The Screengrab : nobody's fool

Thursday Morning Poll for October 9, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Last week, in honor of Paul Newman, we run a poll to determine which of Newman’s performances was your favorite. Based on our findings, it appears that the resounding favorite of Screengrab’s readership was Newman’s work as Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler. Newman’s iconic turn in Robert Rossen’s classic low-key poolroom drama was chosen by 40% of readers, followed by his autumnal performance as Sully in Nobody’s Fool (27%) and his work as the first of the two titles characters in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (20%). Bringing up the rear was a tie between the world-class SOB title role in Hud and the “wild, beautiful” protagonist of Cool Hand Luke. But can you really go wrong with any of these performances?

This week marks the release of Body of Lies, the fourth collaboration between filmmaker Ridley Scott and his star of choice, Russell Crowe. Since directing Crowe to an Oscar in Gladiator, the two have worked together three more times. So which of the films they’ve made together is your favorite?

Favorite Scott/Crowe collaboration? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you next week!

Screengrab Salutes: The Paul Newman Top Ten (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

4. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)

Straddling the line between the revolutionary filmmaking of the 1970s and the tail end of classic Hollywood, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one of those movies that isn’t legendary because it’s important, or because it’s meaningful, or because it broke some rich new ground in the language of filmmaking. It’s legendary because it’s funny, fun, and incredibly entertaining. It’s also one of those films where everyone seems to be firing on all cylinders; the sly buddy-western could easily be counted as a career high for Robert Redford, director George Roy Hill and his cameraman Connie Hall, screenwriter William Goldman, and even composer Burt Bacharach. But Paul Newman is the glue that holds everything together: taking on Goldman’s witty dialogue, he gives it just enough of a human, weary edge that it doesn’t seem as over-the-top as it might coming from some actors. Some performers go their whole lives without snaring a part like Butch Cassidy, and others get one, but handle it all wrong. You sometimes hear actors referred to as intelligent, but rarely movie stars; it’s a testament to how bright Paul Newman was that he was handed a role as rich as this one and figured it out immediately, playing it on screen as perfectly as it could be played. This is a real movie star role, and Newman handles it like a real movie star.

3. NOBODY’S FOOL (1994) & THE VERDICT (1982)

I’ll admit I'm cheating here, attempting to squeeze an eleventh film into this Top Ten list, but I simply couldn’t decide which late-period Newman film I liked best, so I figured I’d call it a tie. Two sides of the same rumpled coin, The Verdict’s beaten-down Boston lawyer Frank Galvin, fighting an impossible battle against the Catholic Church, and Sully, the beaten-down small town ne’er-do-well Newman plays in Nobody’s Fool are both men with no expectations of success or happiness in their lonely lives who nevertheless find redemption despite and because of their own stubborn tenacity. One of the hallmarks of Newman’s career was the Mercedes caliber acting, writing and directing he seemed to attract to most of his star vehicles, and these two films more than hold their own with regard to above-the-line talent. Charlotte Rampling, Jack Warden, James Mason and helmer Sidney Lumet provide typically stellar support in The Verdict, but one of the pleasures of Nobody’s Fool is watching Newman (and acclaimed co-stars like Jessica Tandy and Phillip Seymour Hoffman) bring out the best in frequently wasted and underestimated actors like Bruce Willis (in a supporting role as a big fish businessman in a small upstate New York pond) and Melanie Griffith (happily erasing memories of their previous on-screen pairing in Bonfire of the Vanities as Willis’ dissatisfied trophy wife). Yet despite all the impressive talent surrounding him, Newman is the heart and soul of both films, dominating them with master class, world-weary performances that just make you want to punch the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences right in the face for awarding him his only Best Actor Oscar for The Color of freakin’ Money.

2. HUD (1963)

Newman never took his anti-hero routine farther into "anti-" territory than in this family drama, set in a dusty, unromantic modern Texas. He plays the title role, which turns out not to be that of the Department of Housing and Urban Development but rather a selfish but dashing heel who, in the context of a small rural town situated on the wrong end of the 1960s, qualifies as about as hot as hot shit gets. Hud roughly fits the mold but finally breaks the tradition of such earlier Hollywood characters as the Bogart heroes, who were always talking about how they stuck their neck out for nobody and only cared about keeping their own hides safe and comfortable because Hud really means it; he remains defiantly unredeemed to the movie's end. Seen as daring in its day, the movie actually risks being too morally clear-cut. What keeps it alive and spiky after all these years is that, thanks to Newman, it's hard not to feel closer to this bastard than to his pure and upright antagonists, the boringly earnest young man (Brandon De Wilde) who has to learn to see through him, and the crotchety father (Melvyn Douglas) who seems to have been judging him as harshly as possible for every minute of their shared lives, and who finally seems to die of impacted self-righteousness...especially since Newman and the director, Martin Ritt, seemed to understand something real about the sensual attractiveness of evil: in this, the least sympathetic role of the first half of his career, Newman was probably sexier than he'd ever been before, which is saying something.

