Newman’s Own, by John Ostrander
I liked Paul Newman. I should’ve hated him; bastard was too damn good looking and should’ve given me an inferiority complex. The fact is I didn’t always like how I looked but what I learned was that he didn’t always like the way he looked, either. Newman felt his looks got in the way of his being an actor, affected the roles he was offered, the roles he wanted to play. He was a character actor trapped in a leading man’s body. That allowed me to identify with him as a person as well as an actor.
Paul Newman died about two weeks back. I expect you heard. He had a long and varied career as an actor and not every film was great. I won’t pretend I’ve seen them all but I do have my favorites among them. While I liked Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting and admired his collaboration with Robert Redford, those films aren’t on my list of faves. Nor is The Hustler or The Color of Money, in both of which he played Fast Eddie Felson. It intrigued me – the idea of portraying the same character 25 years apart but they don’t appeal to me enough personally to make my own list of personal favorites.
As I said in last week’s column, our likes and dislikes about anything – film, comics, food, whatever – can say more about ourselves than about those likes and dislikes. So I’m not sure what this list says about me. What follows is not a critical evaluation of the films or their place in Newman’s body of work. They’re just the ones I like best and the reasons why.
Hombre. 1967. Martin Ritt directed this western adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel. In it, Newman plays John Russell, a white man raised by Apaches. For various plot reasons, Russell winds up on a stagecoach with a varied lot that includes Diane Cilento, Martin Balsam, and Frederic March. The stagecoach gets robbed by a gang led by Richard Boone who is after the money that March, as a crooked Indian agent, has accumulated. Russell foils the robbery, recovers the money, and becomes de facto leader of the others as they try to get out of the desert, pursued by Boone and his gang.
Newman has a great quality of stillness in the movie. His character is capable of sudden and effective bursts of violence but I was also taken with the sense of patient waiting that Newman projected at moments. Very still with little or no body movement, yet he had a sense of attention and focus. He made stillness active.
He’s also wonderfully deadpan and has some great moments in the film as a result. At one point, the stagecoach passengers led by Newman’s Russell are at the top of an abandoned mine. Boone’s outlaws have them cut off and Boone, under a white flag, climbs to the shack to dictate terms. Martin Balsam’s character negotiates and, at the end, Russell quietly tells Boone he has a question. “How are you planning to get back down that hill?” Boone turns tail and flees down the stairs and Russell puts two bullets into him.
That was cold and that was slick and I enjoyed it so much I later stole it and put it into one of the GrimJack stories. Worries me some for what that says about me, but there you go. The character of John Russell definitely influenced the character of GrimJack. I’m not going to tell you it’s a great film but it’s a fave of mine.
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