Old PIs Never Die, They Just…Paul Newman’s Twilight

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Twilight, starring Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, James Garner, 1998

The movies and bookstores are filled (and have always been filled) with all kinds of private detectives, hardboiled guys like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe in the old days, oh yeah, Nick and Nora Charles too, old days that is, fetching female detectives, young guys and gals starting out in the profession, gumshoe types too who spill coffee over themselves on stake-outs and smoke far too many cigarettes. Yeah, a whole litany of types from languid shamuses to keyhole peepers doing the best they can. Harry Ross (played by Paul Newman) in the film under review, Twilight, is one of those guys, one of those PIs, who has lost a step or two, maybe is not as hungry to see the bad guys put down, maybe not as hungry to see himself put them down like in his youth, but when the deal went down all his shattered detective instincts rose to the top, almost. Not bad for a guy who did not even bother to renew his PI license with the Los Angeles police, not bad at all.        

Like a lot of guys who turn PI Harry started out as a public cop, did his time, and to help while away the retirement hours went PI, did a few cases and that was that. Well not quite “that was that” because his last case went awry on him. He was hired by Jack (played by Gene Hackman) and Catherine Ames (played by Susan Sarandon) to find their errant under-aged daughter who had run off with a sleazebag guy to sunny Mexico. Naturally Harry found them shacked up in a resort (hell of course he found them after all he was a good PI in his time and they did leave a trail of bread crumbs behind them). When Harry tried to take her back boyfriend, sleaze or not, seeing his meal ticket go down the tubes threw some fist, and the daughter, Mel (played by a young Reese Witherspoon) shot poor Harry accidently. Not good PR for a PI, no question.

Somehow that blow-out got Harry room and board at the Ames residence, they, Jack and Catherine, maybe you remember them if you are old enough, had lit up the screen in their younger days but now were on cheap street, or heading there what with the big overhead of running a La La house, keeping tabs on that errant teenage daughter and paying out of pocket medical bills for Jack (he had cancer). Of course in the movies you can’t just have an old PI retire and sit around the pool all day drinking some guy’s gin (or ginger ale in Harry’s case since he was drying out) so Jack asked Harry run an errand for him, an errand involving sending some hush money to a woman up in the Hollywood hills from the look of it when he got there, straight from cheap street.

See Jack in his vindictive fatherly way had that sleazebag boyfriend of Mel’s picked up and jailed for transporting a minor, you know the scoop, and he was looking for a payout to keep quiet about things he knew, or thought he knew about the mysterious fate of Catherine’s ex-husband who got lost in the mist of time some twenty years before. That missing person thing turned out to be very convenient for this pair of movie stars since they could get married once that ex was assumed to have given up the ghost.                 

Before Harry could do that simple errand though he ran into another PI who had been shot and killed, murdered, in that woman’s house by a party, or parties, unknown and that set off a whole string of events that led back to that twenty-year old case since that dead PI (an ex-cop too) strongly suspected he had been a victim of foul play. Of course when a dame (or dames) is involved you know, or you should be presumed to know in any noir-ish film, there will be plenty of treachery and a few more off-hand murders (of that boyfriend and his lady-friend parole officer) before the mystery is solved. You also know old dog Harry (after all this is blue-eyed Paul Newman we are talking about even in his twilight) had drawn a bee-line for Catherine. Bee-line or not Harry was determined to solve this one no matter who he went to bed with, whose house he had been staying at and who actually shot that ex-husband in the head and buried him out in the desert. Here though is where the aging PI not so hungry for justice whatever the cost comes in. After a little shoot-out with a co-conspirator of the Ames,’ an ex-cop Raymond (played by James Garner), everybody walked. I’ll bet old Bridget in The Maltese Falcon wished that she had Harry around then to twirl around her finger instead of Sam Spade who turned her over, turned her over even though every part of him did not want to. Yeah, aging PIs work differently, very differently.