Harper

Harper is the story of a private eye in a cheap suit prowling the mean streets of Southern California. The opening scene shows our hero, detective Lew Harper, waking up after a restful night sleeping fully-clothed in his office. He goes to the coffee maker and discovers there are no coffee grounds. No problem. He takes the old grounds out of the wastebasket and makes himself a fresh pot. And that scene, I submit, is a metaphor for the whole movie. Recycled plot without a whole lot of fresh ideas.

The premise of Harper starts out pretty well. He’s hired to look for a missing person, by jaded rich wife Mrs. Sampson played by Lauren Bacall. On his travels looking for Mr. Sampson, Harper runs across every stereotypical whacko that was produced by California in the 1960s. Everything from the idle rich, a mindless teeny-bopper twisting to bubble gum on a 5 transistor radio, a playboy fortune hunter, police with skills rivaling those of Barney Fife, weird religious cultists, burned out drug addict lounge singers, illegal aliens, wife-swappers, etc., etc. All this tied together with a razor thin plot and character development that nearly reaches comic book standards. —Epinions.com