Harper and Heart of Darkness: SPOLIERS!
The dialogue in the scene between Lew Harper and Betty Fraley in the car as they're driving toward the dock is lifted almost verbatim from the ending of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. In Conrad’s novel, The Intended (the fiancée of Kurtz) wants to know what her fiancé’s last words were. The narrator in the novel, Charlie Marlow, doesn’t want to reveal Kurtz’s dying words which were, “The horror! The horror!” and so he lies to her and says that they were her name. She says, “I knew it...!” Marlow thinks to himself that he couldn’t have told her because “It would have been too dark—too dark altogether.”
So why is Conrad’s book and this scene in the book alluded to in this movie?
One possibility:
By connecting Betty Fraley with The Intended, the screenwriter William Goldman is suggesting that Allan Taggert is a kind of Kurtz (that is to say, a megalomaniacal madman), and that Lew Harper is a kind of Marlow (man on a quest). Lew Harper is just Lew Archer, the hero of Ross Macdonald’s novel upon which the film is based, renamed. Macdonald’s Californian private detective is based on Raymond Chandler’s Californian private detective Philip Marlowe, and thus this allusion is kind of an insider’s pun: Marlow/Marlowe. That reference and connection goes even deeper when viewers notice that Harper’s plot has many echoes of Raymond Chandler novels, particularly The Big Sleep in 1939 and particularly the Howard Hawks movie version of that novel in 1945. In the novel and the film, Marlowe (played by Humphrey Bogart in the film) visits the mansion of Colonel Sternwood who is in a wheelchair and covered with blankets because he can’t get warm. In Harper, the detective visits the mansion of Elaine Sampson who is also paralyzed and lying in a lounge chair but who is sunning herself, more uncovered than covered. Irony of ironies, Elaine Sampson is played by Lauren Bacall, wife of Humphrey Bogart and also an actress in the film of The Big Sleep. Colonel Sternwood sends Marlowe out to find Rusty Regan who is missing. Elaine Sampson sends Lew Harper to find her husband who is missing. These connections (among many others) are amusing in an insider/literary critic/film buff kind of way. They don’t, however, strike me as particularly meaningful.
There is one allusion, though, which is. That is the final scene between Lew Harper and Albert Graves, two old friends. Graves, out of disgust with Sampson’s lifelong cruelty, has murdered Sampson on the ship, and Harper feels obligated to turn his friend in to the police. As Harper walks away from the car toward the house where he intends to make the call, Graves draws his gun and aims it at Harper. The scene recalls the relationship between Philip Marlowe and Terry Lennox in Raymond Chandler’s 1954 novel The Long Goodbye (also made into a film in 1973 by Robert Altman—the ending of which alludes to and challenges this scene in Harper!) To see the meaning of the ending of Harper, compare Marlowe’s condemnatory speech to Lennox at the end of The Long Goodbye with the final freeze frame of Harper throwing up his hands in a “Aw, hell, I can’t turn in my friend” gesture. Graves lowers his gun with a similar realization. Had Graves shot Harper or had Harper turned in Graves, the film would’ve been “too dark—too dark altogether.” The film ends flippantly. The moral conflict central to Conrad in Heart of Darkness in 1902 and troubling to Chandler in The Big Sleep in 1939 and The Long Goodbye in1954 is just tossed off with a gesture in Harper in 1966.
Other thoughts?
--johnson1740