Paul Newman: one of the best actors of all time

For Empire’s February 2023 issue, we asked readers to vote for the best actors of all time – the silver-screen stars that always deliver, that have changed the game, and whose distinctive talents cannot be replicated. And the winners, in no particular order, are…

Marilyn Monroe

Notable roles: Rose Loomis (Niagara), Lorelei Lee (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), Pola Debevoise (How to Marry a Millionaire), The Girl (The Seven Year Itch), Sugar "Kane" Kowalczyk (Some Like It Hot), Roslyn Tabor (The Misfits)

Oscars won: 0

Iconic line: "I wanna be loved by you, alone… Boop-boop-a-doop!" (Some Like It Hot)

A true movie star, in every sense, Marilyn Monroe's earth-shattering fame sometimes threatened to overshadow everything else – but beneath the ‘blonde bombshell’ sex symbol was the heart of a true artist, who was comfortable with her sexuality and femininity and used it to brilliant ends, in comedies and dramas.

Bette Davis

Notable roles: Margo Channing (All About Eve), Julie Marsden (Jezebel), Leslie Crosby (The Letter), Charlotte Vale (Now, Voyager), Baby Jane Hudson (What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?), Mildred Rogers (Of Human Bondage)

Oscars won: 2 (Jezebel, Dangerous)

Iconic line: “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” (All About Eve)

Seldom has an actor emanated so much force on-screen: Bette Davis was a cinematic cyclone, sweeping through scenes, leaving co-stars dazed and debris in her wake. She took on one complex role after another, not caring if the characters were unlikeable, and aced them all. Her work still bites today.

Humphrey Bogart

Notable roles: Rick Blaine (Casablanca), Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep), Frank McCloud (Key Largo), Charlie Allnutt (The African Queen), Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Duke Mantee (The Petrified Forest), Harry Dawes (The Barefoot Contessa), Roy Earle (High Sierra), Harry 'Steve' Morgan (To Have And Have Not)

Oscars won: 1 (The African Queen)

Iconic line: “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid” (Casablanca)

The thing about Bogart is that his “iconic line” is basically every line he ever said. His laconic, tough-guy energy gave every line a spin of cool defiance that screenwriters rose to match. He wasn’t the tallest, strongest, or most handsome, and at times he barely seemed to move – but you could never take your eyes off him.

Marlon Brando

Notable roles: Stanley Kowalski (A Streetcar Named Desire), Terry Malloy (On The Waterfront), Vito Corleone (The Godfather), Colonel Kurtz (Apocalypse Now), Jor-El (Superman: The Movie)

Oscars won: 2 (On The Waterfront, The Godfather)

Iconic line: “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” (The Godfather)

Among the most influential screen actors of all-time, Brando hit Hollywood like a hammer in the early 1950s – fundamentally changing the definition of “good” acting, despite Truman Capote calling him "dumb as hell." Brando’s deeply-felt naturalism was magnetic, and all his famous difficulty was worth it for his undeniable power. 

Paul Newman

Notable roles: “Fast” Eddie Felson (The Hustler, The Color Of Money), Reggie Dunlop (Slap Shot), Frank Galvin (The Verdict), Hud Bannon (Hud), Henry Gondorff (The Sting), Luke Jackson (Cool Hand Luke), Butch Cassidy (Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid), John Rooney (Road To Perdition)

Oscars won: 1 (The Color Of Money)

Iconic line: “You don’t know what winning is, Bert. You’re a loser. ‘Cause you’re dead inside! Too high, Bert - the price is too high.”  (The Hustler)

Cool, laconic, capable of eating way more hard-boiled eggs than you – he was a bona fide movie star, film director, race car driver, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. Oscar Levant wrote that Newman initially was hesitant to leave New York for Hollywood, and that Newman had said, "Too close to the cake. Also, no place to study." The Hustler was the portrait of a sad man who's afraid to be a winner, that type perhaps was a first in the cannons of American cinema. Source: www.empireonline.com

While Hud does not shoot Homer in the film Hud, Lonnie nonetheless assigns him responsibility for his granddad’s demise. Old Homer moans and dies while lying across Hud’s lap. Lon pulls his dead granddad’s head out of Hud’s lap into his, accusing Hud of “fixing it so that he didn’t want to live anymore.” James Wong Howe gives us a high angle of Hud standing and moving to his right toward the Cadillac’s headlamps.  We cut to an instant of blackness before Hud enters the frame screen right, camera looking up. Hud stops in the center of this extraordinary shot, starkly but flatteringly lit against black, looking down at Lon and us: “You don’t know the whole story.” And then adds: “I guess you could say I helped him about as much as he helped me.” By now Martin Ritt may have assumed the audience would feel that no backstory could excuse Hud. But we must draw a vital distinction between explanation and justification in order to consider more thoroughly why Ritt’s desired effect was “lost in translation” from novel to film. First, the Hollywood-conditioned audience was likely pulling for Hud to be a misunderstood hero who will be redeemed by a good woman. Except for the attempted rape scene, for example, Newman is always photographed in classic three-point lighting, which enhances the star’s attractiveness. 

After the rape attempt, Hud spots Alma waiting at the bus station; “I’m sorry,” he says, cocking his hat. She reasserts her own libido and female power by stating an irony: she might have seduced him eventually “without the roughhouse.” Her silent stare at Hud when he responds, “Why didn’t you speak up sooner?,” fairly clenches Patricia Neal’s Academy Award for Best Actress. “I’ll remember you, Honey,” he says as she boards the bus, camera looking down on him from within. “You’re the one that got away.” Hud, the outsider, drifts to screen right and out of frame as bus and camera take Alma mercifully away from this “cold-blooded bastard.” But the original audience might still have wondered whether some part of Hud, a remorseful, tragic hero, really means, “You’re the one I could have loved had I not injured you so”? 

