The Misfits: The Film That Ended a Marriage

The Misfits (1961) will be screened in the Ted Mann Theatre at the Academy Museum on Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles this Saturday, December 3 at 7 pm, in a North American premiere for the 4K restoration completed from the original 35 mm negative in 2018. The film’s initial release was eclipsed by the death of leading man Clark Gable, and would also prove to be Marilyn’s cinematic swansong – but it’s now considered a minor classic, bridging the gap between Hollywood’s golden age and the 1960s New Wave. The Misfits is followed at 9 pm by another hidden gem of film preservation, Call It Murder (1934). Source: themarilynreport.com

Even though the Monroe/Miller marriage was in crisis, Marilyn was surrounded by people she liked and got on with – Gable, Clift, Wallach and Ritter, a special friend of hers from the Actors Studio. She also had her masseur Ralph Roberts, her press secretary May Reis, her makeup man Allan “Whitey” Snyder, her stand-in Evelyn Moriarty, her limo driver Rudy Kausky, her publicist Rupert Allan and the two people who did her hair, Sidney Guilaroff and Agnes Flanagan. Reis had worked for Miller in the past. Huston gave Roberts a small part as an ambulance driver in the film. The only person John Huston was concerned about was Paula Strasberg, who replaced Natasha Lytess as Monroe’s acting coach and who threatened to derail any production with her imperiousness. Slowly but surely, Miller’s script had begun to infiltrate her life. Where did one end and the other begin? Nobody knew for sure. He was getting ideas from her daily behavior. Mood changes that depressed both of them enriched his work. Monroe’s demons became Roslyn’s by proxy. Miller didn’t know why she was offended. He thought he was portraying some of her most endearing qualities – “spontaneous joy and sympathy.” 

Lee Strasberg had seen something in Marilyn that most other acting coaches missed. “What was going on inside was not what was going on outside,” he said. “That always means there may be something there to work with.” Of all the stars he'd worked with, he said, Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando were the two who stood out for him. One of the reasons Strasberg took such an interest in Monroe was to rebuild his reputation. It suffered some damage from Brando’s renunciation of him in favor of Stella Adler. Marilyn performed many interesting pieces at the Actors Studio, from Golden Boy to A Streetcar Named Desire to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from James Joyce’s Ulysses. No doubt this was the biggest stretch for her. 

The Hollywood Studio Club, a building near the Paramount Studios that housed hundreds of young hopefuls, had opened in 1926 and it would close definitely its doors in 1975. Marilyn Monroe, Dorothy Malone, Kim Novak, Donna Reed, Barbara Hale, Barbara Rush and Sharon Tate had lived in the Hollywood Club for a while (the tops was 3 years). “I heard there was this place for girls in show business who hadn’t made it yet and you got two meals a day for $15 a week,” said Rita Moreno, so she and her friend Louise Martinson moved in. After “playing a lot of Indian maidens,” Moreno signed a contract with Fox. Sparks flashed when Moreno met Brando on the Fox lot. Soon, she was taking his calls on the hallway phone, grabbing her nail polish on the way because, she says, “he was on the phone for hours at a time.” Curled up on the floor with the receiver on her shoulder and the cord stretched as far as it would go, she gave herself a mani-pedi. “All the girls wanted to know what happened on my dates with him, so Louise said, 'Let’s write down your whole experience and read it out loud'.”

One night their bedroom was packed as Rita Moreno recounted accompanying Brando to an Actors Studio party in San Fernando Valley—where she met Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward (whose romance was blossoming) and also James Dean. While Dean seemed fixated on Marilyn, and since Brando was busy dancing with Moreno, Marilyn seemed intrigued by Newman, although it was evident that Marilyn was not Newman's type. Actually, Newman was not enthused with the occasional antics of Woodward as glamour queen, that he called "Joanne's fantasy of being like Marilyn Monroe." 

