Paul Newman dies

In Memoriam: Paul Newman (1925 – 2008)
Sept. 27, 2008, 12:59 PM EST
An appreciation of a true American icon...
Richard T. Jameson
Special to MSN Movies
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Paul Newman's entrance in "Hud" (1963) is actually an exit, emerging just past dawn from a nondescript house on the side street of a no-name Texas town that barely has one street to begin with. He's the title character, of course, mid-30s, the lone surviving son of a local rancher, and he's been spending the wee hours with a married woman whose husband is about two minutes away from arriving home. Hud's nephew Lon (Brandon de Wilde) has been looking for him, found his big pink Cadillac brazenly parked in front of the house, and called him out.
So here comes Hud, snarling, tearing himself away from business left unfinished offscreen and lunging onto the small front porch. The shot is pretty straightforward but Hud's an insouciant angle: his body canted so that one side of him is advancing before the other, his spine still in the reluctant process of drawing itself erect, his left arm lifted in anticipation of leaning on the porch post between him and the camera. "This had better be good," he growls, into the lean now and letting his torso sag a little -- signaling that he's in charge here, but also allowing for the possibility, indeed the expectation, that maybe he can get out of whatever this is without raising a hand.
The sag and the lean ... nobody deployed these body-English parts of speech more eloquently than Paul Newman. See him in "The Hustler" (1961), his thumbs broken and his forearms in plaster casts, trying to button his own shirt, wordlessly rebuffing Piper Laurie's offer of help, then realizing he has no choice but to accept it.
Or as the American scientist turned amateur spy in "Torn Curtain" (1966), trying for embarrassed bonhomie when the Stasi agent catches him at an East German farmhouse where he has no business to be. Best of all, remember the wonderfully seasoned Newman three decades later as Sully in "Nobody's Fool" (1994), halfway out the construction-office door and tenderly poleaxed by the sight of Melanie Griffith flashing him her breasts. Every man in the audience knew how he felt, and every woman loved him for it.
Paul Newman, honored star of stage and screen for half a century who won audiences' affection and esteem in equal measure, died Friday after a long battle with lung cancer. He was 83.
From early on, he was recognized as both an unimpeachably serious actor and a matinee idol with angelic good looks and twinkling blue eyes. Both aspects would play their part in making him a bankable megastar just when the creative power in Hollywood was shifting from the studios to independent artists. Around that same time --1968, to be precise -- Newman developed a sideline as motion picture director, a role he took some half-dozen times over the next couple of decades. He also increasingly embraced the roles of exemplary citizen, philanthropist, political activist--and, as recently as 2006, championship race-car driver.
Newman gave strong performances and appeared in important movies in each of the decades he worked. Still, it's the two indelible title roles from the early 1960s -- paradigms of what came to be called "antiheroes" -- that throw the longest shadows. In "The Hustler" he played "Fast Eddie" Felson, a cocksure pool player come from the West Coast to New York City to challenge the legendary Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). Eddie has talent to burn but not yet the "character" to avoid snatching defeat from victory. The drama -- which takes on Faustian overtones via an enigmatic gambler (George C. Scott) who diagnoses Eddie as a "born loser"-- ends on a note of bleak triumph, but only after exacting a terrible cost from Eddie and those who loved him.
No matter how brash, rash, or sulky Eddie Felson became, he still compelled sympathy. "Hud" is a portrait of "an unprincipled man," a "cold-blooded bastard" who "doesn't give a damn" about anybody or anything. Up to a point, this was not an unheard-of challenge for an avowedly serious actor, especially one with cred from Yale School of Drama, the Actors Studio, and performing in original Broadway productions of plays by Tennessee Williams and William Inge. But "Hud," and Hud, went beyond. Surely there'd be a turning, some piercing blow or epiphany to show Homer Bannon's unloved second son the way to "character"? No. Nothing reformed Hud. His character was what it was. And he remained true to it even as he casually slammed the ranchhouse door in our collective face. The End.
So Hud compelled scant sympathy. But he could charm the dew off the grass, and certainly the audience. And despite the film's firm denunciations of Hud and his heartlessness and materialism, that was at bottom OK. Because as the tagline on billboards assured us: "Paul Newman IS Hud."
Newman received his second and third best-actor Oscar nominations for those performances (he'd had his first in 1958 for playing Brick in the tortuously euphemized film of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"). He'd collect a fourth for 1967's "Cool Hand Luke," whose title character is sentenced to a chain gang for the sublimely useless anarchist gesture of cutting the heads off a streetful of parking meters, then evolves from jackoff-without-a-cause to Christ-like martyr.
Two years later, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969) brought Newman his greatest popularity. Paired in raffish outlawry with rising star Robert Redford, he displayed a comic touch that mostly deserted him in his officially labeled attempts to do comedy ("Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!," "A New Kind of Love," "The Secret War of Harry Frigg"). So refreshing was his and Redford's rapport, personally and professionally, that filmgoers couldn't help wanting to share their company (even if the movie is flagrantly false, a "hip" artifact that affects to demystify the classic heroic Western while concocting its own brand of soft-focus sentimentality). The actors would re-team as 1930s con artists in "The Sting" (1973). Both their movies became runaway hits and attracted a slew of Oscar nominations ("The Sting" going on to win best picture).