In any case, the film turns the novel’s antagonist into an ironic protagonist. This strongly suggests that Hud’s having accidentally killed his older brother Norman (Lon’s father) in a drunken car crash at age seventeen accounts for his need to protect himself from the guilt and loss. Homer “took that hard,” but reviled Hud long before the accident, we are surprised to learn. There are several instances of Hud’s aberrant behavior that might, with a different mode of narration, elicit compassion: Homer raised him harshly, kept him “driving that feedwagon” instead of letting him go to college (Horseman). In the novel Homer had sent him to the Pacific in World War II where he was left traumatized. Paul Newman’s biographer Daniel O’Brien writes, the actor “felt the audience had only seen the ‘cool’ superficial Hud Bannon, failing to pick up on the dark, amoral character underneath.” Newman said in 1967: "I got a lot of letters after that picture from kids saying Hud was right. The old man’s a jerk and the kid’s a schmuck. That son of a bitch that I hated they loved. So the audience makes a film their own – it depends what’s going on at the time in the country." 

Ritt, Ravetch, Frank Jr., and Newman transformed Hud somewhat out of the novel’s sociopath into what I call a wounded narcissist with antisocial traits, a role that proved the perfect vehicle for Paul Newman’s “sensitive rebel” persona, even if here Ritt thought to cast Newman against type as a raw villain. For in their urgency to portray Hud as no mere two-dimensional reprobate like his prototype in the novel, the filmmakers re-created the novel’s antagonist into the movie’s protagonist, yet evidently expecting the audience to condemn him nonetheless. As we know, in rebellious youth culture, the meaning of “cool” is that temporary ironic reversal of the very virtues and values the elders are trying to imprint onto the next generation, as if to question why the better part of wisdom is about never getting to have any fun. By the early 1960s, to be “cool,” perhaps, seemed integral to that separation and individuation process. It is important to understand that Hud’s original audience, did not need to endorse all of these behaviors in any literal sense in order for Hud’s acts to symbolize, even self-caricature, its own rebellious impulses. 

What was dominant in the post-World War II West was that version of capitalism known as Keynesianism, a holdover from the New Deal. It was based on economist John Maynard Keynes’s notion that capitalism, while the best of all possible economies, nevertheless needed government intervention, progressive taxation, and regulation to balance private profit with public well-being: that is, to minimize negative and optimize positive externalities. “An external cost occurs,” writes economist Steven L. Slavin, “when the production or consumption of some good or service inflicts costs on a third party without compensation. An external benefit occurs when some of the benefits derived from the production of some good or service are enjoyed by a third party”. As Granddad Homer tells Lon early in the film, “I expect you’ll get your share of what’s good,” implying the capitalist ideal of pursuing personal gain without costing others: 

“A boy like you deserves it.” Indeed, after a night of carousing with, and defending, Hud, Granddad tells Lon, “You’re going to have to make up your own mind someday what’s right and what’s wrong.” Homer in fact speaks for the filmmakers when he warns the teen, “Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire.” A large contingent of the New Left youth, likewise, would succumb to what Adam Curtis analyzes in the BBC documentary series The Century of the Self (2002). While some activists remained altruistically motivated, and counterculture hippies were communal, according to Curtis, many left-wing participants despaired of any outward revolution in favor of social change brought about through each individual’s inward liberation from outmoded social constraints. Technological advances in mass production allowed for a certain “customized” consumerism touting everyone’s unique individuality. Christopher Lasch likewise studied the mass psychology of the 1960s and 1970s as having grown dialectically out of older forms of neuroses like hysteria and obsessional neuroses, associated with older phases of capitalism, to the growing psychiatric concern with narcissism. 

In 2003, screenwriters Ravetch and Frank Jr. reflected back that something of this spirit was emerging during the making of Hud: “We felt the country was gradually moving into a kind of self-absorption, indulgence, and greed – which, of course, fully blossomed in the ’eighties and ’nineties’” (Baer 260). And narcissism itself indicates some psychological wounding at its heart contracted, as Marcuse argued in Eros and Civilization (1955), in a political economy experienced as “surplus repression.” The narcissist,” writes Christopher Lasch, “has no interest in the future because, in part, he has so little interest in the past”. It is as though the logical extension of Martin Ritt’s Old Left contempt for Haight-Ashbury was the Weather Underground, about which Lasch writes: “The atmosphere in which the weathermen lived – an atmosphere of violence, danger, drugs, sexual promiscuity, moral and psychic chaos – derived not so much from an older revolutionary tradition as from the turmoil and narcissistic anguish of contemporary America”.

As we have seen, Hud freely obeys his impulses, confident of simply improvising his way out of consequences. Homer argues not merely from neighborliness but from wider social responsibility: “And risk startin’ a’ epidemic in the entire country?”, which would be a severely negative economic externality. Hud argues from what he cynically regards as business norms: “Why, this whole country is run on epidemics, where you been?” In this sense, Hud, released on the eve of the JFK assassination, is not just a modern western but very much a film of the long 1950s at the “hard gate” of 1960s unrest, soon to be cynically embroiled in disappointed idealism-turned-mass-narcissistic indulgence. Interestingly, Larry McMurtry felt that sacrificing the herd, Homer’s life work, was the moral imperative. But though he admired the film, the author of Horseman assigned fault to the screenwriters for “following my novel too closely.” As Lasch maintains, “Many radicals still direct their indignation against the authoritarian family, repressive sexual morality, literary censorship, the work ethic, and other foundations of bourgeois order that have been weakened or destroyed by advanced capitalism itself” (xvi). Hud’s “rebellion” was therefore understandable in the abstract, even if such was the pseudo-rebellion of the new culture of narcissism across the political spectrum. —“You Don’t Know the Story”: Horseman, Pass By and the Misprision of Hud (2021) by Randall Spinks. Source: https://brightlightsfilm.com

