Harper, 1966

Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer detective novels had an intensity. The mysteries often went back decades, but the book only covered a day or two during which the private eye worked into the night to solve the case.

For the movie, they changed the name from Lew Archer to Lew Harper because Paul Newman had a thing for characters whose names started with an H. And they made him more of a wise-cracking Philip Marlowe type. Paul Newman overacted, mostly trying to be funny. He should have played it straight.

Detective Lew Harper is hired to find Sampson, a rich guy who flew to Los Angeles with his pilot (Robert Wagner) in a private plane, arrived drunk and disappeared. It turns out he's being held for ransom and Harper investigates the seedy characters the missing man likes to hang out with. With Robert Webber as a sophisticated psychopath, Shelley Winters as his aging starlet wife. Strother Martin as a religious nut who runs a mountaintop temple to the sun god. 

Laren Bacall as the missing man's wife, Pamela Tiffin as his daughter. And in a subplot that serves no purpose, Janet Leigh as Lew Harper's estranged wife.  

There was a sequel, The Drowning Pool, made a few years later.

Both are available now on Filmstruck.