1. THE HUSTLER (1961)

Newman entered his second decade as a movie star, and established himself as a man with staying power, as Fast Eddie Felsen, the cocky pool shark who's set on proving himself a winner -- which he does, though at the loss of his innocence, a girl (Piper Laurie), and the game that's the only thing he's ever been able to claim to be the best at. In addition to the tart dialogue and the opportunity to go head-to-head with George C. Scott (at the peak of his powers as a sly stealer of scenes) and Jackie Gleason (in the most pleasingly assured dramatic performance of his life), the role gave Newman the chance to grow up on camera. In the final battle of the billiard balls, he trades in the self-infatuated, head-jiggling grins and showy flare-ups of the early scenes for a quiet gravity, with suggestions of violent emotions kept under powerful control beneath the surface. It was a good indicator of just how well the actor himself would be able to weather the aging process in the years to come, steadily improving with time while the careers of so many of his contemporaries receded to the background or turned brown at the edges.

Click Here for Part One & Part Two

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Paul Newman, 1925--2008

Phil Nugent — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The death of Paul Newman cuts our movie culture's last ties to a generation of 1950s leading men. Newman himself had long since transcended his film debut, The Silver Chalice (1954), a terrible performance in a terrible movie that he, typically, loved to make fun of. A paragon of classical handsomeness and unostentatiously fit-looking, with eyes that people wrote songs about, Newman arrived on the scene at the same time as Method firebrands such as Brando, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift, though at first he looked to have more in common with such male mannequins as Rock Hudson and Robert Wagner. He wound up casting a shadow as long as any of them, and better sustaining a career than any of them, by taking his work seriously and endeavoring make it mean something. As Richard Corliss writes, ""Instead of leading his talent in weird and wayward directions, like Brando, or smashing it to pieces on a California highway at 24, like Dean, he just kept getting better, more comfortable in his movie skin, more proficient at suggesting worlds of flinty pleasure or sour disillusion with a smile or a squint." At the same time, he never seemed to be in danger of letting a little thing like being the best-known movie star and sexiest man in the world go to his head.

Newman has to have been one of the most famous movie stars for whom there is no automatically recognizable caricature version; he gave nightclub impressions few outsized mannerisms to latch onto. Newman was someone who moviegoers probably felt they knew better from his offscreen image than from any carefully maintained screen image. His image was that of a superior being who laughed at the idea that he was anything but a regular guy who'd been very, very lucky; a supreme sex symbol who, if given the chance, would probably bore you blind telling you how crazy he was about his wife of fifty years, Joanne Woodward, and his family life (""I have steak at home," Newman once famously told a Playboy interviewer who had the balls to ask him what he had on the side, "why go out for hamburger?"); a celebrity liberal who put his money where his mouth was and became a leading philanthropist, plowing hundred of millions of dollars into charitable causes, much of it generated by Newman's Own, the fantastically profitable food line that Newman and writer A. E. Hotchner began in 1982 as a joke. (Dalhlia Lithwick has a great piece about Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, the summer getaway he established for seriously ill children.) Because he was Paul Newman, and because he chose his causes so well and didn't seem to possess whatever gene creates the appearance of smugness, Newman could indulge his political urges and never seem like a polarizing figure to anyone outside the ranks of the bitterly deranged, and though the news that Richard Nixon had been so thoughtful as to have included him on his White House enemies list He is sometimes said to have embodied the "anti-hero" in such movies as Hud, and that willingness and ability to play morally ambiguous and even downright rotten characters no doubt helped him keep him seem "relevant" as the 1950s crashed into the '60s and '70s, but the truth is that Newman was a logical choice for dislikable characters because, even as he gave meticulous, honest performances in those roles, his own likability took the box-office curse off them. After Newman appeared in the William Faulkner adaptation The Long, Hot Summer as Ben Quick, the sexy lout who is ostracized after being falsely accused of being a barn burner, Pauline Kael wrote that Hollywood had figured out that a hero could burn barns all day and night and audiences would love him anyway, so long as he was played by Paul Newman.

The Long Hot Summer, notable as the first of ten features in which he and Woodward acted together, was also one of three films from 1958, along with Arthur Penn's The Left Handed Gun, in which he played Billy the Kid in the big-screen version of a Gore Vidal TV play and the movie version of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, that pinpointed his transition from sincere juvenile to assurec leading man. He achieved classic status in 1961 playing the pool hustler Fast Eddie Felsen in Robert Rossen's The Hustler, a lowlife melodrama whose smoky atmosphere and acting duels between Newman and George C. Scott and Jackie Gleason retain their chewy zest more than forty-five years later. Of the aforementioned Hud, Manohla Dargis writes in yesterday's New York Times: "His lean, hard-muscled body seems to slash against the wide-screen landscape, evoking the oil derricks to come, and the black-and-white cinematography turns his famous baby blues an eerie shade of gray. The character would be a heartbreaker if he were interested in breaking hearts instead of making time with the bodies that come with them. That’s supposed to make Hud a mean man, but mostly he seems self-interested. No one is tearing him apart and Mr. Newman doesn’t try to plumb the depths with the role, which makes the character and the performance feel more contemporary than many of the head cases of the previous decade. He finds depths in these shallows." Hollywood legend has it that it was because of his success in those two movies that, in 1966, when Newman played Ross Macdonald's private eye Lew Archer, the character was re-christianed Harper so that the studio could cash in on what was apparently the sure-fire good-luck charm of releasing a Paul Newman movie whose title began with the letter "H." (Though not one of Newman's best--as in, way not--the movie was a hit, which may be why, a year later, he was rounded up to star in a Western, based on an Elmore Leonard novel, called Hombre.)

