"Paul Newman, 1925-2008"
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Paul Newman, 1925-2008 ‘He made it seem like great fun to be a guy.’ BY JOHN PODHORETZ There is a moment in The Sting, the most popular movie Paul Newman ever made, when his character, the...
...To every one of these roles, no matter how low-rent or low-life he was supposed to be, he brought one essential quality: his vivid, enthusiastic, devastatingly attractive self...
...Newman played a remarkable variety of roles—Boston Irish broken-down lawyer (The Verdict), Chicago Irish gangster (The Road to Perdition), Italian boxer (Somebody Up There Likes Me), noaccount Texas heel (Hud), Mississippi barn-burner (The Long Hot Summer), Louisiana governor Earl Long (Blaze), impotent and possibly homosexual former football star (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), gigolo (Sweet Bird of Youth), brokendown private eye (Harper), surly cowboy raised by Indians (Hombre), bank robber (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), third-rate minor league hockey coach (Slap Shot), fi rst-rate pool shark (The Hustler...
...In a gesture meant to drive Lonergan mad with its sheer obnoxiousness, Gondorff ebulliently claps his hands and rubs his palms together as he gathers the huge pile of chips and brings them home...
...No matter the picture, in the midst of all the trouble his character was causing, his aqua eyes would glitter, he would turn his lips up in that billion-watt smile, and whatever the sins he was mimicking, all was forgiven...
...We could be told of the failures visited upon his friends and family by his self-indulgence...
...It took his prettiness and made it seem imposing and powerful...
...The visual feast that was Paul Newman needs no eulogizing...
...The contrast is what made him manly, and manliness was at the core of what made Newman the most enduring male star of the postwar era...
...That moment crystallizes the central quality of Newman’s 50-year career in the movies: the unbridled, infectious pleasure he took in playacting another person...
...Whatever neuroses his characters might have been displaying, Newman made it seem like great fun to be a guy...
...Like Bogart in Casablanca, the opening of Harper offered a quick-sketch portrait of what it looks like when a man is entirely comfortable in his own skin...
...Such a nice boy, so charming, and so good-looking, with those blue eyes...
...In Hud he was a rapist...
...Harper opens with a scene in which he can’t fi nd any new coffee to make in the morning, so he digs yesterday’s grounds out of the garbage and boils himself up a new cup...
...but really, Paul Newman a drunk...
...The actual key to understanding his extraordinary career was his gravelly, harsh voice...
...The sandpaper scratch of his voice was what he needed and used to add anger, threat, danger, and despair...
...It was, instead, as though he were an especially personable small child in dress-up, doing everything possible to lose himself in fantasy even as his indulgent parents beam and think he is the most adorable creature alive—perhaps even more adorable for making the effort to sound and act differently when he has no earthly reason to do so...
...In The Long Hot Summer he engaged in arson...
...It was the same when he took on the part of an alcoholic, which he essayed numerous times...
...Paul Newman, 1925-2008 ‘He made it seem like great fun to be a guy.’ BY JOHN PODHORETZ There is a moment in The Sting, the most popular movie Paul Newman ever made, when his character, the con man Henry Gondorff, wins a pot in a poker game...
...At his best, and he usually was at his best, Paul Newman gave his audience more than a performance...
...In The Hustler he helped drive a woman to suicide...
...He made them feel joy, which may be even rarer than seeing a great Hamlet...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...Its ugliness served to undercut his beauty—to scar it, really...
...even when he tried his hardest, he did not have it in him to convey that kind of weakness or illness...
...Like all post-Brando American actors, he tried to be an antihero...
...Gondorff is deliberately trying to get under the skin of his poker rival, a gangster named Lonergan, against whom he is running a complex scam...
...There are similar moments throughout his career: Jumping off the cliff in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, brushing his fi nger against his nose as a private signal of respect and affection in The Sting, beaming avuncularly as he watches inane Ice Capades skaters perform in a Christmas show in Slap Shot, playing cards and shooting the breeze for years with his old buddy Gene Hackman in Twilight (the best littleknown Newman movie...
...But could anyone really believe Paul Newman would behave like that...
...This bit, the perfect encapsulation of what life is like for a too-old slovenly bachelor, is what turned Newman from an easily eclipsed star like Glenn Ford (who was, then, Newman’s equal in Hollywood) into an icon to rival Humphrey Bogart...
...it is the most obvious and ordinary fact about him...
...He was the only kind of loser a motion-picture audience will really clasp to its bosom: a winner who is slumming it...
...Newman was a slight man, and the dreamy quality of his soft eyes might have made him seem insubstantial...
...And playacting is what it was, because never in the course of his career did he actually succeed in convincing an audience that he was anyone other than Paul Newman...
...What would he need a drink for...
Vol. 14 • October 2008 • No. 5
