Babylon, Liz Taylor, Paul Newman, Slap Shot

Actor Eric Roberts gushed over Margot Robbie’s performance as Nellie LaRoy in Babylon, comparing it to Elizabeth Taylor and Sandy Dennis’ landmark performances in Mike Nichols’ “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” And even though it’s early in the Oscar race, Roberts (who plays a small role in Babylon) is already predicting that Robbie will walk away with the Best Actress trophy. “I don’t watch myself anymore,” Roberts said. “But Damien Chazelle’s movie, I have watched that. I will also tell you that Margot Robbie is going to win an Academy Award for that. She gives the most incredible performance in ‘Babylon’ that I have ever seen. The two incredible actresses in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ gave perfect performances, and it’s on that level. She blew me away. I couldn’t believe how brilliant every minute of every day she was.” Source: indiewire.com

Despite the rather tepid one-two of The Helen Morgan Story and Until They Sail, Paul Newman was a rising commodity, and he was connected in trade papers with a number of roles: the male lead in Marjorie Morningstar; an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die; and an adaptation of Nelson Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side. As it happened, none would pan out (the roles went to Gene Kelly, John Gavin, and Laurence Harvey, respectively), but the increasing frequency of his name in the press evinced his gathering stardom. His next film would prove it. He won the role of Brick Pollitt, the alcoholic scion of a powerful southern family in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which writer-director Richard Brooks was adapting from the successful Broadway version of Tennessee Williams’s play. Elizabeth Taylor would play the heroine, Brick’s wife, Maggie the Cat, with a far more cinematic brand of sensuality than Barbara Bel Geddes, the original stage Maggie, could bring to the screen. But Brick was a tricky part. Ben Gazzara had created the role on Broadway, and he had theatrical credentials. But he had no value as a name; there was no way he’d get the movie role. A lengthy search for a screen Brick had ensued, and Newman was selected only when Brooks and Taylor’s husband, impresario Mike Todd, warned MGM that she would walk from the project if a Brick wasn’t found soon. “For Christ’s sake,” Todd told the studio brass, “we’re gonna blow this thing.” His threats worked: Newman, Brooks’s favorite for the role, was to be paid $17,000, his highest fee yet, for his work.

The shoot was scheduled for Hollywood in March, which would allow both Newman and Taylor to work on their southern accents with dialect coaches and generally to take the holidays for themselves. For Taylor, this meant a Christmas with Todd, whom she’d married in February (at age twenty-four, it was her third wedding), and their baby daughter, Liza. For Newman, it meant arduously working out the terms of a divorce from Jackie, who had finally agreed to give up her claim on him. The gossip press scented something in the air—the New York Post ran a photo of Newman and Woodward in December with a caption implying a wedding was impending. On January 16 they appeared on television together in “The 80 Yard Run,” a Playhouse 90 production of Irwin Shaw’s story about a college football hero’s unlikely romance with a sophisticated girl and the troubled marriage that results. 

It was their first filmed work to appear anywhere, and it proved what all the directors and fellow actors and Actors Studio colleagues had always said about them: Newman had indelible star power, but Joanne was by a good measure the more accomplished actor. She’s alive in an indeterminate number of ways, all fresh and exciting. In comparison, Newman is game and ardent and a bit stiff; you sense him planning and staging his emotions and reactions. He’s stunning to look at but he’s not her equal. Funnily enough, the differences between their levels of skill add credibility to the script. Joanne’s character is meant to be the sophisticate, and she winds up dumping her shallow Adonis for a pipe-smoking New York magazine editor (a Hugh Hefner type played, ironically, by Richard Anderson, the mama’s boy from Long, Hot Summer). Newman’s character, on the other hand, needs to develop a sense of himself and build a reservoir of self-respect and self-reliance. Dramatically, he needs to be less effective than she; the director Franklin Schaffner recognized this. Which isn’t to say Newman didn’t do a nice job: it would be his final appearance on live television and a thoroughly creditable one: lively and knowing and with a broad swath of blue-collar decency and plausible streaks of insecurity and shame.

Indeed he was acting. In real life he was surely caught up in drama and emotion that had little to do with what he played in that film. Chief was the knowledge that Joanne was carrying his baby. Sometime during the shoot of Long, Hot Summer, perhaps on that voluptuous brass bed, they had conceived a child—the reality of which may have been the final straw in Jackie’s agreeing to let him go. And now that there was to be an end to his marriage, he and Joanne could make wedding plans of their own: she’d take the train (she hated flying) to Las Vegas, and he’d meet her there after a side trip to Mexico to obtain his divorce. He did, however, confess to one emotion about his divorce from Jackie: “Guilty as hell” was how he described himself, adding “And I’ll carry it with me for the rest of my life.” Newman and Woodward's honeymoon was very happy, but it ended with a sting. 

