THE MASTERPIECE
Gene Hackman, bruised and battered as private investigator Harry Moseby.
IN THE PRIZE (1963), a big-budget, near-miss bit of cod-Hitchcock based on a thick paperback, Paul Newman plays a Nobel laureate for literature who finally breaks down and admits what he’s been doing since his last Great American novel was published — writing cheap mystery paperbacks, which he dismisses as “private eyewash”.
Already, the great private eye movies — The Maltese Falcon (1941), with Humphrey Bogart as Dashiell Hammett’s shamus Sam Spade, The Big Sleep (1946), with Bogart as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe — were backlist items. Yet the fantasy of the idealised hero persisted.
Spade, Marlowe and many others — Shaft in the movies and Rockford on TV — were as much knight errants as sleuths. These men were tough but not mean, loyal to clients who didn’t deserve it, saved the girls and caught the killers (though often the girl was the killer). In the end, the eye kept his integrity in a rotten world. That seemed absurd in the shadows of Vietnam and Watergate, but Hollywood couldn’t let the detective go in the 1970s, even as hip writers and directors competed to bury Sam Spade.