The Drowning Pool

Among the movies I recorded back when Paul Newman was TCM's Star of the Month, there's The Drowning Pool.

Newman plays private detective Lew Harper, reprising a role he'd done about a decade earlier. This time, the action is moved from California to Louisiana, with the premise being that one of Harper's old flames out in California is Iris Deveraux (Joanne Woodward), who married into a wealthy family in Louisiana, and who needs a private investigator who's not known in these parts.

Except that his arrival is known, because somebody sends along a piece of jailbait to get in Harper's motel room and try to get him arrested. The police, in the form of Broussard (Tony Franciosa) and his nasty deputy Franks (Richard Jaeckel), do indeed bring Harper in, but let him go in part because he's more useful to them on the outside.

When Harper visits Iris to find out why she wanted him, he discovers there's a lot more than meets the eye. Ostensibly, the family's former chauffeur, Reavis, is sending blackmail letters about Iris having cheated on her husband. But the family's land sits on a whole bunch of oil, which local oil magnate Kilbourne (Murray Hamilton) wants. And when Harper sees Iris' teeange daughter Schuyler, he immediately recognizes her as the jailbait from his motel!

Kilbourne wants Harper to get the Deveraux matriarch to agree to sell the rights to drill oil on that land, which Harper doesn't have any particular desire to do. It's not too long before said matriarch winds up murdered, and the obvious suspect is Reavis.

Oh, there's blackmail going on, but it's much bigger than supposed letters about Iris and any paramour she may or may not have. Harper is getting deeper into the case, to the point that there are lots of people willing to kill him, ultimately leading to the movie's climax, the scene that gives rise to the movie's title when Harper and Kilbourne's wife are locked in the hydrotherapy room of an abandoned mental institution and Harper decides the way to escape is to flood the room and break out a skylight.

There's a lot going on in The Drowning Pool that you're going to have to concentrate to put all the pieces together. And even then, I don't think the pieces really do come together. There are a lot of scenes that are all OK as individual scenes, but the resolution is muddled and fairly sudden. Location shooting was nice, and Newman is reasonably appealing as the cynical and dry-witted detective.

Some people will probably like The Drowning Pool a lot more than I did. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so you can watch it any time you like.