Paul Newman: "In those days theatrical agents took the train up from Grand Central Station to New Haven to scout the new talent at the drama school. There was apparently at least one in attendance for one of Yale’s four performances of Beethoven, a fellow from the Liebling-Wood Agency, Jim Merrick. He came backstage afterwards, gave me his card, and suggested I come see him in Manhattan. The Liebling-Wood Agency was a powerhouse on Broadway. It represented many of the era’s leading playwrights—such as Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Yip Harburg—as well as some of the hottest stage talents, including Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. So I began making day trips to the city just to test the waters, on those days when I didn’t have classes. I read a theatrical trade paper called Actor’s Cues to find out about open casting calls, and went to many of them at CBS and NBC. They were airing a lot of live television dramas then being shot and broadcast from New York, but I never got any jobs from these open calls. Jim Merrick wanted to sign me to the Liebling-Wood Agency, but his bosses didn’t want to make a commitment to me. In the meantime, unbeknownst to Liebling-Wood, I’d also been seen by another talent agent, Maynard Morris, from the big MCA operation—but again with no commitment or obligation. One afternoon, Maynard sent me out to see a theater producer that the Liebling-Wood Agency had already had me visit. That’s when I decided to leave Liebling-Wood. That summer, I told Jackie I wanted to give New York a real try. For the time being, she would remain in New Haven with Scott, while I moved into a tiny apartment on the corner of Spring Street and Sixth Avenue, what’s now considered SoHo. It was incredibly tiny and I stayed there with two other people—a Yale young woman named Joan Szell and her boyfriend, who were summer housesitting for the actual tenants. Jackie had an aunt who lived on Staten Island and we moved there. Plus, someone we met suggested I might be able to get a job as a model. I was broke. I owned only one suit. And when I got offered a cover shoot for a detective magazine, I took it. I was posed with a cute girl in a brassiere, and I was supposed to be grabbing her arm. I was really embarrassed—but they paid me $150, which was quite a bit of money then. I walked out of that studio thinking, “Boy, I can go out now and buy me a new suit for $39.95!” 

"I became a member of the Actors Studio, the extraordinary acting study group headed by Lee Strasberg and famous for preaching the Method—the art of using your own memories and feelings to inhabit a role. How, I still wonder, did I ever pass that audition? They didn’t, and couldn’t, have responded to my acting. I’m sure the other actors there wondered, “How did this son of a bitch get in here?” But when I mixed my confidence and energy with my real emotions—terror and fright (which came out as rage)—something genuine was going on, even if just by accident. I felt the Actors Studio members were the real actors, the bohemians, and they saw this kid from Shaker Heights wearing his seersucker suit and, well, I was in their world but definitely I was not a part of it." —"Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of An Ordinary Man" (2022) by Paul Newman

Frank & Marilyn: The Lives, the Loves

Marilyn received dispiriting career news: early in 1957, when Oscar nominations for 1956 were announced, she wasn’t on the list. Even worse: fellow Actors Studio actress Carroll Baker was nominated for Baby Doll, a role Marilyn had wanted. Perhaps the coup de grace: Don Murray, the newcomer launched to stardom thanks to being Marilyn’s leading man, was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Poor Marilyn! “I never understood why she wasn’t nominated,” reflected Murray in later years. Both the movie and director Logan were also ignored by the Academy. “Marilyn had defied the system,” noted David Brown, “and you needed the studio behind you all the way to get nominations.” Don Murray felt that not only should Marilyn have been nominated, she should have won. “I thought Marilyn’s performance was so much richer, had so much more variety, and it was so much more interesting than Ingrid Bergman’s character in Anastasia,” he said. 

Unknown to many, Marilyn Monroe became a temporary but rather unstable member of the Rat Pack. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, an enemy of Sinatra, wrote that he dated some of the great beauties and stars of their day, including Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe. “Others,” she claimed, “were fluffy struggling dolls of show business.” Although Joe DiMaggio socialized with Sinatra, he never completely trusted him, especially around Marilyn, causing a rift in the trio. Marilyn wanted to film What a Way to Go with Sinatra, but one night she decided that she preferred Gene Kelly as her co-star. At 20th Century Fox, executives wanted to co-star Marilyn and Sinatra in Pink Tights, a remake of Betty Grable’s 1943 Coney Island. Marilyn was open to the idea of co-starring with Frank in a film in which her character evolves from a prim schoolteacher to a torch-singing cabaret artiste. Frank’s moods—testy, difficult, unpredictable, rebellious, stubborn—were part of the package, as were Marilyn’s. Lauren Bacall, with her born-in-the-Bronx traditional Jewish upbringing, had been accustomed to far less volatile behavior when it came to relationships. Bogie had been “a pussycat.” Bacall had been romanced by Sinatra, but they broke up their announced engagement.

Since marrying Marilyn, Arthur had bought a second farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut, an upgrade from his previous home, where he and his ex-wife had lived since 1947, after the success of his play All My Sons. Pleased that Arthur’s property lent itself to improvement, she had an idea. Since she’d once met fabled architect Frank Lloyd Wright, she contacted him with a request—would he be interested in designing her “dream home”? He traveled to the site and came up with a rendering of a home that perhaps a Joseph Schenck or a Darryl Zanuck could afford. She loved it. But it was hardly Arthur Miller’s idea of a “dream home.” And the cost! The pool alone would have been $250,000 ($2.2 million in today’s dollars).  Marilyn faced reality: since Wright’s dream house was out of the question, she suggested to Arthur that they make some improvements: raise the roof of the house, add a guest bedroom, get a TV set, and she would do some inexpensive redecorating that would require very little reconstruction. Miller was agreeable. He was handy, describing himself as “a born carpenter and mechanic.” He’d been building things since he was seven.

