In the newspaper today

In a piece honoring the recently deceased Janet Leigh, L.A. Times critic Carina Chocano says in today’s edition (10.5) that Leigh’s best films — Touch of Evil, Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate — amounted to “a dark trilogy, [in which she played] an icy, un-settling and alienated woman, a cynically tragic ur-feminist.” I’d leave room for a fourth character in this vein: the embittered ex-wife of Paul Newman’s down-at-the-heels shamus in Jack Smight’s Harper (1966), which boasted a finely-tuned script by William Goldman. The angry and wounded Susan Harper was surely a more substantial part than Leigh’s bizarre Candidate character, Eugenie Rose, who did little more than dab Frank Sinatra’s bruised face with a handkerchief and tell him how wonderful and adorable he was.

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