Paul Newman

On September 26, 2008, Paul Newman died at the age of 83 at home with his wife of 50 years, Joanne Woodward. Blessed with looks and acting ability, he made his name on stage and then in Hollywood. Many of his movies were based on novels and plays so a book review blog should take a look at them.

As the 30-year-old teenager Brick Pollitt, Newman puts in a restrained but memorable performance in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958, Tennessee Williams). The scene in which Newman and Burl Ives go at it about mendacity stands as one of my favorite scenes in a movie. Restraint on Newman’s part was a good strategy in contrast to the larger than life performances by the imposing Ives and the sometimes too earnest Elizabeth Taylor. While we’re on the topic of the great cast, Jack Carson and Madeleine Sherwood did fine jobs as did Judith Anderson as Big Mama. Yeah, I know the movie version punks out on the examination of the relationship between Brick and his dead friend Skipper.

The best seller by John O’Hara From the Terrace was a portrait of a medium-sized town like Scranton, PA in the first part of the 20th century. The movie with Newman and Joanne Woodward follows the theme of the emptiness at the core of an American success, but like the movie version of Sometimes a GreatNotion, it’s a noble failure, not capturing the richness of the novel. I read the novel when I was overseas in the late 1980s; I had bought all of O’Hara’s novels in used bookstores before we left the US.

Newman plays Fast Eddie in 1961 movie version of Walter Tevis’ The Hustler. A must-see movie from a must-read novel for those into existential works concerning an ordinary man’s struggle with himself in world that could care less if he lives or dies. I read this as a teenager  - about the same time as I read Hud and the baddest sports novel ever Fat City by Leonard Gardner.

Hud (1963) was a good movie, though admittedly it wussed out on the black-white conflicts in the novel. Based on Larry McMurtry’s debut novel Horseman Pass By, the movie touches on the theme of the Passing of the West (a genre on its own) in that we have moved from hard-working cowboys to the callous thugs, as personified in Newman’s character Hud.

In the revisionist western mold of Little Big Man by Thomas Berger, Newman plays the title role in the version of Elmore Leonard’s fine short novel Hombre. Though it is hard to get one’s head around the idea of the blue-eyed Newman playing an Indian, he does a good job. He doesn’t talk but lets his actions speak for him.

Newman directed Never Give a Inch (1971) which is based on the incredible novel by Ken Kesey Sometimes a Great Notion. It’s about a family in the logging business that keeps cutting despite the union’s strike against big companies. An okay movie from The Great American Novel about big themes: individualism vs. collectivism, jock vs. hippie, men vs. women, old vs. young.

WUSA (1970). Newman served as co-producer of this adaptation of Robert Stone’s kick-ass but now neglected novel A Hall of Mirrors, which I read in the early Seventies in college when I should have been studying. Rheinhardt is a nihilistic crap that has thrown away every chance that came his way. A seedy Laurence Harvey (is that redundant?) gets him job as on-air gabber for a radio station that broadcasts hatred and stupidity to validate the racism of its chump listenership. Yeh, still relevant today.

I never read the novels for these movies and don’t plan to but they are worth a mention to balance out the blather about Butch, just a buddy movie.

Cool Hand Luke (1967) is the powerful story of the conflict of the two great forces in our scheming world: Mindless Authority versus Mindless Resistance. Newman was nominated for Best Actor in this one but lost to Steiger’s performance in In the Heat of the Night.

Slap Shot (1977) is the best sports movie ever made, after Raging Bull. Newman plays a coach on two missions: win back his wife, who has discovered lesbianism, and turn his hapless semi-pro hockey team into a winner. Hilarious, with salty enough language to shock us even today: “They brought their f*****g TOYS with 'em!”

Being a guy and all, I remember the incandescent Lolita Davidovich in the title role of Blaze (1989). Nobody who’s seen it would forget the scenes when the dude yells out “Good Gawd Amighy” or when the title character eats watermelon. But Newman excellently plays Gov. of Louisiana Earl K. Long as a flamboyant scamp. Great to look at for its 1950s Big Easy mise-en-scene too. A movie for adults, for romantics, because the stripper and the gov really seem crazy about each other.