D: Jack Smight. S: William Goldman. Novel: Ross McDonald. P: Elliott Kastner, Jerry Gershwin. Cast: Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Janet Leigh, Arthur Hill, Shelley Winters, Pamela Tiffin, Robert Wagner, Robert Webber. UK dist (DVD): Warner Home Video.

Girl: (lounging provocatively) Don’t you think I’m attractive?

Harper: You’re young, rich and beautiful and my wife is divorcing me. Whaddya think I think?

Jack Smight’s irresistibly classy private-eye caper reinvents the dour gumshoe of film noir legend for the hedonistic Sixties, seven years before Robert Altman’s controversial decision to deposit Philip Marlowe in the world of hippie swingers and Californian head-shrinkers in The Long Goodbye (1973). The Spirit of ’66 is alive and well in Harper: go-go dancing chicks (sometimes in bikinis), flash pad with circular bed, Pop-Art colour schemes and a morally-compromised hero fully capable of being a thorough-going bastard should the mood take him. (And it often does.) Add a snappy William Goldman script (adapted, probably quite liberally, from a Ross McDonald novel) laced with wit and vivid characterisation and all the ingredients are in place for a sparkling draught of escapist fun.

Meet Lew Harper (Paul Newman): private detective, charmer, and all-round loveable wiseass. (Just don’t expect his soon-to-be-ex-wife to concur with the last part.) He’s hired by the wealthy Mrs Sampson (Lauren Bacall) to find her missing husband, a charmless louse given to extravagant acts like giving away mountains to crackpot religious sects. Harper suspects a kidnapping, and it’s not long before a half-million-dollar ransom demand is received; matters are complicated, however, when the bag-man turns up dead, the money gone. Harper remains stubbornly determined to dig up the truth, though nobody really seems to care whether the unfortunate Mr Sampson is freed or not – his family least of all…

Harper’s first scene proper is a nice riff on The Big Sleep, with another proletarian shamus calling on the decadent rich – this time with Bacall recast as sardonic matriarch rather than sexbomb daughter (a role filled amply here by va-va-voom Pamela Tiffin). It’s a part Bacall could play in her sleep, of course, but with a little help from Goldman it becomes a delightful cameo rather than just an ageing stereotype; first encountered tanning under expensive UV lights in an otherwise Stygian drawing room, we quickly peg Mrs Sampson as a member of that overprivileged class for whom ordinary sunlight isn’t good enough – she prefers to buy her own. It’s a nice counterpoint to the title sequence that precedes it. Perhaps inspired by the anti-glamour aesthetic of Sidney J. Furie’s The Ipcress File of the previous year, Harper opens with an unromantic glimpse into the private life of a private eye: the harsh clamour of a cheap alarm clock, a cramped apartment, a TV left on from the night before, a desperate scrounging of used coffee grounds from the bin. It’s hardly a recruitment ad for budding gumshoes, though as the film subsequently goes on to show, the job does have occasional perks; you get to brush off beautiful rich girls, insult the representatives of Law and Order, and wake up bruised and bloody from being cold-cocked by all and sundry. Well, it’s a living.

Supporting ranks are filled with an impressive roster of all-star suspects, red herrings, out-and-out rascals and interested parties, including: the estranged Mrs Harper (Janet Leigh), a straight-laced attorney (and Lew’s best pal) (Arthur Hill), the guileless family pilot (Robert Wagner), a mealy-mouthed New Age druid (Strother Martin), a sadistic crimelord (Robert Webber) and Variant 28 of the Shelley Winters “booze-addled has-been” archetype (which takes self-deprecation to new heights – “She got FAT!” as one of the beautiful people cruelly observes). Newman himself is on fine form here; the flawed, narcissistic, a-hole loser Lew Harper is one of his most enjoyable creations. (Newman probably thought so too, as he went on to reprise the role in the belated sequel The Drowning Pool [1973].)