So Far, So...

That Decorative Little Shit

Hi Hello & Welcome to this week’s look at the movies and movie people that matter to me and a belated Happy New Year to you all.

Back to normal business we go though with this week’s piece on someone who was way more complicated and conflicted than his phenomenal good looks and cool demeanour would’ve had you believe. Who was as troubled as he was humane and philanthropic, and dichotomous as he was successful and lauded, who was as dangerously self-loathing as he was kind and unselfish. This week then I’m going to take an insanely quick spin through the life and three movies of an actor, film director, producer, race car driver and team owner, philanthropist, entrepreneur, political activist and all round cultural icon -

PAUL NEWMAN

Paul Leonard Newman was born on January 26th, 1925, in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. His Father was Jewish and ran a sporting goods store, his Mother a Christian Scientist - both first generation Hungarian immigrants. (Newman followed no formalised religion as an adult although he did go on to describe himself as Jewish later in life purely on the basis he found it “more of a challenge”)

He showed some interest in Theatre in High School (though nothing crazy) before attending Ohio University and then joining the United States Navy where he served in the Pacific theater during WW2 as a radio man, a rear gunner and member of various torpedo squadrons.

After the war he returned to college to complete his Bachelor of Arts in Drama and Economics in Ohio before then joining various summer stock companies touring places such as Wisconsin and Illinois and ending up at the Yale School Of Drama (for a year) before eventually moving to New York and enrolling himself at The Actors Studio in the early 50’s under the tutelage of the legendary Lee Strasberg.

Newman was already married by the time he touched down in New York, but this was soon to change when whilst making his Broadway debut in William Inge’s 1953 play ‘Picnic’ he fell in love with a fellow cast member by the name of Joanne Woodward. Five years later Newman left his wife and three children, married Woodward and remained married to her right up until his death 50 years later.

In the early 1950s Newman seemed to most the unthreatening version of Hollywood’s angry young men – less eruptive and disruptive than Brando, less twitchy than Montgomery Clift, less surly and sullen than James Dean. And so despite losing out on a few jobs to Dean (especially), Newman bagged his first Hollywood film in 1954 (The Silver Chalice). It was a forgettable flop, but he’d made it to the bottom of the old greasy pole. His second feature had him absolutely slam his flag into the ground however, with an acclaimed performance in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). Dean had originally been slated to pay the part of Rocky Graziano but died on Highway 41 in September ‘55, and so Newman took full advantage of Dean’s tragic demise and as a result of Newman’s fiery promise in the piece Hollywood absolutely sat up and took note of our blue-eyed boy.

Newman was not fucking about, for in ‘58 he won Best Actor at Cannes for The Long, Hot Summer (more than holding his own against that genius but tricky son of a bitch Orson Welles) and in the same year he co-starred with Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood’s version of Tennessee Williams’ Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and bagged himself his first Oscar nomination. In 1960 he garnered further accolades for his performance in Otto Preminger’s Exodus, meaning Newman entered the 60’s flying high, flying Hollywood high.

Then in 1961 came the first of the three films I’m highlighting this week, and one of my favourite of his performances - THE HUSTLER.

Newman plays "Fast Eddie" Felson and the plot is pretty simple - a crack pool player makes his living hustling unsuspecting locals but has an ultimate ambition to beat the uncrowned champion (Jackie Gleason) who he eventually takes on (getting his ass well and truly whipped) but in the aftermath of humiliation then gets brutally schooled by a shadowy entrepreneur (George C. Scott) who educates him well enough that he finally beats Gleason’s champion, only to discover the prize is not worth the race. That’s it in a nutshell, the rest is all incident(s). Piper Laurie adds the ‘love interest’ but the movie is really about Newman’s brilliantly modulated performance, Scott and Gleason. Robert Rossen helms superbly and Eugen Schüfftan beautifully photographs some fantastic pool hall locations.

Newman was nominated for another Best Actor Oscar and the film itself was nom’d for a total of eight Oscars, winning two. But it’s one of this week’s three in the spotlight because for me it’s Newman’s first really mature, technically impressive, believably intense and understatedly powerful performance. In short, he absolutely kills it. Scott and Gleason are absolutely immense too though, and so for these three alone if you haven’t yet or it’s been a long time, hunt it down, grab some candy, settle back and get on in there.