Newman had to be back in Hollywood by early March to begin work on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Joanne would, of course, join him there in his tiny rented home—“a glorified shanty,” as Hedda Hopper described it—so that she could take part in the Oscar campaign for The Three Faces of Eve. But Joanne had a miscarrage and was admitted to St. George’s Hospital, while Newman had to be shooting Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. And then she returned from London to the States on her own. “That very nice doctor then put me on a plane and sent me home,” she said. “It was a terrible end to a lovely honeymoon.” Shooting with Brooks began in March with several members of the original stage cast—including Burl Ives and Madeleine Sherwood—joined by the likes of Judith Anderson and Jack Carson. At first Newman had trouble with Taylor because their styles of acting were so different. “He needed to rehearse and explore,” remembered Stewart Stern, who heard Newman’s complaints. “She would just be doing nothing in rehearsals except saying the lines and walking along. He’d go to Richard Brooks and say, ‘What’s going to happen when we get to a shot? She’s not doing anything.’ Brooks said, ‘Just wait a minute.’ He’d say ‘Action,’ and Paul’s eyes fell out because she’d be there with a full performance, and he never knew where she found it.”

The atmosphere was of great seriousness—as Newman learned when a joke he pulled on the set backfired. He was playing a scene in which the drunken Brick, who has been filled with guilt at the apparent suicide of his schoolmate and friend Skipper, brushes up against one of Maggie’s nightgowns. “I’m in my pajamas,” Newman remembered, “and I’m supposed to slam out of a door, and when I do, my wife’s nightgown, hanging on the door, brushes against my face. So during the rehearsal, when we got to that point, I suddenly tore off my pajama top and cry, ‘Skipper!’ There were twenty people on that set, and not one of them laughed. To them, this was the Method in action, and they stood in respectful silence.” If Newman’s penchant for awkward jokes didn’t impair the flow of work, the events of March 22 did, awfully. That day Mike Todd was killed in the crash of his private plane, the Lucky Liz; Taylor was to have been on the flight with him but had a cold and chose not to travel. She was, naturally, hysterical, and Brooks went to her house to console her. “You son of a bitch,” she greeted him. “I guess you’re here like all the rest of those bastards who’ve been here all day long!” Brooks tried to assure her that she, and not the film, was his chief concern. “It’s a movie, that’s all it is,” he said. “If you never want to come back, that’s fine.” “Well, I’m not,” she replied. “I’m never coming back. Fuck you and the movie and everyone else.”

The studio was, indeed, ready to pull the plug, but Brooks was able to mollify them temporarily by changing his shooting schedule and rewriting some scenes so that he could shoot without her for a couple of weeks. And then he got a call from Taylor’s secretary saying that the actress wanted to visit the set. “I think I’d like to come back to work,” she told him. “I don’t know how long I’ll be able to work. Maybe I’ll start and something will happen.” Brooks eased her back into the production with short bursts—an hour, then two. “By the end of the week,” he remembered, “she was working four or five hours. Never missed a day and was never late.” As impressed as he was with the transformation in Taylor between rehearsals and the actual shoot, Newman was even more awestruck by her work in completing the film. “She was extraordinary,” Newman recalled. “Her determination was stunning.” Two for the Seesaw, a hit Broadway play about the unlikely romance of a Nebraska businessman and a Greenwich Village dancer, was going to go onscreen, and Newman was to star opposite Elizabeth Taylor again. But somehow the project fell apart. 

Indeed, Newman could have made an impressive career of the films he didn’t make over the span of the next half-decade. To wit, he was supposed to appear in The Sixth Man, a biopic about Ira Hayes, the Native American marine who helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima; The Hook, a Korean War melodrama with Sidney Poitier; Sylvia, a romantic detective thriller; The Last Frontier, based on the Howard Fast novel about the U.S. Army’s war on the Cheyenne; the political melodrama Seven Days in May; an adaptation of The Wall, John Hersey’s novel about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; The Enemy Within, an adaptation of Robert F. Kennedy’s book about his racketeering investigations; The Great Race, Blake Edwards’s gigantic chase movie farce; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, from the John Le Carré novel; After the Fall, from Arthur Miller’s play about a man married to a ravishing second wife (inspired by Marilyn Monroe); an adaptation of Tropic of Cancer costarring Carroll Baker; Night at Camp David, in which he would play an aide to an American president who may be approaching a nervous breakdown; The Sand Pebbles, in the role that Steve McQueen ultimately won; and even In Cold Blood, when Columbia Pictures thought that Newman and McQueen combined would be boffo box office as the cold-blooded killers Dick and Perry. Even Federico Fellini had wanted Newman for the lead role in La Dolce Vita, but Riama Films imposed Marcello Mastroianni. And François Truffaut discussed with his producers by repeatedly suggesting they try to build their adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 around Newman, even going so far as to suggest setting it in New York. Only a handful of these films would get made—and without him—but their sheer numbers give an insight into the sort of stature he was achieving. —Paul Newman: A Life (2009) by Shawn Levy

Slap Shot (review by Gary Arnold in 1977): "This tendentious comic fable about the comeback of a failing minor-league hockey team under the desperately mischievous leadership of an aging player-coach called Reggie Dunlop, finds Paul Newman in winning form while the director seems to be running a deliriously hypocritical fever. "Slap Shot" comes at you like a boisterous drunk. At first glance it appears harmlessly funny, in an extravagantly foul-mouthed sort of way. However, there's a mean streak beneath the cartoon surface that makes one feel uneasy about humoring this particular drunk for too long. Luckily for the filmmakers, audiences may decline to equate themselves with the hockey fans shown clamoring for brawls and buffoonery. There's strain and discontent in the movie that seems unwarranted and damaging. It's as if Hill couldn't suppress his resentment at giving public what he presumes it wants. Like their protagonist, Hill and screenwriter Nancy Dowd, try to engineer a con, but their motives and techniques are less respectable. Dunlop is scheming to save the jobs of his players. 

