I can think of at least two American detective movies
of the 1970s whose producers made a fatal mistake: taking their protagonist out
of the setting that, in their original source, functioned almost as a character
in its own right. One of these films was the 1978 remake of Raymond Chandler’s The
Big Sleep, which transplanted hero Philip Marlowe from the “mean streets”
of Los Angeles and Hollywood all the way to London.
Something not quite as dramatic, but ultimately just
as fatal, occurred with The Drowning Pool, when Hollywood made a second
film featuring Ross Macdonald’s answer to Chandler’s hard-boiled but decent
private eye, Lew Archer (renamed for the big screen Lew Harper). Paul Newman
(pictured) played the character again, as he had done in Harper in 1965.
But, for some reason I don’t know and can’t imagine,
the film’s creative team decided to set the movie in Louisiana rather than in
Southern California, where Archer/Harper functioned as a probing conscience. It
was a terrible choice. This film was nowhere near as good as its predecessor,
and—perhaps thankfully—Newman never played the role again.
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