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This entry was posted on September 27, 2008 at 3:27 pm and is filed under FILM with tags Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman, Plastic Jesus, Stuart Rosenberg. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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shadowplay
September 27, 2008 at 4:35 pm
”The Hustler” is one of the best films of all time and Newman’s performance in that film is one of the very best you’ll ever see. Up there with Cagney, Fonda, Olivier, Brando. DeNiro, Jean Gabin anyone.
I liked him also in ”The Left-Handed Gun” and ”Hud” and also in ”The Verdict” in a late role. He’s also good in ”Love With A Proper Stranger” and although people diss the film, his role in ”The Color of Money” is one of the best performances by an actor playing a man getting old.
September 27, 2008 at 5:26 pm
I only saw The Hustler for the first time a couple of years ago, and I was blown away. Newman is on fire in that film; you can’t take your eyes off him. What a talent.
September 27, 2008 at 6:14 pm
The infamous Paul Newman /James Dean screen test
September 27, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Wow, that’s a sexy brace of man.
The Hustler is indeed impressive, with career-best work from Newman, Scott, Laurie, Gleason.
Billy Wilder to a friend: “I have terrible news: Bob Rossen made a good film.”
September 27, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Robert Rossen also directed the John Garfield-Abraham Polonsky classic ”Body and Soul”. ”All The King’s Men” is good as well. But Wilder had a point since after that the magic went.
But still his comeback in the 60’s is one of the most remarkable examples in film history. He went from Hollywood studio hack to art-filmmaker with ”The Hustler”(based on his own experiences as a pool shark) and his final film, the stunning ”Lilith” made when he was dying during the production, the critical and commercial failure killed him since it was obviously a deeply personal moving film. Both these films were shot by the great Eugan Schufftan, who’s worked with Lang, Ophuls, Ulmer, Sirk, Franju but may have done his most interesting work with Robert Rossen. He also wrote the source for ”The Cool World”.
Thankfully, Paul Newman ended up better off than the director of his masterpiece. I have to say that I feel that he was more handsome and goodlooking as an older man than in his younger days. Hope that’s not heretical. Obviously in his later days he’d be more frail and the like.
And let’s not forget his proudest achievements…he was on Nixon’s “enemies list”.
September 27, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Mambo is outrageously poor!
Jules Dassin seemed to have a degree of sympathy for Rossen, an unfriendly witness who caved under pressure and named names. It badly damaged his relationship with his children, who lost respect for him.
The Hustler, whatever authenticity it gained from Rossen’s life experience, is based on Walter Tevis’ fine novel. Tevis also provided the source for The Man Who Fell to Earth, and his Mockingbird is a book I’d love to film.
Lilith is indeed a fascinating, strange and deeply uncommercial work. It doesn’t move like an American film at all.
September 27, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Newman was quite good on stage. I saw him and Joanne Woodward and James Costigan in Costigan’s Baby Want a Kiss. A very good satirical comedy it got horrid reviews but ran for close to a year because of the stars. The title comes from a “Teach Your Parakeet to Talk” recording that Newman and Woodward dance to as if it were a cha-cha record.
September 27, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Sounds great!
September 27, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Mambo is great camp. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t lapse into its concluding voice-over monologue — “And so I went back, back, BACK to the world of the Mambo!”
September 27, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Well…I don’t know what I’d have done if I was in Rossen’s position. It’s very easy for people to judge. Jules Dassin I suppose can pass judgment on Rossen(though almost all the films he did in Europe suck). People should be more angry with the bosses and others who didn’t take a stand and backed it’s writers and directors and the like putting people in that position where they basically have their careers, reputation and ambition at stake. Of course unlike Kazan who made his best films after testifying(his way of atonement I suppose) Rossen became worse until the 60’s.
In any case his daughter did a commentary for ”The Hustler” DVD so she definitely did understand later I guess.
In any case I find it odd that you bring up the HUAC thing when you use a quote from Billy Wilder(“Of the Ten, two were talented the rest were just unfriendly!”).
