"Drink?" "Not before lunch." "I thought you were a detective." "New type." The new detective (we meet him in his undershirt, re-using old coffee grounds) plays out the old game against an updated backdrop: L.A. sleaze, 1960s style, complete with go-go bars and redecorated bungalows. Hired by aging tigress Lauren Bacall to find a "missing thing"-her husband-Newman's smirking Harper (based on Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer), acutely aware of impending middle age, looks like he's got a perpetual headache brought on by the company he's forced to keep (or maybe he needs that drink): mountaintop gurus, millionaire astrology nuts and assorted murderers. "The bottom's full of nice people," he tells a cloyingly naive buddy (Arthur Hill), "only cream and bastards rise." Harper himself is somewhere between the sludge and the cream, a cynical trickster who's not in it for the laughs. William Goldman's screenplay recalls the old Hawks/Huston mode in its cynical banter; Newman, a born smoothie tryin' to be a loser, does a pretty good job of it.