Remembering Paul Newman
January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008

By Hal Drucker

If the screen personas of Marlon Brando and James Dean were that of the American male as surly iconoclast, the stunningly handsome Paul Newman remade him as an enormously likable anti-hero, of street wise intelligence and wit. He acted in more than 65 movies over more than 50 years.

On screen or on the stage as actor, or behind the scenes as director, he was a passionate student of his craft.  More important, he spoke out on the issues that affect our society and was a titanic humanitarian.  He raced cars, opened summer camps for ailing children and became a nonprofit entrepreneur with a line of foods (Newman’s Own) that put his picture on supermarket shelves around the world while putting all post-tax profits and royalties, more than $250 million, into charitable foundations. 

I witnessed Paul Newman on the Broadway stage in his first and final performances. Here are my recollections of the man plus my choice of Newman’s top ten motion picture appearances.  I was in the audience for his final performance in 2003 on Broadway playing the “Stage Manager” in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

The first time I either saw or knew of Paul Newman was in 1955 in a Broadway melodrama called The Desperate Hours, in which he played a slightly built, sniveling young escaped con, who along with three cohorts kept a suburban family headed by Karl Malden at bay in their own home. The show was later made into a movie with Humphrey Bogart (considerably older than Newman’s 29 years) and Frederic March in the two leading roles. On the basis of that unremarkable stage performance, I could never, ever envision Newman having the distinguished movie career that awaited him. Both he and his wife Joanne Woodward with whom he appeared in 10 films, were inveterate theater goers, more apt to be in the audience than on the stage. Above all, his philanthropy through his Newman’s Own salads, sauces and lemonade, is legion, as is his Hole-In-The Wall Camp, funded by the completely non-profit company, for underprivileged kids. I witnessed his final performance in 2003 on Broadway playing the “Stage Manager” in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

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1)      HUD (1963)

I recently had another go at Hud on Turner Classics Movies. Photographed in lush black and white by the immortal James Wong Howe and superbly directed by Martin Ritt, does it ever hold up! It stars Newman at his quintessential best, with my wife still doing mental flip-flops over his performance as the amoral, hard-drinking, skirt-chasing, charismatic farmhand, Hud Bannon. Based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, and set in the contemporary West, Hud is constantly at loggerheads with his father Homer, (played with dignity and gravitas by the great Melvyn Douglas). Homer has never forgiven Hud for the death of his older brother and the two disagree over whether or not the cattle ranch should give way to oil exploration. Hud further strains the relationship when he begins taking his brother’s son Lon out drinking and carousing (Lon is played by Brandon de Wilde, whose promising career was snuffed out in a highway accident). In a role that justifiably earned her an Oscar, Patricia Neal is Homer and Hud’s cynical yet compassionate  housekeeper Alma, whom Hud drunkenly assaults in a devastating sequence in which he says,  “You're not young anymore, what are you saving it for?" To which Alma retorts, "I've done my time with one cold-blooded bastard. I'm not looking for another." Douglas won an Oscar for Best Supporting Role. Curiously, no such hardware for  Newman.

2)      THE VERDICT (1982). 

Written by David Mamet and directed by Sidney Lumet, this exhilarating courtroom drama reveals the redemptive power of the law through Newman’s portrayal of Frank Galvin, an alcoholic Boston lawyer whose life and law practice are both nearly bankrupt.  Presented with the case of a young woman reduced to a vegetative state by the incompetence of the doctors at a Catholic hospital, Galvin begins an almost epic journey that pits him against the entrenched forces of the Boston establishment: the Archdiocese, represented by the imposing Edward J. Concannon (James Mason), and the well-connected judge (Milo O’Shea).  In preparing for and trying the case, Galvin suffers the torments of all out-gunned and seemingly overpowered trial lawyers.  Yet for all his failings, he grows during the process, and proves the maxim that he utters early in the movie: “the court exists to give [them] a chance at justice.”

3)      COOL HAND LUKE (1967).