Rossen got attraced to Walter Tevis’ book because he understood the life it described because it was based on his own days as a hustler. So it works anyway. He’s pretty much the auteur of these two films even if he isn’t in the case of his other films. I think if he had lived longer he could have become a major film-maker in the 60’s. These two films are to me more interesting than say Joseph Losey’s films of the early 60’s.
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It doesn’t move like an American film at all.
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Rossen was like many directors deeply excited by European films like Antonioni, Resnais, Bergman and the like so it’s in that school. It has a lot to do with the indepedent New York films at that period even if it is better budgeted. It has a perfect cast with nary a bad performance and it has Jean Seberg, Warren Beatty and Peter Fonda at their respective bests in my view.
The score is quite good too. In some respects it’s kind of Mankiewiczian only with less dialogue. The psychoanalysis, a sense of Stendhalian romanticism.
September 27, 2008 at 10:14 pm
I’m a big defender of Dassin’s European period, I should warn you! In fact, bizarrely, I just today made contact with the actress who played the little girl in 10.30pm Summer. Hope to publish an interview with her here.
Generally I feel sorry for Rossen — he tried his best to resist HUAC.
Kazan appears not to have believed he needed to atone for anything — although Dassin reports Gadge pestering him and trying to arrange a meeting. He needed someone to tell him he did the right thing, I guess, and Dassin wasn’t remotely interested in taking that job.
Wilder liked to make fun of both sides of any political argument, so his crack about the Hollywood ten is typical of this tendency. He did stand up to support Mankiewicz when there was a move to oust him from presidency of the Director’s Guild.
One striking thing in Lilith is Gene Hackman’s early performance – he explodes into the movie, almost disruptively. Al the performances are great, but the rest are kind of sleepy, and Hackman is ALL VIGOUR. It’s very effective.
September 27, 2008 at 10:19 pm
“Cahiers du Cinema” interviewed Jean Seberg about Lilith and she spoke of how harrowing it was to watch Rossen directing the film hile dying right before her eyes. The line “Everybody dies” is uttered by Beatty — and it’s of course “borrowed” from Abe Polonsky.
Mankiewicz’s role in the Hollywood Red Scare is most interesting as, being a liberal, he and others like him were the TRUE targets of right-wing wrath.
Naturally he made a film about it — People Wioll Talk.
September 27, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Found this scene from Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. Newman’s only in it foi a bit as it’s all about Joanne Woodward and Sean Patrick Leonard. It’s also the film closest to James Ivory’s heart as this is precisely the sort of family he came from and the mother-son conflict in this scene is one he experienced in life.
September 27, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Here’s Newman in a scene from Harper — a big hit at the time and much better IMO than his more noted films of the period like Cool Hand Luke. R.J. is his usual suave self (I must read his just-published memoir) and la jeune fille is Pamela Tiffin — one of my all time fave 60’s babes. She had a nice little career (whose high point was Wilder’s sublime One Two Three) and then, as they say, “she married well.”
September 27, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Harper is great fun, launched William Goldman as a star screenwriter, and lacks any of the pretence to seriousness of Newman’s James Dean type rebel roles.
Robert Wagner has apparently admitted to an affair with Stanwyck while making Titanic…
September 27, 2008 at 11:20 pm
I got a strange feeling watching that clip, that Newman had been looking at Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo. He almost does the shoulder-flex at the end. But his whole attitude seemed reminiscent.
Then I remembered that Newman played the Mifune role in the remake of Rashomon… now I’m sure I’m right!
September 27, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Very interesting observation. I’ll bet he saw Stray Dog.
September 28, 2008 at 12:10 am
Did you see Fred Schepisi’s HBO adaptation of Richard Russo’s Empire Falls. He’s doing an anarcho grandpa-grump schtick but he does it so well. Lovely film, lovely performance.
September 28, 2008 at 1:21 am
Alas, I haven’t. Realising now how much late Newman I’ve missed. Maybe the last I saw was Hudsucker Proxy? In which he’s easily the most relaxed, and best performance.
September 28, 2008 at 10:13 am
Nice and apt clip. Thanks.
September 28, 2008 at 10:26 am
I couldn’t believe it when I stumbled on it. I was just looking for something from Cool Hand Luke, sentimental reasons, and this suddenly appeared, trailing perfection in its wake.