When Glenn Ford announced Marilyn as the winner of the Golden Globe, there was prolonged applause as she made her way to the podium. When Ford handed her the statuette, she smiled broadly, turned to the audience, and clutched the award to her bosom. In a breathy voice, she said, “Thank you with all my heart.” According to Peter Lawford’s manager, Milton Ebbins, whose comments echoed those of Sinatra’s crony Jilly Rizzo, Frank was in love with Marilyn. Frank thought Marilyn was a great beauty in the same league than Ava Gardner. Marilyn confided in those closest to her that Frank was a skillful, unselfish lover. When they asked how Frank and DiMaggio compared, she purportedly replied: “He’s no Joe.” Frank dared to employ a highly dangerous tactic: he began having sex with Pat Lawford—Peter’s wife, RFK’s sister—hoping he could get her to use her influence with her brothers to let up on the mob. What he got was the undying enmity of Robert Kennedy, who learned about it when J. Edgar Hoover played him audiotapes of a Sinatra's phone conversation with Sam Giancana, during which the information was disclosed. Bobby demanded that his brother sever all ties with Frank. 

Frank needed some breathing room, and he began a highly publicized “romance” with twenty-five-year-old dancer/actress Juliet Prowse. They even became “engaged.” She later stated emphatically that the whole affair had been strictly for publicity, for both of them, never anything more. Prowse would later date her co-star Elvis Presley while filming GI Blues, with everyone waiting to see what Elvis would do next in his career after military service. Elvis's one and only meeting with Marilyn Monroe also took place backstage at the Paramount lot in June 1960. In GI Blues, Elvis  played Army Specialist Tulsa McLean opposite her nightclub dancer Lili (Juliet Prowse), and their onscreen romance was mirrored behind the scenes. Prowse later said: "Elvis and I had an affair... We had a sexual attraction like two healthy young people, but he was already a victim of his fans. We always met in his room and never went out." Frank's affair with Juliet Prowse apparently did not fool Marilyn for long, because she and Frank got back together. 

It was around this time that Sinatra consulted his loyal attorney for an opinion on what he was now contemplating: marrying Monroe. Meanwhile, when the lawyer realized that Sinatra wasn’t joking about marrying Marilyn—he wasn’t acting on a whim or an impulse; he was dead serious—he pointed out to his client how marrying her could be problematic. However, Frank’s mind was made up. If Marilyn was his wife, he said, chances were that everyone would back off, give her some space, and allow her to get herself together. They wouldn’t dare do otherwise. Frank told his lawyer Lew Wasserman that he wanted the marriage to take place in Europe (probably Paris); that way he wouldn’t have to deal with DiMaggio. He told Wasserman to make inquiries about where the best place would be to get married quietly and assured the attorney that he was going to give the whole matter a lot of thought. He likened this decision to a film project in development and said that he was going to talk to Marilyn about it. “And then we’ll see what happens…” No one knows whether that discussion between Marilyn and Frank—did she really want to marry him?—ever took place. According to Jilly Rizzo, Frank did propose before the year 1961 was out, and he was surprised when she said no to him.

Frank was completely supportive of Marilyn’s imminent return to the screen, although he, and the rest of the industry, knew Fox was drowning. Peter Levathes, the executive recently appointed head of production, was “a dark and brooding man,” recalled David Brown. Eventually, Marilyn had won not only the battle with Fox but the respect of the industry. Norma Jean had proven her point: Marilyn Monroe was not a “disposable” star. It’s unlikely that so many questions would have been raised surrounding her untimely death if her efforts at resuscitating her career had failed. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Bobby Kennedy, “with his curiosity, his sympathy, his absolute directness of response to distress, in some way got through the glittering mist as few did.” Bobby certainly seemed to have a crush on Marilyn. She denied rumors of the affair, although she knew it was the talk of Hollywood. According to columnist Victor Lasky, "The White House was shaken by Marilyn’s death. The truth was that there had indeed been a cover-up, one designed to protect the Kennedys by hiding their relationship with the actress."

During the course of that ill-fated July weekend at Cal Neva, several disturbing incidents took place. In her bungalow, number 52, in front of Frank and the Lawfords, Marilyn removed several syringes from her purse, placed them on a table, and, with the cool precision of a surgeon, calmly filled them with the contents of a few “vitamin” capsules she had broken open. They all gasped as she proceeded to inject herself in the arm. Sinatra couldn’t believe what he just saw. “Don’t worry,” she said airily, “I know what I’m doing. It gets into your system faster that way.” Frank immediately phoned Dr. Greenson: Marilyn was a mess! What the hell was Greenson doing? She ought to be in a sanatorium! Frank had done everything he could to make her stay at Cal Neva comfortable, including issuing special orders for healthful meals to be sent to her bungalow. That was Mama Dolly’s cure-all: eat, you’ll feel better! The food, though, was hardly touched. Things seemed to spin out of control and Marilyn overdosed on barbiturates. The Lawfords were panic-stricken, but Frank knew what to do—along with Peter and Pat, he walked her around the room, keeping her awake with coffee. “She wants to kill herself,” said Frank, “I’ve been there…”

Late in 1963, Angie Dickinson—whose friendship with Sinatra would stand the test of time—arrived in New York to promote her MCA/Universal film Captain Newman, M.D. Interestingly, the picture was based on Dr. Ralph Greenson’s World War II experiences with soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Ms. Dickinson said how proud she was of the picture, saying that it was one she would like the president to see (there was no question that she wasn’t talking about the president of Universal). Ms. Dickinson’s relationship with JFK was very much a topic of conversation within the inner sanctums of MCA/Universal. Ms. Dickinson spoke openly. She’d liked Marilyn, and had seen her not long before she died. “She looked gorgeous,” she said, “but when I spoke with her, she didn’t recognize me. There was no expression in her eyes. Her eyes had a blankness.” 

