General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Drowning Pool

The Drowning Pool is a 1975 American crime drama directed by Stuart Rosenberg, in which Paul Newman returns as private investigator Lew Harper, hired by a New Orleans oil heiress (Joanne Woodward) to unravel a blackmail scheme.¹ It is a sequel to Harper (1966), the earlier adaptation of Ross Macdonald's detective novels, and adapts Macdonald's 1950 novel of the same name.²

Key fact	Detail
Release	Premiered in New Orleans on 18 June 1975; PG rating; 108 minutes²
Director / writers	Stuart Rosenberg; screenplay by Tracy Keenan Wynn, Lorenzo Semple Jr., and Walter Hill, based on Ross Macdonald's 1950 novel²
Lead cast	Paul Newman (Harper), Joanne Woodward (Iris), Anthony Franciosa (Broussard), Murray Hamilton (Kilbourne), Gail Strickland (Mavis), Melanie Griffith (Schuyler)¹
Source change	The novel is set in Southern California; the film moves the story to New Orleans³
Production	First Artists Production Company, a venture Newman formed with Steve McQueen and Barbra Streisand; location shooting in Louisiana³^•²
Critical reception	53% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (17 reviews); Metacritic metascore 48; IMDb 6.5/10¹^•⁴^•⁵
Signature scene	Harper and Kilbourne's wife trapped in a flooded hydrotherapy room of an abandoned sanatorium, filmed in the large water tank at Warner Bros. in Burbank³^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot and source

Los Angeles private eye Lew Harper is summoned to Louisiana by Iris, a former lover who married into a prominent New Orleans family, and becomes entangled in blackmail, extortion, crooked businessmen, and murder.³ After the murder of Iris's mother-in-law, someone implicates Iris and attempts to blackmail her, and Harper works through a crowded suspect list that includes her teenage daughter Schuyler, a former chauffeur, a businessman and his wife, and Iris herself.⁷ The investigation eventually pits the family matriarch against a greedy oil baron, Kilbourne, who wants their property.⁸

The film departs from its source in plot and location: Macdonald's novel is set in Southern California, while the movie is set in New Orleans.²^•³ In Macdonald's novels the detective is named Lew Archer; the film versions renamed him Lew Harper because the author had reserved rights to the Archer name, and Newman reportedly considered the letter "H" a good luck charm after The Hustler (1961) and Hud (1963).²^•³ An early draft of the screenplay named the character Lew Ryan, and the production was initially titled Ryan's the Name according to a September 1974 Hollywood Reporter item, suggesting it did not begin as a direct sequel to Harper.²^•⁹

Production

Newman reprised the character nine years after Harper, reuniting with director Stuart Rosenberg for the fourth time; Rosenberg had first worked with him on Cool Hand Luke (1967).⁶^•³ The film was produced by First Artists Production Company, a business venture Newman formed with Steve McQueen and Barbra Streisand to secure film properties, and by most reports the shoot was a happy working experience, though Newman nearly suffered major injuries racing a Porsche at a New Orleans racetrack off the set.³

A four-week location schedule in Louisiana began in October 1974; Iris's estate was filmed at Oaklawn Manor, a plantation built in the early 1800s near Franklin, Louisiana, with additional locations in Lafayette, Lake Charles, Franklin, Henderson Swamp, and New Orleans. Production wrapped in late December 1974 after nearly ten weeks, six of them on location.² The title set piece was filmed in the big water tank at Warner Bros. in Burbank and integrated into footage shot almost entirely on location.⁶ Gordon Willis served as cinematographer, with music by Michael Small and editing by John C. Howard.³

Reception

Critics were largely unenthusiastic. Roger Ebert, then of the Chicago Sun-Times, called it "a confusing and not very exciting private eye caper" and argued that the first-class production values were fatal: so much attention went to making the film look good visually that the story got mislaid.¹⁰ Variety called it "stylish, improbable, entertaining, superficial, well cast, and totally synthetic," and the New York Times found it a lackluster workout that generated action rather than character.⁴ On Metacritic the film holds a metascore of 48, with 7 of 8 collected reviews mixed and one positive.⁴ Murray Hamilton's performance as the oil-developer villain drew praise even from unsympathetic reviewers; Molly Haskell in the Village Voice called him the exception to a listless cast.⁴

Retrospective assessments have been somewhat warmer. DVD Talk's Stuart Galbraith IV argued that seen back to back with Harper, the sequel is less self-conscious, more assured and subtle, including Newman's own performance, though he acknowledged it was neither as successful nor as influential as its predecessor.⁶ Reviewers also note the film's place in the neo-noir cycle: one survey of Macdonald adaptations describes it as carrying "the last vestiges of the classic gumshoe," and Newman never played the character again.¹¹^•¹²

Legacy

The film marked one of Melanie Griffith's early screen appearances, in the role of Schuyler.¹ Its hydrotherapy-room sequence, in which Harper and Mavis Kilbourne try to escape a flooding room by floating to a skylight, gives the film its title and remains its most cited set piece.³^•¹⁰ After the film's indifferent response, Newman moved on to Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), and the Lew Harper character did not return to the screen.³^•¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1970s films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?