Harper (1966); directed by Jack Smight, screenplay by William Goldman, based on The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald; starring Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris, Robert Wagner, Pamela Tiffin, Arthur Hill, Shelley Winters
Another one that showed on Turner Cable Movies, this introduced by Ben Mankiewicz. I'd seen an edited version way back when it was a fairly recent movie, and I'd forgotten a lot about it.
Maybe the best cast I've ever seen in a movie mystery. Bacall, an invalid, hires Lew Harper (Archer in the books, but Newman had a string of hits with H in the title -- Hud, The Hustler -- and someone superstitious changed the name; Mankiewicz says Newman, but I've heard before it was a producer) to find her missing husband. He's been gone about a day and has a habit of running off with young women before reappearing. She doesn't really care if he's found dead, she just doesn't want him giving away his fortune -- a while before he'd given a mountain top to a self-proclaimed holy man (Strother Martin). Mankiewicz noted a sort of tip of the hat to Bacall's career: One of her first movies was The Big Sleep, in which she played the daughter of an invalid and here an invalid on prickly terms with her husband's daughter (Tiffin, whose appearance alone would mark this as a '60s movie).
The movie pretty much follows the novel, though Harper's wife (Janet Leigh; really good cast) is divorcing him. This is consistent with the Macdonald series, though in his novels it happened previous to this. And it was another H hit for Newman, whose underlying sense of humor keeps cropping up at good times.
Kidnapping, murder, smuggling, a fading actress (Winters), a drug-addict singer (Harris), duplicity and the revelation of family secrets are all unwound in about 2 hours, mostly in sun-drenched Technicolor making it one of those movies that seemed to revel in the prosperity of its time even as it picked at the decadence and hypocrisy of the rich. Really, though, a mystery well worth the time spent watching it.