The Drowning Pool

The private detective Lew Harper travels to Louisiana on a letter from an old acquaintance. She is being blackmailed. The deeper he goes, the more he finds: oil land, family money, the daughter's own games and the cooperation of the local police. The murder comes later. The film is not interested in a solution. It is interested in a detective being useless: Harper finds the truth and saves nothing, and in keeping with the crime cinema of the seventies the film does not let him win. The form is seventies American crime: hot, humid locations, yellow light, slow pace. The scene that gives the film its name takes place in a hydrotherapy room filling with water and is its most tense passage. Stuart Rosenberg directed, from Ross Macdonald's novel. It is the sequel to Harper, with Paul Newman returning to the character after nine years. The woman opposite him is played by his real-life wife, Joanne Woodward. Melanie Griffith is in the cast as the young girl. Who it is for: viewers who like the noir tradition and slow seventies crime films. Who it is not for: anyone looking for the first film. This sequel is looser, its plot is tangled and the characters' motives disappear at times.