Newman's major contributions to the rebel strain of the counterculture were Cool Hand Luke (1967), in which he played a nonconformist on a chain hang who becomes a martyr figure--Christ in a sweat box--and the 1969 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where his performance, engaging though it is, now looks like part of a charitable enterprise aimed at making a star of his buddy, Robert Redford. He would prove devoted not just to Redford--leading to a partnership that would be dipped in gold and garlanded with Oscars in the 1973 The Sting--but to the directors of those movies: respectively, Stuart Rosenberg, with whom he would re-team for WUSA, Pocket Money, and The Drowning Pool, in which he would reprise the role of Lew Archer, I mean, Harper; and George Roy Hill, who went on to direct The Sting and Slap Shot. For some of us, these hold up less well than many of his other hits; they feel self-satisfied and smirky, with the adolescent wisecracks piling up like foam rubber peanuts. In general, a complacency seemed to settle in for Newman in this period, if not so much in his acting as in his choice of roles. There's plenty of evidence that he had grown tired of presenting himself for the camera's delectation. He had a high-profile side career as a race car driver, but he had also turned to directing. He directed six films in all, four of them--Rachel, Rachel (1968), The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1973), the TV film The Shadow Box (1980), and The Glass Menagerie (1987)-- starring Joanne Woodward, and two, the Ken Kesey adaptation Sometimes a Great Notion (1971) and Harry and Son (1984) starring himself. (Both he and Woodward won Golden Globes and New York Critics Cricle Awards for Rachel, Rachel.)

There were signs that he had begun to stir again when he signed on to star in two pictures directed by Robert Altman, but Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) and Quintet (1979) did not mark the finest hour for either of them. But by now Newman was in his mid-fifties and wide awake, and he seemed to enter the 1980s with a renewed commitment to his craft. Unlike some other make stars who became public embarrassments by their determination to prove that aging hadn't slowed them down or cost them a drop of testosterone, Newman seemed genuinely, and even playfully, curious about seeing just what he could do with this new state of affairs and how long he could keep it going. His performances in Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981), Absence of Malice (1981), and The Verdict (1982) were as forceful and finely shaded as anything he had ever done, maybe as good as anything any star at his age had done, and the Academy Award that he received for revisiting the role of Fast Eddie twenty-five years down the line in Martin Scorsese's The Hustler sequel The Color of Money (1986) may have been even more well-deserved as it was unneeded as a confirmation of his stature.

After that benchmark, he seemed to settle in doing whatever it pleased him to do. He had what looked like a terrific time being miscast as tomcatting Louisiana governor (and secret desegregationist) Earl K. Long in Ron Shelton's Blaze, reunited onscreen once more with his wife in the Merchant-Ivory Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, indulged his taste for screwball nonsense as the capitalist villain of the Coen brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), kept a firm grip on his sex appeal even as he approached and passed his seventieth birthday in two movies directed by Robert Benton, the underappreciated 1994 charmer Nobody's Fool and the grim memento-mori detective story Twilight (1998). Some fifty years after playing George Gibbs in Our Town on TV, he returned to the play, this time playing the Stage Manager in a Broadway revival that was also recorded for television. He made his last on-camera movie appearance as Tom Hanks's gangster boss in Road to Perdition but continued to do voice work, including a role in the Pixar animated feature Cars. He also played Ed Harris's father in the 2005 HBO miniseries Empire Falls, whose cast also included Joanne Woodward. In May of 2007, he publicly announced his retirement from acting, a decision that was cause for considerable sadness among his fans. The news of his death might best be seen as cause for gratitude, both for the pleasure he gave and the example he set, and for gobstruck admiration at just how much one man was able to get right in the conduct of his life. Presumably Newman would begin any list of his achievements with the names of his children: Susan Kendall and Stephanie, from his early marriage to Jackie Witte, and, from his marriage to Woodward, Elinor "Nell" Teresa, Melissa "Lissy" Stewart, and Claire "Clea" Olivia. (Elinor appeared in both Rachel, Rachel and The Effect of Gamma Rays under the name "Nell Potts".) Newman and Jackie Witte also had a son, Scott, an actor who made his movie debut opposite his father in The Towering Inferno (1974), who died in 1978 from an accidental drug overdose. The Scott Newman Center, which seeks to prevent substance abuse through education, was established in memory.