The Drowning Pool (Coleytown, First Artists, Turman-Foster Company, Warner Bros., 1975)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, April 26) I was disappointed in the schedule for Turner Classic Movies because they’d announced online a double bill of Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) and The Left-Handed Gun (1958), the films that had been announced for James Dean and then recast with Paul Newman after Dean’s death. Alas, there was a change in plans and, though they did in fact show a double-bill of Paul Newman vehicles, instead of the two in which he’d replaced Dean they showed the two movies in which Newman played Lew Harper. The character was originally developed by Canadian noir novelist Ross Macdonald (true name: Kenneth Millar) for a 1949 novel called The Moving Target, which was filmed by Warner Bros. in 1966 in a movie that changed the title to Harper and the name of the central character from “Lew Archer” to “Lew Harper.” I turned on TCM hoping to see The Left-Handed Gun – a film that has somehow eluded me so far even though it cast Newman as Billy the Kid and was the first feature film directed by Arthur Penn – and instead watched Newman’s other “Harper” movie, The Drowning Pool (1975). This one cast Newman opposite his real-life wife, Joanne Woodward, and I remembered having seen it in a downtown San Francisco grindhouse towards the end of its initial theatrical run. I hadn’t seen it since, though, and about the only thing I remembered about it was the titular “drowning pool” in which Lew Harper (Paul Newman) and Mavis Kilbourne (Gail Strickland) are locked in the hydrotherapy room of an abandoned mental hospital and try to escape by flooding the room with water in hopes they’ll float to the top and be able to break through the room’s skylight.

The overall plot, which screenwriters Tracy Keenan Wynn, Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and Walter Hill and director Stuart Rosenberg (who’d previously helmed one of Newman’s weaker movies, Cool Hand Luke, and an earlier Newman-Woodward vehicle, WUSA) moved from Macdonald’s Los Angeles to New Orleans, casts Woodward as Iris Devereaux, a former flame of Lew Harper’s who after their breakup moved back to New Orleans and married James Devereaux (Richard Derr). Apparently she only married him for his money and social position. The two had a daughter named Schuyler (played by the young Melanie Griffith, who exudes precocious sexuality the way the equally young Carrie Fisher did a year later in Warren Beatty’s Shampoo). Harper flies to New Orleans to find out who’s sending anonymous letters to James accusing Iris of having extra-relational activity – which seems likely because, though James and Iris have conceived a daughter, the hint is that James is actually Gay. We think that because James is an unsuccessful playwright who’s living off the income from the old Devereaux plantation run by his formidable mother Olivia (the British actress Coral Browne, who was also Mrs. Vincent Price), and in one scene he’s visited by – and quickly disappears with – a male friend who’s identified as someone who “helps him with his writing.” The film opens with Harper flying into the New Orleans International Airport (today it’s called the Louis Armstrong International Airport even though Armstrong avoided New Orleans as much as possible in the last three decades of his life because he was appalled at its racism) and renting a room at a motel, where Schuyler Devereaux shows up, knows his name, and offers to have sex with him. Then he’s busted by Lt. Franks of the New Orleans Police Department (Richard Jaeckel) and changed with having sex with a minor – an offer Harper either virtuously or sensibly refused – though the New Orleans police chief, Broussard (Anthony Franciosa), shows up and plays good cop to Franks’s bad cop. Broussard lets Harper off with a warning, and then we meet Iris, who turns out to be the precocious Schuyler’s mother.

Harper traces the letter to Pat Reavis (Andrew Robinson, a quite good actor who was the serial killer in Dirty Harry and who played Liberace in one of the two dueling movies about him in the late 1980’s), who’d been the Devereaux family chauffeur until he was fired about a week and a half before Harper arrived in town. Ultimately Harper learns that a crooked, crazy oil tycoon named J. Hugh Kilbourne (a marvelous crazy-villain performance by Murray Hamilton) is after the Devereaux plantation because there’s an enormous oil deposit right under it, only Olivia Devereaux refuses to sell at any price. So he’s suspect number one when Olivia Devereaux is found murdered, and later Pat Reavis is killed too. It turns out that Kilbourne hired Reavis to kill Olivia and then hired the dirty cop Franks to kill Reavis. It also turns out that the old sanitarium where Harper and Mavis Kilbourne, J. Hugh’s unhappy trophy wife, are locked in the hydrotherapy room and threatened with drowning was one to which J. Hugh Kilbourne’s parents had taken him in his childhood because even before he grew up, they could tell he was crazy. Out of revenge, when Kilbourne became a man and made his fortune in the oil business, he bought that old sanitarium and closed it, thereby putting his former tormentors out of work. Harper and Mavis try to break out by smashing the window of the sunroof (my husband Charles wondered why they didn’t try to break the reinforced-glass side windows) but they’re unable to, and they’re finally rescued in a weird scene that’s a visual cop from the end of the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. It seems that Kilbourne forgot a badly needed medication he left in the room when he threatened to kill both Harper and his wife the morning afterwards, and when he and his assistant open the door, an enormous amount of water as well as Harper and Mavis come spilling out. Then Iris gets killed, and we learn that the real culprit is [spoiler alert!] her daughter Schuyler, who had an incestuous crush on her father and thereby decided to kill the two women in his life, his mother Olivia and his wife Iris. Harper then returns to L.A.

The Drowning Pool is an O.K. example of the revisionist neo-noirs of the 1970’s, which suffered not only from color instead of the cool black-and-white of the original noirs but from overly bouncy jazz-inflected music by Michael Small instead of the dark orchestral scores used for these types of movies in the 1940’s. There’s a cool professionalism about this film that’s appealing, but The Drowning Pool isn’t a great thriller the way it had every right to be (Ross Macdonald published the novel in 1950 right after The Moving Target, the source for Newman’s 1966 debut as Harper nè Archer, and just before the book he considered his best, The Way Some People Die, which also had a teenage girl as the murderess). It’s an O.K. movie that does what it sets out to do, and the big surprise is that Iris Devereaux doesn’t survive until the end of the movie and pair up with Harper at the end the way we’re expecting them to, if only because the actors playing them were married for real!