This prison drama set in the South in 1948, captured the anti-authoritarianism of the ‘60s while spawning the most memorable movie quote this side of Casablanca. No, it wasn’t Paul Newman as Lucas Jackson who said, “what we have here is … failure to communicate,” but everything else in the movie is informed by Newman’s iconoclastic presence, including two richly comedic sequences. The first is the opening scene where the drunken Jackson summarily dispatches the heads of two long rows of parking meters with a pipe cutter, with the red two-hour time limit VIOLATION foreshadowing his imminent arrest and introduction to the horrors of Southern prison life on a chain gang and the sadism of two monstrous authority figures George Kennedy as “Dragline” and Strother Martin as  “the Captain,” who was the source of  the “failure to communicate” line. The second laugher is Luke’s gustatory prowess in the famed egg-swallowing competition. Once again Newman is the obligatory anti-hero, like his Paul-bearing cinematic predecessor, Muni the Marvelous, of Mervyn LeRoy’s pioneering 1932 I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.

4)      ROAD TO PERDITION (2002) 

It is 1931, the winter of discontent for the Rooney family, two years after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The irascible Chicago gang lord Newman as  John Rooney laments the impulsive execution of a favored lieutenant by his trigger-happy son Connor (Donald Craig). It reminded me of the vituperative relationship between the wizened warlord Charles Bickford and his hot-headed gun-slinger of an offspring (Kevin (Chuck Connors) whose chromosomes have gone awry, in The Big Country. Indeed, Road to Perdition has much of the grandeur of that classic Hollywood Western.  ''Sons are put on the earth to trouble their fathers,'' growls Rooney, who regards Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) as closer than flesh and blood, an orphan whom he brought up as a surrogate son and who married and sired two boys. Sullivan has the demeanor and wholesome looks of a seasoned choir boy. What he really is, is Rooney’s personal hit man, who was witness to the killing by Connor. Propelling the movie's inexorable chain of events is 12-year-old Michael Jr.'s (Tyler Hoechlin) curiosity about his father – as to whether he’s a good man or bad man -which compels him to hide in the back seat of the car that Sullivan drives to the fateful meeting at which Connor goes bonkers. Newman's Rooney, he of the regal mien, punctuated by piecing aquatic eyes and sotto voce Irish brogue, was at age 77, one of his more astonishing portrayals. Others who perform admirably are Jude Law as Maguire, a ghoul –like killer who punctiliously photographs his victims, and the ever reliable Stanley Tucci as Al Capone’s henchman Frank Nitti.

5)       BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)

Who are those guys? None other than Newman as the outlaw Butch Cassidy and Robert Redford as fastest-gun Butch Cassidy, buddy-buddy fuddie-duddies on a lam from a posse.  It is  a George Roy Hill-helmed comedy masquerading as a  Western. (In an earlier age it would have been Hope and Crosby in a Road movie.) Adding to the fun is Newman showing off slick bicycle tricks to Sundnce’s girl friend Katherine Ross, to the strains of  the omnipresent Bacharach/David song, Raindrops Keep Fall’n On My Head. My favorite exchange  takes place as the two are cornered by the posse on the ledge of a steep cliff:

Butch: Then you jump first.
Sundance: No, I said.
Butch: What's the matter with you?
Sundance: I can't swim.
Butch: Why you crazy bastard, the fall will probably kill you.

6)      THE STING (1973)

Not quite up to Butch & Sundance, but this highly entertaining  flick reuniting Newman, Redford and Roy Hill, won  seven Oscars,  including Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay.  Set in mid-Depression years, the dynamic duo are now Chicago con artists who, in endeavoring to avenge the murder of a friend, dupe big-time crook Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) in an elaborate sham betting parlor scheme.  Using a bogus bookie joint as a front for their scam, the two feel the heat from the Mob on one side and encroaching police on the other. The plot with its twist ending, is augmented by a score by Marvin Hamlisch and Scott Joplin’s  ragtime song: The Entertainer. Prominent among the splendid supporting players are Eileen Brennan, Robert Earl Jones (father of James Earl Jones) Ray Walston, Charles Durning and Harold Gould.

