‘The Drowning Pool,’ another pitch-black ‘70s noir, turns 50

Paul Newman starred in Stuart Rosenberg’s 1970s film about a private eye faced with shocking darkness.

Movies about private detectives stumbling into complex plots that include the worst depths worse than they possibly imagined weren’t exactly a new thing in the 1970s. But the genre certainly hit a crescendo around that period, especially with Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Arthur Penn’s Night Moves, and Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. It’s the Altman film, released 25 years earlier almost to the day, that the Coens’ The Big Lebowski owes the most to, although it has all of their DNA.

Also on that list is Stuart Rosenberg’s The Drowning Pool, which landed in theaters in July of 1975, 50 years ago this month.

The Drowning Pool starred Paul Newman as Lew Harper, and the film functioned as a pseudo-sequel to Newman’s 1966 film Harper, with both films adapted from the work of novelist Ross Macdonald.

The film is often combined in the public mind with Night Moves, a film released almost exactly one month earlier; Jaws was released in between. Not only are the plots of The Drowning Pool and Night Moves similar, but both films co-starred a teenage Melanie Griffith as a too-young temptress who makes an unsuccessful pass at the protagonist.

Also, neither film was really seen at the time as among the best of the ‘70s New Hollywood era. Night Moves’ reputation has been largely rehabilitated, with a major Criterion release earlier this year, as well as a surprisingly large place in the remembrances of Gene Hackman, upon his passing in February. The Drowning Pool hasn’t quite received the same level of reconsideration, although it did get a Scout Tafoya “The Unloved” video essay for RogerEbert.com back in 2023.

The biggest difference between the two? Hackman was believable, as always, as a sad sack. Paul Newman, though, was Paul Newman- always a much cooler guy.

Rosenberg had earlier directed Newman in Cool Hand Luke, and The Drowning Pool came in about the exact middle of his filmography, which also included Brubaker and The Pope of Greenwich Village.

The plot of The Drowning Pool had Newman’s Lew Harper heading to Louisiana to do a job on behalf of his sometime lover Iris (played by Newman’s longtime wife Joanne Woodward.) The complex plot pulls in crooked oil men, who want a hold of Iris’ land, as well as her mother-in-law, corrupt cops, and various other figures.