Part of the reason Goldman did so well as a screenwriter is he had a great knack at rejuvenating old Hollywood genres – Westerns (Butch Cassidy), newspaper movies (All the Presidents Men), swashbucklers (The Princess Bride). This was his take on private eye films and it launched his career (he’d written one full script before, an adaptation of ‘Flowers for Agernon’ for Cliff Robertson which wasn't filmed, and do some rewriting on Masquerade, but this was his first proper produced credit).
It’s bright enough, no classic, no Big Sleep, but it has some funny dialogue (Goldman always tries to end a scene with a wry line; may favourite one was “when she’s 100 you’ll only be 124”) and colourful characters to attract a good support cast (which it did). To his credit, Goldman didn’t take too much credit for the success of the film, attributing it to a terrific cast and good timing.
His script is solid – it’s logical, it holds - but not in the class of Butch Cassidy.
As in the movie, the script loses heart when Taggert the secretary dies – you just don’t care about Arthur (Harper's lawyer mate) as much. It’s also too open ended for my liking – I get that Arthur isn’t going to shoot Harper but does Harper saying “oh hell” too mean he’s not going to report Arthur. Structure-wise it isn’t that great – lots of running around and going from encounter to encounter. Which is a requirement of the genre, I guess. Harper gets beat up a lot – about three or four times.
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