From the personal files of Marilyn Monroe: one of her diary entries dated June 7, 1962, reports a fall in the shower between 2 and 3 a.m. resulting in swelling and tenderness of the nose. Monroe was brought to Dr. Gurdin by her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson. Monroe was referred to Drs. Conti and Steinberg for X-rays. For her visit to the radiologists she used the alias ‘Miss Joan Newman,’ and that name appears on the paperwork with Monroe’s Brentwood home address. The pseudonym was probably inspired by the golden couple Paul Newman/Joanne Woodward. In the memory-filled, hazy, wee small hours of the morning, how often must Frank have thought about the girl he’d failed to save. Garson Kanin (alongside his wife actress Ruth Gordon) years later recalled, “I know that Frank was very sensitive about anyone bringing up Marilyn Monroe’s name. A friend of mine once made that mistake—it was at a dinner party, and Frank and his wife Barbara were among the guests—and my inquisitive friend told me that the look he got from Frank was scary, ‘I thought he was going to hit me,’ he said. But for Frank, I think that awful Cal Neva weekend was like a wound that never healed.” —Frank & Marilyn: The Lives, the Loves, and the Fascinating Relationship of Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe (2022) by Edward Z. Epstein

"The Fabelmans" review, The Age of Movies

Any Spielberg fan knows these beats: an early fascination with cinema; the move to Arizona; a difficult parental dynamic, with a driven father and loving-but-conflicted mother; ambitious 8mm films made with sisters, neighbors, and anyone else willing to lend a hand; a much less pleasant move from Arizona to California; teenage years fueled by creativity, but also impacted by a feeling of outsider status; and, ultimately, the first steps into a world he would eventually dominate. The Fabelmans checks all boxes, but it is not merely Portrait of Spielberg as a Young Man. This is also a warm, moving drama about the need to make art, whatever its cost. Sam (Gabriel LaBelle), the Spielberg stand-in, sees no other option. Filmmaking is not, as his father maintains, “a hobby.” What might be most striking about The Fabelmans is how normal the experiences of young Sam play for the audience. It begins in 1952 as Sam’s parents, Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano), bring the boy to his first big-screen movie—fittingly, the widescreen spectacle of enjoyable hokum that is The Greatest Show on Earth. What hits young Sam the hardest is the unforgettable train crash.  

Burt is a complex figure––loving yet stern, and different from Mitzi in almost every way. Burt keeps his emotions inside, whereas Mitzi is all emotion, even when it hurts. Sam carries bits of all traits, sometimes seeming closely linked to his father, other times his mother. It is fascinating to watch Spielberg pull back the curtain on his life as a child, warts and all. The entire family contributes to Sam’s filmmaking, even more so once they move to Arizona. This land of dry heat and desert is ideal for Westerns and war movies, both of which Sam makes with striking ingenuity. By this point the act of moviemaking courses through Sam’s veins. Indeed, as his mother’s brash uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) explains, the need to create art is in Sam’s genes. From this moment on Sam’s world becomes increasingly splintered. His parents face a marriage crisis and Sam discovers that the camera sometimes captures moments meant to be hidden. Things become even thornier when the family uproots once again, this time to California.

It is best not to spoil how the film concludes, but it is both surprisingly subtle and dramatically bold. Spielberg avoids the over-emotional payoff that has often upended the late stages of his recent films. What’s onscreen is only the conclusion of the first part of its protagonist’s life. So, smartly, Spielberg wraps things up with a delightful sequence and a genuinely winning final gag. Every Spielberg feature, from The Sugarland Express to West Side Story, reveals elements of its creator’s passions. Not until now, though, has Spielberg filmed what is essentially a memoir. Sam’s story is universal, but the real emotional pull from The Fabelmans comes from knowing that everything here––the short films created with “spit and glue,” the family strife, even high school bullying––led to an ability to create some of the most successful and beloved movies ever made. Source: slantmagazine.com

When we go to a play or a movie we expect a heightened, stylized language; the dull realism of the streets is unendurably boring. It’s the subversive gesture carried further, the moments of excitement sustained longer and extended into new meanings. We learn to dread Hollywood “realism” and all that it implies. Maybe you just want to look at people on the screen and know they’re not looking back at you, that they’re not going to turn on you and criticize you. I think violence is objectionable when it makes you identify with the killer. There’s a lot of violence at the beginning of The Grand Illusion, but you’re appalled by it. Whereas in a Clint Eastwood movie, you identify with the guy with the biggest gun, not the victim. That’s a big difference emotionally. I’ve walked out on movies I found hopeless. Harold Pinter’s Betrayal drove me crazy—people talking in these precise phrases over and over again. Fellini’s Casanova drove me out too. I mean, you’re still a human being, even if you are a critic.

I thought the first half of Conspiracy Theory (1997) was terrific, then it fell apart. Movies often start with a fascinating situation that they don’t know how to resolve. Directors are very manipulative people. They have the opportunity to be cruel and domineering, and can’t resist it. The different elements that go into movies—music, cinematography, actors, design—get to you very strongly. That’s why so many educated people disapprove of movies; they’re not used to giving themselves over to that much emotion. They prefer the distance they can keep in legitimate theater. Part of the appeal of movies is the sensuality of the actors and actresses—their faces give us pleasure. The symmetry of their beauty is often very appealing. They’re more beautiful than the people we see in life, and they give us standards of beauty and feeling. 