The Newman-Redford pictures were directed by George Roy Hill, which brings us to a curious fact: Newman rarely worked with first-rate directors, and when he did, the results were mostly disappointing. Newman the "Method" actor didn't jibe with Otto Preminger's objective approach in "Exodus" (1960) or Alfred Hitchcock's chilly classicism in "Torn Curtain." John Huston was equally chilly, in his own way, with the absurdist spy caper "The Mackintosh Man" (1973), to the extent that Newman seemed left out of the loop; and for all its charms, the frontier jape "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" (1972) displays director and star's mutual weakness for overextending the joke. Lacking even those charms was Robert Altman's "Buffalo Bill and the Indians" (1976), too locked into complacent historical revisionism to let Newman really tap the shame of being a two-shows-a-day charlatan, and "Quintet" (1979) was impenetrable. (Still, Newman gave those last two directors the benefit of his considerable savvy. When Huston suggested that Newman costar in his long-dreamt-of film of "The Man Who Would Be King," the actor pointed out that by the 1970s audiences would no longer accept a familiar American actor dressing up, faking a cockney accent, and trying to pass as a 19th-century Englishman: "Get Connery and Caine," he advised -- which Huston did, with magnificent results. As for Altman, that director delightedly approved of his friend's read of "The Player": "I know what this picture's about," Newman said. "It's about getting to see the tits of the girl whose tits you don't care about seeing, and not getting to see the tits of the girl whose tits you want to see." He wasn't kidding, and he was piercingly right.)
We've been speaking of a prolific career but neglecting a rich and enviable life, for the last fifty years of which Paul Newman was married to actress Joanne Woodward. (Previously, Newman had been wed for ten years to Jackie Witte, with whom he had three children.) He and Woodward met during his first Broadway run (Inge's "Picnic" in 1953), married in January 1958, and acted together onscreen that year in "The Long, Hot Summer" and "Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!" They went on to co-star in "From the Terrace" (1960), "Paris Blues" (1961), "A New Kind of Love" (1963), "Winning" (1969), "WUSA" (1970), and "The Drowning Pool" (1975). The Newmans chose to make their home far from Hollywood, in Westport, Conn. (where they raised three children of their own). In later years they co-starred as "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge" for Merchant-Ivory (1990), then had featured roles in the TV miniseries "Empire Falls" (2005, Newman's final work onscreen), though they shared no scenes.
Meanwhile, Newman had made his 1968 directorial debut to shepherd Woodward to glory in "Rachel, Rachel," a moving character study of a small-town schoolteacher tentatively deflected from the role of old maid. Adapted by longtime friend Stewart Stern from Margaret Laurence's novel "The Jest of God," and shot within hailing distance of the Newmans' own Connecticut home, this labor of love won Newman the New York Film Critics Circle Award as best director of 1968. Four Academy Award nominations followed, including best picture -- though not best director, which irked his wife and best-actress nominee no end. Newman would direct Woodward again in "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds" (1972 -- costarring their daughter Nell Potts), "The Shadow Box" (a TV-movie, 1980), and "The Glass Menagerie" (a Cannes Film Festival selection in 1987). Newman himself acted in none of these, but starred in as well as directed "Sometimes a Great Notion" (1971) and "Harry & Son" (1984).
Was he a reluctant star? He sometimes seemed stricken with a less virulent strain of what we might call Marlon Brando Disease -- a sense that he should apologize for having blue eyes, a weekend athlete's easy grace, and a likability that communicated itself to millions. There are movies in which a kind of self-immolation occurs, when Newman seems to be doing all he can to make himself unsympathetic--and in the process, to produce something as dour and unwatchable as "Winning" or "WUSA." For a manifestly witty man with no small gift for the well-turned phrase, he appeared to relish playing dumb, or at least not very bright, guys; the phenomenon set in with boxer Rocky Graziano in "Somebody Up There Likes Me" (1956, a role he inherited from the late James Dean) and reached its nadir with "Pocket Money" (1972 ). But "Slap Shot" (1977), about a bottom-of-the-barrel hockey team in a Pennsylvania rust-belt town, is a profane joy, beautifully anchored by a hilarious -- and surprisingly moving -- Newman as the larcenous team captain.
He had two more best-actor nominations in 1981-82 for "Absence of Malice" and "The Verdict" (excellent as an alcoholic Boston lawyer seizing a last chance to save his soul). The seventh time proved the charm: he finally won his Oscar for reprising Eddie Felson twenty-five years later in Martin Scorsese's "The Color of Money" (1986). But the best was yet to come: his warm, funny, beleaguered Sully in "Nobody's Fool" (1994), Robert Benton's lovingly wrought celebration of community and the emotional geography of a small town. Clear as a winter bell, might it be the finest performance of the '90s? An eighth Academy nomination followed, as well as the best-actor awards of the New York Film Critics and the National Society of Film Critics. (At the former group's awards dinner, Newman and Robert Redford were to present each other's prizes -- the former Sundance Kid having directed the critics' best-picture choice, "Quiz Show." Despite eleven years' age advantage, the formally attired Redford looked tired and worn opposite the 70-year-old Newman, sauntering to the dais in what may have been a casual jacket donned for an afternoon working in the yard.)
We haven't even begun to pay tribute to his philanthropies -- especially the Newman's Own line of salad dressings, pasta sauces, et al., founded with writer A.E. Hotchner in 1982, administered by Newman's daughter Susan, and funneling all profits to charity ($220 million by early 2008). His commitment to support liberal political causes dates back at least to Gene McCarthy's 1968 run for the presidency and included helping bankroll The Nation political magazine. And still with the awards: a ninth Oscar nomination, this time in the supporting-actor category, for his gangland paterfamilias in 2002's "Road to Perdition."
Fast Eddie called it: "I just hadda show 'em what the game can be when it's great."
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