Paris Blues came out the same year as THE HUSTLER and gave Newman another version of the same part; a young man with a gift whose principal virtue is his devotion to that gift (and to whom love equals chains). Sweet Bird Of Youth was more Tennessee Williams and got him a Golden Globe, Hud (1963) not only had him nominated for another Best Actor Oscar (the late great Sidney Poitier making history that year with his win for ‘Lilies Of The Field’) but was the beginning of Newman as a Producer with Hud being the first of a three-picture deal with Paramount his newly formed production company (Salem) had struck.

1966 found our boy working with the great Alfred Hitchcock but on the poorly received Torn Curtain, however, in 1967 came Cool Hand Luke - an absolute classic which pained me to leave out of my spotlit three this week but despite my doing so is a solid solid favourite of mine and absolutely one of my favourite Newman performances and films. The Academicians thought well of it too as he was nominated for his fourth Oscar in ten years for his portrayal of Lucas "Luke" Jackson.

Coming up for Newman however was a movie that would go down in the annals of cinephelia as arguably one of the most beloved films in history and most definitely one of the standouts in the decade that was the 60’s -

BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)

Initially the critics (what the fuck do they know) were less than tepid in their response to the movie. TIME magazine, Ebert, and many others were seriously less than impressed. But audiences loved it and word of mouth was strong, and it ended up being the top grossing movie stateside in ‘69. Hell it was the eighth most popular film in France that year, which took some doing then!

The script took some time to get any studio traction, and it’s baby-daddy William Goldman kept being told to change the ending that had Butch & Sundance skedaddle to South America (despite this being historically accurate) with - according to Goldman - one studio head proclaiming about this historical fact and proposed ending to the movie - “I don't give a shit. All I know is John Wayne don't run away.”

In the end though after Jack Lemmon had backed out (of playing Sundance) and McQueen and Newman had agreed to ride together in the movie as the titular characters but then fallen out over some bullshit of some daft sort or other (bullshit would rear it’s head between the two of them again in 1974 over top billing in The Towering Inferno), Robert Redford and Newman it was, and no, there was no running off to South America for our gun-slinging duo.

In terms of plot you either know it by now or you don’t, but if you don’t I’ll contain myself and leave you to watch the thing, but, I will say that the final scene ends with one of the most fantastic uses of freeze frame - at that stage - since Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, and George Roy Hill does a wonderful job in the chair.

Katharine Ross is excellent, Lawrence Schiller’s stills pepper the piece superbly, Burt Bacharach & Hal David’s Oscar-winning “Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head” is terrific, Goldman’s screenplay is superb and the chemistry between Newman & Redford is wonderful - so much so that of course they reunited for The Sting (1971) just two years later.

The 70’s bought Newman fans not only The Sting (1973) and The Towering Inferno (1974) but other favourites (of mine) including The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Quintet (1979) and a fun appearance in Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie (1976). As Newman headed into the 80’s his philanthropic projects took off via his Newman’s Own line of food products, his long established racing teams were continuing to soak up his passion and energies and our boy was now into his 60’s. I’m sure there some beginning to write him off. Newman so wasn't done however.

The 80’s kicked off with a sixth Oscar nomination, this time for his performance in Absence Of Malice (1981), followed by yet another Oscar nomination for the last in my hat-trick of spotlit movies this week -

THE VERDICT (1982)

By the time the great Sidney Lumet came a knocking, for my money it’d been some time since Newman had turned in a performance with the focus and intensity worthy of his talents and by now substantial experience. Lumet (one of the most underrated movie Directors of all time imho who seemingly never gets spoken about in the same breath as your Hitchcock’s and Kubrick’s and Scorsese’s, Wilder’s, Capra’s, Kurosawa’s, Fellini’s, Spielberg’s etc etc etc) was many things as a Director of course, but one of his key strengths was he was an ‘actors director’. Unlike some of the aforementioned (Hitchcock for sure) he loved working with Actors and so often therefore got the very best out of his Actors. This was exactly what Newman needed at this point, and our boy rose to the challenge and then some. Yes the part was fantastic, yes Mamet was a genius writer of dialogue, and yes Newman was surrounded by a crack group of Actors in James Mason, Charlotte Rampling, Jack Warden and Milo O’Shea - but there was work to do, darkness to descend into, a journey and a half to undertake as the character. And for me Newman embraced all of these and much more in this movie, hence it being one of my favourite performances of his.