Their emotions can transform us. Someone like Greta Garbo opened up a generation of moviegoers to a kind of sensuality they didn’t experience elsewhere. There’s something about a great actress on screen that can be extraordinary. Garbo had something else plus beauty. When you watch her in the scene in A Woman of Affairs, where she inhales a bouquet of roses, you think you’ve never seen anyone inhale so completely. It’s not comparable to what goes on the stage. –"The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael" (2011) by Pauline Kael and Sanford Schwartz 

Deeper Into Movies, Numbing the Audience

"I Have Always Depended On The Kindness Of Strangers." —Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) directed by Elia Kazan, based on Tennessee Williams's play (1947)

According to the Department of Psychology from Georgetown University, in a recent study revised on October 26, 2022, findings suggest that highly altruistic individuals believe that others deserve help regardless of their potential moral shortcomings. Results provide preliminary evidence that lower levels of cynicism motivate costly, non-normative altruism toward strangers. Perceiving strangers at baseline as deserving of help may be an important factor, with perceptions of others’ benevolence versus malevolence being particularly influential in various forms of prosociality (Yamagishi, Cook, & Watabe, 1998). For example, higher levels of generalized interpersonal trust and lower levels of cynicism are associated with more prosocial behavior (Turner & Valentine, 2001). We thus assessed whether altruism toward strangers may be correlated with generally favorable perceptions of others’ benevolence or lack of malevolence using the Belief in Pure Good (BPG) and Belief in Pure Evil (BPE) scales. Beliefs about others’ benevolent versus malevolent goals, intentions, and traits have been linked to self-reported measures of prosociality and antisociality (Webster & Saucier, 2013). We also considered the potential role of religious and spiritual beliefs, and belief in pure good is correlated with religiosity and Christian devoutness (Webster & Saucier, 2013). Little is yet known about the potential role of religious and spiritual beliefs in extraordinary altruism. One study found that 37% of those who have considered altruistic acts cited spiritual beliefs as a motivation (Henderson et al., 2003). But in another investigation, only 17% of individuals who have actually altruistic cited religious reasons––despite more than half of participants having described themselves as religious (Massey et al., 2011). We predicted that altruists would endorse greater belief in human benevolence and less belief in human malevolence. Given the observed relationship between self-reported empathy and belief in pure good (Webster & Saucier, 2013), we also accounted for empathy in our models. Source: www.sciencedirect.com

Ellen Dowling (who performed as Blanche's sister Stella on Broadway) suggested that Elia Kazan should use the ambiguity evident in the play to their advantage, where Blanche and Stanley alternate roles of protagonist and antagonist. John Timpane, a theater and fine arts critic, in June Schlueter’s Feminist Rereadings of Modern America Drama (1989), posits that reading A Streetcar Named Desire from a feminist perspective actually heightens the ambiguity, deconstructing the audience's responses. As John Timpane notes, ambiguity is not necessarily an artistic failure and may even be intentional in this case: “in a way, ambiguity is a hedge against annihilation.”  

Jessica Tandy was originally slated to play Blanche DuBois, after creating the role on Broadway. The role was given to Vivien Leigh (after Olivia de Havilland refused it) because she had more box-office appeal. John Garfield had turned down the role of Stanley Kowalski because he didn't want to be overshadowed by the female lead, Vivien Leigh. 

Vivien Leigh, who suffered from bipolar disorder in real life, later had difficulties in distinguishing her real life from that of Blanche DuBois. Although Vivien Leigh initially thought Marlon Brando to be crass and affected, and he thought her to be impossibly haughty and prim, both soon became friends and the cast worked together smoothly. Despite giving the definitive portrayal of Stanley Kowalski, Marlon Brando said he privately detested the character. Tennessee Williams's letter to Audrey Wood, mid-June 1947: "Both Kazan and me had John Garfield in mind for the part of Stanley Kowalski. Kazan and Garfield went way back to the 30s, in the days of the Group Theatre. But Garfield balked at the idea of coming back for an open-ended run which would keep him out of Los Angeles indefinitely. So although the trade papers announced that Garfield had signed on to play Stanley (in early August), that was not actually the case. Garfield only wanted to do it for four months, a limited run, and he also wanted to be guaranteed the role should it be made into a film. Irene Selznick turned Garfield down, and so they had to, again, look for another Stanley." 

Tennessee Williams to Audrey Wood, August 25, 1947: "I am willing to accept the bungling of the Garfield deal and the nerve-wracking battle that was waged to secure the right director, but when arbitrary action is taken interfering with my irreductible rights as an author, I’m not going to take it. It was bad management that announced Garfield in the papers before he was signed and I strongly suspect that good management would have signed him. George Beban was flown out here from the Coast and read for me this morning one scene. His body movements were stiff and self-conscious without grace and virility, which the part calls for and it made me more bitterly conscious than ever of how good Garfield would have been. That leaves us with Marlon Brando, of the ones that have been mentioned to date." 

Brando’s feeling that the play was a size too big for him was intensified by the knowledge that John Garfield had been the first choice. He couldn’t get that out of his head, the anxiety that he was second-banana. He would mutter, “They should have gotten John Garfield” in the middle of rehearsals when he was struggling. His insights into the character of Stanley, however, are invaluable. Theatre producer Robert Whitehead said about Brando in the play: "There were no previous models for Brando. His relationship to the poetic reality of Williams was particularly embracing; what Tennessee wrote, in relation to Brando’s sensibility, it all worked." Dakin Williams (Tennessee Williams’ brother): "Blanche is actually Tennessee. If he would tell you something it wouldn’t be necessarily true. As Blanche says in Streetcar, ‘I don’t tell what’s true, I tell what ought to be true.’ And so everything in Blanche was really like Tennessee." 

