When I visited my parents last week, my mum gave me this copy of The Moving Target.
Fontana Books, 1966
As you can see, it’s in a pretty sorry state. The cover is badly scuffed and creased, some of the pages are falling out and the fragile spine is held together by Sellotape. Despite all of this, it’s the prize of my collection.
You see, this was the book that got me into Ross Macdonald. This was the book that I found on my parents’ bookshelf all those years ago, and the book that introduced me to the private eye genre. I hadn’t read Chandler or Hammett back then. This is where it started, with this battered old film tie-in.
I was surprised and pleased that it’s survived. My parents have moved house twice since then, and now it’s with me. I was really touched when my mum presented it to me – she must have been following this irregular series of posts!
I think it’s a great cover too, with that pop art target image so much more imaginative than the design for The Drowning Pool tie-in.
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!
Here’s another in my irregular series on Ross Macdonald covers. You can find the first two installments here and here.
Over at Killer Covers, there’s an insightful post by J. Kingston Pierce on pulp paperback art. Do go over and read it here.
Pierce interviews Charles Ardai, Max Allan Collins and David Saunders. Their consensus is that by the 1970s, the trend for cheaper photographic art had forced pulp cover artists toward Hollywood and advertising. This struck a chord with me. Time has passed. Living next to a cinema means I’m depressed daily by the Photoshopped eyesores that now pass for movie posters.
Since reading that post, I’ve been mulling the subject over. Do I find photographic covers inherently less interesting? Is this unwarranted prejudice or a simple matter of aesthetic preference?
With this in mind, let’s look at another Ross Macdonald cover. My first post in this series depicted two painted covers, partly because I thought they were unusual and visually more stimulating. However, my second post showed the movie tie-in for The Drowning Pool, a lazy job of design (publicity still reproduction) but meaningful to me because of the quality of Archer-ness in Paul Newman’s face.
My subject today is a different kettle of fish altogether. Yes, it’s a photographic cover, and it’s an eccentric image.
Fontana edition, 1967
I think my first response to this cover was amusement. The forced perspective makes the corpse’s feet seem comically enlarged. Ditto the baldness of that protruding dagger. However, the more I look at it, this image unsettles me. Its gallows humour, perhaps consciously, recalls this still from Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry.
The Trouble with Harry, 1955, Alfred Hitchcock
In each case, the corpse is dehumanized, a figure of fun. And perhaps this is why the cover seems so inappropriate for this novel. As Fred Zackel recalls here, Ross Macdonald was of the opinion that, “The detective isn’t your main character, and neither is your villain. The main character is the corpse. The detective’s job is to seek justice for the corpse. It’s the corpse’s story, first and foremost.”
Despite its incompatibility with the book’s contents, I’m happy to have kept this copy in my collection. That curious blend of macabre humour and genuine creepiness is very striking!
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.
