A big-city private detective travels to the Deep South to help out an old girlfriend who is worried that her husband will find out that she is cheating on him. Harper is brought to Louisiana bayou country to help out an old girlfriend who is worried that her husband will find out that she is cheating on him. What is more, he finds himself caught in a power struggle between the matriarch of the family and a greedy oil baron, who wants her property. Poor Harper! Things are not as straight-forward as they initially appeared. Like a lot of the films that I enjoy, The Drowning Pool can be watched on two levels. It's a Bogart'ish, Nior'ish mystery thriller with only a few lines that come off as maybe trying to be too clever. But that is well balanced out by some class acting and story development along with some unusual sleuthing techniques that we see from the Newman character. The characters and morals, the nastiness and the kindness have an authentic stamp of reality about them that compares well with the sentimental sugariness and lack of reality of so many "violent" modern action/thriller films. That in itself is a reason for watching the film; just for the stark contrast with so many creative works today that claim to show "realism".<br/><br/>On another level there is much social commentary going on here. The stifling psychological atmosphere lives up well to the title of this piece as we watch people tear themselves and their relationships apart; driven on, of course, by those who have a vested interest in seeing them fail.<br/><br/>There is a key scene towards the end of the film that pulls together all the strings at work on this second level.<br/><br/>Well worth it if you're prepared to pay attention. It's a lot better than Harper. Newman has fewer tics and the story moves along smoother. Harper had no dynamism because Jack Smight is a terrible action director; the only excitement came from the exchanges between Newman and Arthur Hill in the car. Stuart Rosenberg can be relied on to throw enough kinkiness and ambiguity at us to keep our interest.<br/><br/>Melanie Griffith was used better by Arthur Penn in Night Moves; it's too bad the kitten with a whip persona had to end when she grew up. Andy Robinson was so good as the villain in so many pictures–that sensual face worked well for him, as it does here. You'd expect to see him at Andy Warhol's Factory. Gail Strickland and Murray Hamilton as the rich couple were enjoyable to watch. If Joanne Woodward's part had been better written, she could have given us more than just the nervous belle. An average picture, affording some pleasure for Paul Newman completists. You can tell from the credit sequence—when Paul Newman takes four minutes to execute a simple expository gag—that this Stuart Rosenberg sequel to Harper is likely to be an interminable drag. And the opener is really the high point of an alleged thriller that wastes the talents of Newman, Joanne Woodward, Murray Hamilton, and Tony Franciosa, and telegraphs all its narrative twists with the subtlety of a Chicago building inspector explaining how to avoid a violation.
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