"East of Eden" and "Splendor in the Grass" both deal with America's puritanical streak and the latter film, in particular, addresses excessive capitalism, its recklessness and potential to produce destructive consequences. "A Face in the Crowd" questions the American public's gullibility and its fascination with celebrity, fame and power.   

Eva Marie Saint and Marlon Brando in "On The Waterfront" (1954) directed by Elia Kazan. "On the Waterfront" can be read as Kazan's attempt to account for his willingness to comply with HUAC's demands by having his alter ego, Terry Malloy, move from informing to a metaphorical crucifixion and redemption to becoming a hero figure to his peers. Unfortunately, for Kazan, life didn't imitate art. —"Criticism on A Streetcar Named Desire" (2003) by John S. Bak

"In movies, the balance between art and business has always been precarious, with business outweighing art, but the business part was, at least, in the hands of businessmen who loved movies. As popular entertainment, movies need something of what the vulgarian moguls had—zest, a belief in their own instincts, a sentimental dedication to producing pictures that would make their country proud of their contribution, a respect for quality, and the biggest thing: a willingness to take chances. They were part of a different America. The cool managerial sharks don’t have that; neither do the academics. The big change in this country is reflected in the fact that people in the movie business no longer feel it necessary to talk about principles at all. There has always been a megalomaniac potential in moviemaking, and in this period of stupor, when values have been so thoroughly undermined that even the finest directors with the most freedom aren’t sure what they want to do, they often become obsessive and grandiloquent. Perpetually dissatisfied with the footage they’re compulsively piling up, they keep shooting—like mad royalty, adding rooms to the palace. Megalomania and art become the same thing to them. But a lot of people around them are deeply impressed by megalomania. 

We don’t know what we’re reacting to anymore, and, beyond that, it’s becoming just about impossible to sort out the con from the truth because a successful con makes its lies come true in this business. Movies are now being pushed in the school system because the number of paid movie admissions per year is about a fourth of what it used to be. Actually, something has gone terribly wrong with movies. I think it can be said that the public no longer goes to them with much expectation of pleasure. Even college students don’t go to many new movies and often they prefer old movies on television (they say they have a better time watching classic movies). Most movies these days are made (seemingly) for nobody; the proportion of movies that fail commercially is at an all-time high, and they often fail mercilessly sometimes on the opening day of a first-run movie a theater does not sell a single ticket—so that investing money in movies is becoming a fantastic long-shot gamble against public apathy. The problem may lie in the attitudes that permeate new films; even when they’re relatively clever and fast-moving, one is likely to come out depressed rather than refreshed, feeling disagreeable or angry. 

Is this perhaps because the moviemakers don’t have the respect for the audience essential to the creation of satisfying theatrical experiences? Many of the men who have been quickest to take advantage of the flux since the conglomerate takeovers are those with the cunning to exploit the current low mood of the young movie audience (as in Joe) or with the strong, shallow egos to convince the shaken-up studio heads that they know what the youth market will buy. The rising hacks now making deals have taken over some of the coarsest attitudes of the moguls of yore and have left out one vital ingredient of old picturemaking. It used to be understood that no matter how low your estimate of the public intelligence was, how greedily you courted success, or how much you debased your material in order to popularize it, you nevertheless tried to give the audience something. That was the principal excuse for all the story conferences and the restrictions inflicted on the writers and directors by the producers, and even though this excuse was the basis for crippling some talented writers, their excuse wasn’t totally false. It seems a little silly to have to point this out, but the assumption that a movie was supposed to do something for the audience was a sound one. 

The greatest filmmakers—like D.W. Griffith and Jean Renoir—were the men and women who not only wanted to give the audience of their best but had the most to give. This is also, perhaps, the element that, combined with originality and temperament, makes the greatest stars and enables them to last—what links Louis Armstrong and Laurence Olivier and Bette Davis. In the new, fluid movie situation, with some of the obstacles gone, it should be easier for artists to give everything they have; that’s what freedom means in the arts. Working at one’s peak capacity, going beyond one’s known self, giving everything one has, makes show business, from time to time, art. Good hack work could be done under the old system, because even when you worked beneath your full capacity—grinding your teeth in frustration—you could still do an honest job, respectful of the audience’s needs, and some fine American movies were made as plain, honest jobs of hack work. But the American audience outgrew the conventional genre films. The familiar patterns whose unfolding once gave the audience such anticipatory pleasure and such nostalgic satisfaction in the formal closing began instead to turn the new audiences derisive, and so the western heroes became camp figures who grew old (as John Wayne in True Grit) or Freudian-freaky (as in the Burt Kennedy westerns), or escaped to other countries (as in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). 

But substituting the clichés of Madison Avenue militancy for the middle-class banalities is a disaster at every level; in Europe a movie like The Strawberry Statement may be considered politically daring, but we here can recognize it for what it is—the twin of that teenage-magazine pitch for the youth market. The old film romances may have been grandiose, but at least they bound us together by reminding us of our common fantasies. Exploitation “message” movies like The Strawberry Statement, the brash, confident Getting Straight, and the Stanley Kramer's political drama R.P.M. are more offensive. No contemporary American subject provided a better test of the new movie freedom than student unrest. It should have been a great subject: the students becoming idealists and trying to put their feelings about justice into practice; the relationship between boredom and activism; and what Angus Wilson wrote: “Life can't be put on paper in all its complexity.” Instead, we’ve been getting glib “statements” and cheap sex jokes, the zoomy shooting and shock cutting of TV commercials, plus a lot of screaming and ketchup on the lenses. 