7)      The HUSTLER (1961)

Why do I have a soft spot for The Hustler? It goes back to the time I had the chutzpah to engage the real Minnesota Fats on a green-felted table with pockets. For the life of me I can’t recall why I was in the hallowed gaming room of the exclusive Metropolitan Club in New York, a far cry from the succession of smoky billiard parlors of Robert Rossen’s film; it had something to do with a product we were marketing through my advertising agency. I should have listened to Meredith Willson’s lyrics: You’ve got trouble my friend, with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Pool.  The assembly of pool players, gamblers, hangers-on, bartenders and fallen women are peopled by such notable supporting actors as Murray Hamilton, Myron McCormick, Vincent Gardenia and Piper Laurie. They are the province of gunslinger (oops I mean, pool shark) Fast Eddie  Felson who takes on the likes of Minnesota Fats, played with “Away we go” panache by Jackie Gleason. As the malevolent devil incarnate gambler Burt Gordon, George C. Scott is at the top of his game. There are cameos from pool champ Willie Mosconi and boxer Jake LaMotta that add to the ambience  of the movie. In 1986, Newman returned as "Fast Eddie” in Martin Scorsese's  lesser film, The Color of Money, for which Newman finally earned  his Oscar.

8)      CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958)

Had I not seen the original 1955 Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece, the movie version would undoubtedly have merited a higher standing among My Top 10 Newman’s Movies. But Elizabeth Taylor’s star turn as the tempestuous Maggie  and Newman’s sexually ambiguous Brick , were defanged by the Hollywood Production Code, versus the hot-blooded stage performances of Barbara Bel Geddes and Ben Gazzara. The one constant in the two media was Burl Ives as the authoritarian Big Daddy to Brick, who inhabited the proscenium stage like a bearded, white-suited colossus, chomping on a panatella, arms akimbo, legs planted like an inverted V. As Brick explains to him  how he fractured his leg by jumping over hurdles on an oval track in the wee hours, Big Daddy with his back to Brick. his eyes fixed on the audience, mischievously retorts: Was you a-jumpin’ or a-humpin?’  In 2003, I sat a couple of rows behind Newman while viewing  a revival of “Cat” that had Ned Beatty as Big Daddy. Newman generously applauded Jason Patric as an unimpressive Brick.

9)      Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956)

Newman inherited from James Dean the role of the boxer Rocky Graziano in this motion picture. Mr. Dean had been killed in a car crash before the screenplay was finished. What mother’s son of us can forget the savage Tony Zale-Rocky Graziano ring encounters? As staged by Robert (West Side Story) Wise, the climactic battle in this movie, with Zale, the “Iron Man,” is one of the best choreographed fights ever filmed. Newman makes his mark as a serious screen actor with his plug-ugly portrayal of the middleweight champion Graziano, who rose from the New York City streets and a household of psychological and physical abuse at the hands of an alcoholic father. An unregenerate punk, Graziano goes from reform school to the army to prison, where he meets Johnny Hyland (Judson Pratt), the prison fitness instructor. Hyland sees Rocky’s potential as an athlete and urges him to channel his violent energy in a better direction. Released from prison and still behaving like a thug, the boxer hooks up with small-time manager Irving Cohen (Everett Sloane) whose daughter, played by the Italian actress Pier Angeli becomes his wife. Sloane is but one of an extraordinary cast of character actors including Josef Buloff (the original Ali Hakim of Oklahoma!), Eileen Heckart, Harold Stone, Frank Campanella and Jackie Kelk - and three people who made their screen debuts in non-credited roles, George C. Scott, Steve McQueen and Robert Loggia.

10)  EXODUS (1960) 

Like so many of you, I lapped up Leon Uris’ 1958 page-turner, and conjectured who would ultimately playAri ben Canaan on the big screen,  a country-wide phenomenon that swirled around Rhett and Scarlett 22 years earlier. Indeed Exodus was the biggest selling novel since GWTW. I envisioned just about anyone who remotely resembled a young Moshe Dayan, sans eyepatch upon whom Ari was purportedly based. In retrospect, Paul Newman, should not have come as a surprise, given his half-Jewish heritage though he belied the description of Ari in the book. Shot on location in Israel and Cyprus for authenticity, the movie was diminished by Otto Preminger’s mundane direction and stereotypical performances by love interest  Eva Marie Saint  as Army Nurse Kitty Fremont,  Sal Mineo as Dov Landau,  Jill Haworth as Karen Johansson and a succession of such theatrical mainstays as David Opatashu, Lee J. Cobb, Ralph Richardson and Hugh Griffith. Aiding immeasurably in stirring the juices is Ernest Gold’s haunting score.