By this stage Paul Newman had lost a son to suicide, been a rampant alcoholic, had numerous affairs and dalliances during his supposedly ‘perfect’ Hollywood marriage to Woodward, and he’d been battling depression and an acute sense of self-loathing most of his adult life. He had scars. Big ones and lots of them. But as this creative certainly believes (a) bad shit is an entirely normal part of the human existence and (b) if you’re a creative or artist of real intent, great pain and suffering - if utilised in the right way, i.e. to expand and enhance one’s sense of empathy and therefore understanding of the human condition - can provide the most extraordinary route map to get to the essence and ultimately delivery of the character. For me Newman did this in The Verdict.

You see Newman was not some extraordinary example of physical beauty narcissistically in a life-long affair with himself. From everything I’ve read and researched about him, Newman had enough self-loathing for twenty Hollywood stars let alone one. The dude was crushingly hard on himself. The title of this piece comes from a quote where he referred to himself as “that decorative little shit”. He described his relationship with his son Scott as “a dance of death”.

His mother took a huge retrospective beating from Newman, her main crime being she adored him. In Newman’s eyes she dandled him like a doll and he would compare himself to the lapdogs she stuffed with chocolates until they “became so cancerous and obese they could hardly move”. Stifled by her cosseting, he refused to reciprocate affection and developed as he put it, a protective “carapace of indifference”. The beautiful blue-eyed man that women the world over lusted after and craved was one seriously dark motherfucker. His 50’s peers such as Brando, Dean & Clift became icons for self-loathing and indeed they were classic artistic self-loathers, but Newman I think went darker. He went on the Wurlitzer of darkness, held on super-tight, didn’t let go, faced it up, rode it out, then got straight back of the ride again.

The point in highlighting this? Well, as said, I think it’s why Newman was actually a much greater actor than many give him credit for. He suffered, and not because he thought he should but because he knew it was intrinsically necessary for him to do so, as a man absolutely first and foremost, but yes also as a creative. And itt didn’t matter whether life was going swimmingly or to hell in a hand-cart.

Some of you will understand this, have it chime with you - some of you won’t, and that’s fine, but in terms of fellow creatives and artists reading this or just in terms of non-creatives reading this, the point here is that there is value and necessity in darkness, in the courage of facing up and even embracing the shite underbelly that’s always under our belly. I see Newman as a magnificent - yes, magnificent - example of this. Some may see this as nothing more than the masturbatory bullshit of arty-farty types, and that’s ok, it’s all opinions when it comes to art (and the human psyche). But for me, at this stage of whatever length of life I’m to be afforded, those that ride the Wurlitzer for a better, darker, deeper, more authentic understanding of themselves and others and who then attempt to share their findings with their fellow humans through the prism of art and creativity - are fucking heroes & heroines.

Newman gave us brief insights into his ride on the Wurlitzer in THE VERDICT, and I love the bastard for it.

Of course Newman wasn’t even finished with the 80’s let alone generally despite having received his seventh Oscar nomination, and although he received a patronising ‘Honorary’ Oscar in 1986, he stormed back with his first and what would be his only Oscar win in 1987 for his wonderful performance in Scorsese’s The Color Of Money (1986). At last, he’d nailed one.

There was another Oscar in 1994 for his humanitarian work (although where the worth in The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarding you something like this is beyond me), and two more Oscar nominations (making it ten in total) for Nobody’s Fool (1994) and more understandably imo for his terrific portrayal in Sam Mendes’ excellent Road To Perdition (2002).

Finally then for this week then I’ll leave you with two videos worth your time. The first is a recent documentary - The Last Movie Stars (2022).

As Peter Conrad in The Guardian put it:

“In the late 1980s, between beery binges, Newman recorded endless hours of reminiscences, trying finally to understand the insecure, inadequate stranger who skulked behind his handsome facade. Probably alarmed by what he’d revealed, he later destroyed the tapes. But after his death in 2008, 14,000 pages of transcripts were discovered in his musty Connecticut basement and in a storage locker; these have now been cut and pasted into an autobiography, supplemented by contributions from colleagues and family members. The result is startling: Narcissus breaks the mirror, leaving only some cruelly jagged shards.”

It’s a must-watch.

And finally finally here’s a compilation of Newman interviews from 1973, 1982 & 1987 which will further enhance your understanding of a man who was most definitely not all he seemed but who for me is all the richer, more human, more connectable with and less god-like for the darkness.

A repeated Happy, Healthy, Peaceful & Prosperous 2023 to you all then, and I’ll see you next week for more about the movies and movie people that matter to me.

Michael