These movies took the recently developed political consciousness of American students, which was still tentative and searching and necessarily confused, and reduced it to simplicities, overstatements, and lies. In the standard Hollywood vulgarizing tradition, the theme of student revolution was turned into a riot-movie fad, polished off now by Stanley Kramer’s grandstanding liberalism in his R.P.M. Though Anthony Quinn, as an acting college president, is the hero, and the movie is meant to show primarily the Kramer old-warrior-liberal side, the movie, for all its jabber of hating violence, nevertheless heads right toward it, just like Getting Straight and The Strawberry Statement. The directors present violence as the students’ only courageous course of action, not because it arises out of the given issues but because of their crudeness as moviegoers—because they want the smash finale of a big-production-number violent confrontation. They change their rhetoric but not their styles: Richard Rush’s carnage in Getting Straight is just like his carnage in the wheeler The Savage Seven.

In an article in the New York Times, Israel Horovitz explained that he didn’t write the screenplay of The Strawberry Statement for radicals. From his ideas (“Isn’t it strange that man could invent wealth but never find a way to spread it around?”), he seems to be a sophistic Andy Hardy. He wrote the movie, he tells us, to radicalize a typical fifteen-year-old girl in his home town. His article could almost be a classic New Left Hollywood parody. How is it that, unlike the writers on the Andy Hardy pictures, who knew they were hacks when they wrote down to the audience, Mr. Horovitz does not know? How is it that Richard Rush and his scriptwriter, Robert Kaufman, do not know that when they reject criticism of Getting Straight by appealing to the court of those “lined up every night in record numbers” they are giving the same old Hollywood answer, and that when they gild it with the information that these queues are composed of “the new generation of moviegoers who have taken film as their own medium, as their personal art form and instrument of communication” they are talking the Hollywood-speak of Louis B. Mayer and Darryl F. Zanuck? Horovitz didn’t appeal to the court of the public, because The Strawberry Statement was a flop, but Rush and Kaufman had a hit, so they claimed that the public knows best.

The avowed aim of most of the new film men is to shatter the complacency of the audience. Michael Sarne, the director of Joanna and Myra Breckinridge, threatens us with more of the same until “some compromise is achieved between the generations and races, classes, and warring factions.” He and the others justify everything in their movies with slick revolutionary catch phrases; they are, they tell us, attacking the bestiality of our time by making brutal movies, attacking the shoddiness of American culture by shoving shoddiness down our throats. Their movies become our punishment, and the worse their movies turn out, the more self-righteously they explain that it was just what we deserved. They’re shaking up Middle America! The press reception at which the announcement was made was Sterling Silliphant’s first in New York since he left the helm of the Twentieth Century-Fox publicity department in 1953. “This time,” he quipped, “I’m on the other side of the fence.” He isn’t; he’s still in the same business, whether he writes publicity or makes movies. Madison Avenue sells attacks on Madison Avenue the same way conglomerate-appointed studio heads grow beards and serve up the terrorist, utopian thinking that they hope will appeal to young ticket buyers.

The movies that are popularly considered the best movies at any given time may or may not be important movies—but they touch a nerve, express a mood that is just coming to a popular consciousness, or present heroes who connect in new ways. They not only reflect what is going on in the country but, sometimes by expressing it and sometimes by distorting it, affect it, too—such movies as The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle, On the Waterfront, Morgan!, Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider. Movies like these enter the national bloodstream, and, at the moment, the few big movies seem to do so faster than ever before, and more directly—maybe because that “best-educated” generation in history is so nakedly vulnerable to whatever stirs it emotionally. This susceptibility, rather than “visual literacy,” is the distinctive trait of the “film generation”; they go back to re-experience the movies they identify with, re-entering into them with psychodrama. Easy Rider was a mainliner, tapping a vein of glamorous suicidal masochism. At least, Medium Cool and WUSA were honest.

Joe is so slanted to feed the paranoia of youth that at its climax (a reversal of the Sharon Tate case), when the young hippies are massacred by the “straight” adults—the blue-collar bigot Joe and a liberal advertising man—members of the audience respond on cue with cries of “Next time we’ll have guns!” and “We’ll get you first, Joe!” The apprehensiveness that one feels throughout Joe—the sense of violence perpetually about to erupt—makes it effective melodrama but also makes it an anxious, unpleasant experience. I had some doubts about the use of melodramatic techniques on the serious political theme of Costa-Gavras's Z, but the director seemed reasonably responsible; in Joe the manipulation of the audience is so shrewdly, single-mindedly commercial that it’s rather terrifying to sit there and observe how susceptible the young audience is. Since the assassinations, there’s been a general feeling of powerlessness, and what gives Joe some of the validity that the audience reacts to is that so many lies have finally resulted in many young people’s not knowing how to sort things out, not caring, and not believing anything. 

They go numb, like the young girl in Joe looking vaguely for some communal Eden where those without hope can cling to each other, and they accept and prefer their loser self-image, not wanting to believe that anything good can happen to them. They don’t make it happen; they won’t even let it happen. Joe, written by Norman Wexler (another former advertising man), preys on this stoned hopelessness and martyrdom in a congratulatory way, and feeds the customers a series of tawdry cliches about the hypocrisy and rottenness of the straight world. Its message is that it’s all crap. The few new movies that the “film generation” responds to intensely are the most despairing about America. It’s a bad combination." —"Numbing the Audience: Deeper Into Movies" (1973) by Pauline Kael