John Huston hated the way Monroe treated Miller while shooting The Misfits. She insulted him in front of others. He’d act like he didn’t care: “He would pretend he wasn’t listening.” Her hangers-on carried on the humiliation: “I think they hoped to demonstrate their loyalty to Marilyn by being impertinent to Arthur. On these occasions Arthur never changed his expression.” In his book Conversations with Marilyn (1976), journalist WJ Weatherby gives voice to Marilyn's intimate thoughts about her failed marriage with Miller: "I had asked why she had yelled at the film crew of The Misfits, in particular a shy, well meaning man who had taken it badly. 'I can be a monster,' she replied seriously. 'Some of my friends want me to be innocent. If they saw the monster in me, they'd probably never talk to me. Sometimes I think that's what happened in my marriage to Arthur. He saw me as so beautiful and innocent between the wolves of Hollywood, I tried to be that person. When the monster showed up, Arthur couldn't believe it. But I felt he knew and loved all of me. I put Arthur through a lot, I know. It would've been easier with a more party-going kind of man. But I want someone different from me. A challenge." 

Monroe always looked out for Clift. When his jeans sagged, she told the makeup people to moisten them so they became tight. Though the overt romantic relationship in the film is between Gable and Monroe, the one between Clift and Monroe is in some ways deeper. Clift patted Monroe’s bottom on the set one day and she was amused. At other times she tantalized him with her body, rubbing her breasts across his nose. It was said that she was “determined to get him into bed for the hell of it,” thinking of his affair with Liz Taylor. Clift tried to make love to her once but they were both too drunk at the time for anything to happen. Instead they just “fooled around.” —The Misfits: The Film That Ended a Marriage (2022) by Aubrey Malone

Hollywood: The Oral Story, Sweet Bird of Youth

RIDGEWAY CALLOW: This is the true story of Hollywood. The most ruthless town in the world. RICHARD SCHICKEL: Or at least that’s the way people like to picture it. GEORGE CUKOR: . . . there are all sorts of stories . . . usually untrue . . . STANLEY DONEN: . . . because it was simply a group of people who kept working there in those pictures, going from one job to another . . . HOWARD STRICKLING: Everything was done carefully, thoughtfully, and in real detail. Everybody working together. We got on the same page, film by film. It was a business made up of creative, intelligent, hardworking people. RAOUL WALSH: Work. That’s the true story of Hollywood. But who wants to hear it? They’re looking for something else. Who took off whose panties behind the piano while the director shot the producer in the head? People want to know stuff like that, even if it isn’t true. BRONISLAU KAPER: Hollywood drew envy. All that money and power. People liked to ridicule Hollywood. “Oh, that’s Hollywood.” Everything is “typical Hollywood.” “Oh, he’s going Hollywood.” Nobody says “He’s going San Francisco.” No. “He’s going Hollywood,” where everyone really secretly wanted to go. GEORGE CUKOR: Hollywood throughout the years was always a real stop on the bus. People were very interested in everything that went on in Hollywood. It was exciting. It had all the glamorous people. Everybody wanted to come to Hollywood. 

FRANK CAPRA: Hollywood! What the hell good could come out of a Hollywood? Three thousand miles west of the Hudson River, where nothing west of the Hudson was any good anyhow? A little town way out in the west, a little bit of a dusty burg called Hollywood? Ah, but here film was being made, being sold, being canned, being shipped. We invented it. We created it . . . this enormous thing that has the tremendous power to move and influence. An art form and a business. Hollywood! VINCENT SHERMAN: What started out as a nickel-and-dime, honky-tonk business grew to be a great industry. It gave employment to many people doing all kinds of jobs, all of which had to be coordinated and put together. Some great films were turned out during this period. A town was created as a result of the picture business: Hollywood. I would say that the films that Hollywood made stood at the forefront of the entire world. Hollywood became a legend. ALLAN DWAN: In the beginning, of course, it wasn’t Hollywood. Films were being made all over the country: New York City, New Jersey, Florida, Chicago, St. Louis, Arizona and New Mexico, Oregon, San Francisco, and San Diego. Everywhere. And nobody knew they were going to work in the movies because there was no such thing, really, when they were born. TAY GARNETT: As a matter of fact, I don’t think it ever occurred to anybody that the movies would ever be a business. 

