Harper

See Harper. See it grow. See it complicate itself. And see it imitate everything from The Big Sleep to Charade, with Paul Newman imitating everyone from Bogart to Belmondo.

Color Jack Smight's first direction job promising. Harper is unobtrusively photographed--nothing fancy and nothing less than competent; it is also well paced and acted. The pacing is largely a consequence of the tight cutting, and the acting is traceable to the actors, a thoroughly professional lot who go their alphabetical ups and downs from Lauren Bacall to Shelley Winters.

Either Miss Bacall's part was slowly edited down to its present size, or else she was convinced by the proverbial agent's line about how you're the one they'll notice. Whichever, Lauren Bacall deserved a better fate.

Arthur Hill plays much the same part in Harper that Walter Matthau played in Charade. He's so mild-mannered you can't avoid suspecting him, but Hill in any guise is marvelous.

Janet Leigh appears briefly as Newman's wife, and both the character and the marriage seem wonderfully out of place in Harper. Miss Leigh's performance--for all its brevity--is a minor gem.

With Harper Paul Newman makes it into the high echelons of professional slick. Ten, maybe twenty years hence he may have his own cult, assuming he gets enough good parts. And if he extends ten years of steady improvement, he may even deserve the cult he gets.

No one to my knowledge has ever figured out the plot of The Big Sleep, so by that comparison--an obvious one in many ways--Harper's complexities are kid's stuff. But while nothing is left unclear, the first 90 minutes throw out so many loose threads that the remaining 30 can only provide a solution as complex and confusing as the mystery. Partly this is by intention; Harper ends on an effective gimmick which justifies and explains its earlier intricacies.

Justification, however, is not tantamount to satisfaction. The notion behind Harper precludes the possibility of a well-knit mystery, and it is only at the very end that this becomes evident. Thus anyone who tries to figure the mystery out feels cheated. If you don't try you will be spared what is really the one failing of a fine movie.

While you're at it, stick around for Inside Daisy Clover, the most underrated picture in--well, in weeks: underrated not because it's so good, but because it has received such a phenomenal overkill from the Natalie Wood-haters, a sorry lot who probably haven't seen the picture anyway.