Each year when a stalwart of the entertainment industry makes his or her final curtain call, I find myself wishing I’d paid closer attention to their work and inevitably fill up my Netflix queue with old movies, or buy several tracks from iTunes I feel I should have owned all along. This happened with Johnny Cash and Ray Charles, as well as Sydney Pollack and Marlon Brando. This was not the case with Paul Newman, who passed away this past Friday at the age of 83. Newman was a mainstay in the Malchus household when I was growing up, and continued to be an artist and human being that I respected and admired for three decades. If I were to compile a list of my favorite films of all time, that list would include at least 10 starring Newman.
We didn’t go to the movie theater often when I was a kid; my first exposure to motion pictures came via the edited versions on the ABC Sunday night movie or whatever was showing on the weekend afternoons on the independent channels. It was through these television airings that I saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Sting (1973), and the irreverent Slap Shot (1977). In the early ’80s my mother won a VCR, then a newfangled device. A whole world of cinema was available to me every time I entered the video store. My father was very open to letting me rent any gory horror movie I desired — on the condition that I watched one of his selections as well. Thus did I receive a film education, and come to know the likes of Bogart, Hitchcock and many of the brilliant artists who revolutionized Hollywood in the early ’70s. It was also through these shared screenings with my dad that I first saw Absence of Malice (1981), Fort Apache the Bronx (1981) and Alfred Hitchcock’s underappreciated Cold War thriller Torn Curtain (1966).
When I headed to college, I finally saw Cool Hand Luke (1967), and boy, did that film have an effect on me, just as it must have on the generation that first saw it in the ’60s. In it, Newman’s performance as the lost, system-bucking rebel Luke Jackson is so convincing, it becomes painful to watch it upon second and third viewings. Newman is so charismatic, so likable, so… beautiful, that knowing the system will break him and ultimately defeat him is all the more devastating. Newman was able to do that with every role — whether he was playing a rebel, a genius, a down on his luck drunk, or a cantankerous old man, he had a quality about him that made you root for his characters (or at least, as in the case of 2002’s Road to Perdition, in which he was an crime boss who orders a hit on the family of a loyal soldier, understand the logic behind his heinous decision). (more…)
