cool.

Paul Newman as Lew Harper

When I began to read the Macdonald novels I started noticing differences. Here, the PI’s name was Lew Archer. And far from being cool and cynical, Archer was a compassionate thinker. He could swing a fist with the best of them, but a great deal of the books focus on Archer listening. Listening to people’s stories, listening to the way they talk about each other.

For me, this is why Macdonald is the most affecting of the great crime writers, the one whose writing reaches out from its period and continues to resonate.

Go to Dashiell Hammett for ice-pick ruthlessness. Not a spot of ruth in his prose. Go to Raymond Chandler for the romance of the city and the well-turned quip about the well-turned ankle. But go to Macdonald and you find violent emotions and secret cruelties. The family melodrama told by a man tired of hearing lies.

Lew Archer private investigator

I suppose Archer’s defining quality is his involvement with the people who come to him for help. It’s rarely romantic involvement; he often acts like an older brother or a father to his clients, steering them away from the tragedies in their lives, trying to save them. Lew cares.

‘I have a secret passion for mercy,’ Archer admits in The Chill (1963). ‘But justice is what keeps happening to people.’

Macdonald wrote eighteen Archer novels and nine short stories between 1949 and 1976. Over the course of the series Archer ages and matures as Macdonald’s literary style develops. It’s with the seventh novel, The Doomsters (1958) that Macdonald really finds his theme: the broken family, torn apart by the sins of previous generations. The author’s obsessive return to this narrative led Donald Westlake to quip, ‘He must have terrific carbon paper.’

But it’s this familiarity that keeps me coming back. I want to spend time with Lew, learn from his kindnesses and (I admit it) savour his melancholy at a disappointing world.

Ross Macdonald

Over the years, I’d collected all of the Archer novels, mainly in the easy to find but ugly 70s Fontana paperbacks. Recently I threw most of them out. I decided that I wanted to collect Macdonald all over again, this time in older editions that are easier on the eye. I’m looking forward to the hunt!

There’s a fascinating account of Macdonald’s life here, an overview of Lew Archer’s career here, and January Magazine’s marvellous and comprehensive Ross Macdonald tribute here. Enjoy!