The filmmakers exploit Dunlop far more questionably than he exploits the Chiefs and their followers, because they attempt to stretch the story into a would-be devastating social parable to no avail. One can't even be certain what Braden's climactic beau geste, a striptease on the ice, is supposed to signify. If may be a gesture of ironic contempt or a gesture of whimsical resignation. For reasons that remain baffling, it appears to patch up his marriage. The ultimate weakness of the film is that it's calculated to be a self-fulfilling cynical prophecy: Box-office success can be taken as justification of the assumption that moviegoers only want to play dirty. Well, not necessarily; it all depends. It is unreasonable to expect the public to feel guilty because Hill and Dowd insist on slapping the hands that feed them." Source: washingtonpost.com

Paul Newman is one of the few stars we've got in a normal emotional range. The Actors Studio may have contributed to the situation of many of our leading actors, such as AI Pacino—they can do desperately troubled psychological states: gloom, defeat, manic... but they're so inward you can't see them getting through a competently managed average day. Newman's range has become more normal with the years; he has grown by going deeper into the emotions of ordinary men. Newman is too modest and too straight inside for the strutting blowhard of Buffalo Bill; Warren Beatty, who's not as skilled an actor, could have done the role better. Newman is one of the least vain of movie stars; he used to smirk sometimes, but it wasn't vanity, it was nervous self-mockery, a shameful recognition of the effect that his handsomeness could have on other people. What Newman does in Slap Shot is casual American star-acting at its peak; he's as perfectly assured a comedian as Bogart in The African Queen, even though the role isn't particularly well written and the picture itself isn't in the same class. 

In The Sting, he was smooth and charming, but he wasn't a con man for a minute. What he does as Reggie shows he has now the confidence, the control, the awareness. The essence of his performance is that Reggie has never grown up. Reggie is scarred and bruised, and there are gold rims on his chipped teeth; you don't see much of his eyes. But with Newman leaner, and his bone structure more prominent, the childlike quality is inner, and the warmth comes from deeper down. Whizzing around on the ice, Reggie is a raucous American innocent. He's thin-skinned but a bit thick-headed, a good-natured macho clown who can't conceal his vulnerability. Newman gives Reggie a desperate, forlorn quality. He suggests an over-age jock's pain from accumulated injuries and the despair under Reggie's manic behavior. The story premise is that the steel mill in the mythical town of Charlestown (most of the film was actually shot in Johnstown, Pennsylvania) is closing, and the Chiefs, a third-rate team, dependent on the support of the local workers, are going to fold at the end of the season. 

Reggie convinces himself that if the team has a winning streak a buyer may be found, and in order to improve morale he bluffs the men into believing that a Florida syndicate is interested. They begin to play dirty and to draw crowds. Shabby as the team is, it would mean a lot to the decaying town, but we don't get to see this or feel it. The director skims the material, as if he were directing from a low-flying helicopter. Actually, the shutdown of a mill might be expected to improve hockey attendance; laid-off workers have to get out and do something, and a minor-league hockey ticket isn't that expensive, even if you're on union benefits, or welfare. People kept going to the movies during the Great Depression. The plot of Slap Shot and its asserted social theme never gel together. We're told that the fans only want blood and gore. 

Yet toward the end, when Reggie inspires his men to go out and play "old-time hockey," they don't get the chance to play it that way. The film is too buffoonish to care about its own theme. And as Jennifer Warren plays Reggie's wife, she's so self-contained she doesn't look as if she'd ever given him the time of day. Hill isn't strong on male-female attachments. The use of hockey as a metaphor for what has been going on in movies is nebulous at best. Hill is a technician, not an artist. Yet he's not just putting down the industry hacks who use shock effects-he's putting down the artists like Scorsese who use violence organically. I don't know that I've ever seen a picture so completely geared to giving the public "what it wants" with such an antagonistic feeling behind it. The theme is that the public no longer cares about the sport--it wants goonish vaudeville and mayhem. There is a grim relentlessness, and expletives are sprinkled around to give it a funky seasoning. Perhaps as a result, the public rejected the film. Hill lacks the conviction or the temperament for all this brutal buffoonishness, and he can't hold the picture together; what does is the warmth supplied by Paul Newman, as Reggie Dunlop, whose likableness in the role is infectious. —"When The Lights Go Down: Film Writings" (1980) by Pauline Kael