Harper

Harper (1966) — watch online the American neo-noir directed by Jack Smight, with Paul Newman as Lew Harper, a Los Angeles private eye scraped together from equal parts wit and world-weariness. The screenplay came from William Goldman, adapting Ross Macdonald's 1949 novel The Moving Target.

A wealthy, icy woman — Lauren Bacall in a role that practically invents a type — hires Harper to find her missing husband. The money is the only warmth in the house. The trail runs through a washed-up film actress (Shelley Winters), a nightclub singer (Julie Harris), a charismatic cult leader and a human-smuggling operation. Robert Wagner plays the young pilot, Janet Leigh the attorney's wife who knows one thing too many. Harper circles all of them with loose, amused precision, cracking jokes and then arriving at the answer before anyone realizes he was looking.

Newman makes Harper a man too honest to ignore what he finds and too tired to be surprised by it. The film lands somewhere between the hard-boiled tradition and something more relaxed — Goldman's dialogue carries as much weight as the plot. Stream Harper (1966) online on iFILM.