LEO MCCAREY: I planned to be a lawyer. I even practiced. I started out very young, and they mistook me for the office boy. I was a very poor lawyer. A discouraging factor in my legal career is that I lost every case. JEANINE BASINGER: A movie maker had to be ready to pull up stakes and run! The patent wars are a complicated story—but very colorful. In 1908, after months of negotiations, the two biggest companies, Edison and Biograph, former enemies, got together and became The Motion Picture Patents Company. These big guys licensed successful smaller companies to “legally make films”: Vitagraph, Essanay, Lubin, Selig, Kalem, Kleine, and Méliès and Pathé. It was an attempt for MPPC to own it all. By 1912, this controlling and threatening company was weakening, and in 1917, it was dissolved by court order. The motion picture game was afoot! And it was anybody’s game. ALLAN DWAN: I started directing early. I know I directed in 1909. I know that for sure. When I say 1909, it could have been down to almost Christmastime. In California, you don’t remember—there’s no snow, so we don’t remember there’s a winter. 

PAUL NEWMAN: My time in California didn’t have an auspicious start. I drove there from New York, alone, and literally didn’t know where I was going. I was booked for a room in Hollywood, at the Roosevelt Hotel, but I got off at the wrong exit on one of the freeways—I’m not even sure whether it was the Ventura or the Pasadena; I must have cut all the way through Kansas. Anyway, I don’t really remember ever coming into Los Angeles itself, but I ended up exiting at Santa Monica Boulevard. I later, of course, found out there was a much easier way to get where I was headed, but I had to drive a long way on local roads along Sunset. It took forever until I found the Roosevelt. [...] My vacillations about divorcing Jackie went on for years, despite I knew I had fallen in love with Joanne. —Hollywood: The Oral History (2022) by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson 

In The Hustler (1961), Paul Newman delivers what easily might be his best performance (and it's probably the best film he ever made), a literate and psychologically probing drama set in the grubby world of pool halls. Robert Rossen directed with a conspicuous anti-Hollywood grit and maturity (and he couldn’t resist a heartbreaking ending). As “Fast Eddie” Felson, a born loser with the pool-shooting talent to become a winner, Newman excellently delivers the cocky bravado, the sexy charm, and the self-destructive tendencies, a believable combination of drive and defeatism, finally fulfilling his mission of the Method with ostensibly “personal” acting. Newman often appears semi-paralyzed in his early films, not yet free enough to be great, unable to give of himself fully. In The Hustler, he is somewhat shown up by the superb work around him, from George C. Scott’s electrifying portrait of cool malevolence, and Piper Laurie’s aching, unadorned work as Newman’s sad girlfriend. Laurie and Newman had previously shared one brief scene together in Until They Sail (1957). The Hustler is about mind games, in and out of the poolroom, and it's self-consciously reaching for profundity while also providing a satisfying conclusion. Newman deserved his Oscar nomination and was favored to win the gold-plated prize, but Maximilian Schell (Judgment at Nuremburg) was the victor for a far less intricate, though showy, role. 

Despite the steady stream of film work, Newman had opted to spend the bulk of 1959 starring on Broadway in Tennessee Williams’ new play Sweet Bird of Youth, which opened just after Newman received his Oscar nomination for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, making him very much the Williams actor of the moment. It was only a matter of time before Sweet Bird of Youth made it to the screen, and there was no need to look for a bigger movie star than Newman to play Chance Wayne. With four major cast members from the Broadway production (Newman, Geraldine Page, Rip Torn, and Madeleine Sherwood), Sweet Bird of Youth has more heavyweight original-cast members on hand than any Williams film since A Streetcar Named Desire. 

Chance Wayne would appear to be an ideal Newman role, a virile and ambitious operator out to climb the Hollywood ladder. About a decade ago, he was a good-looking star athlete (a swimming diver) who fell for Heavenly Finley (Shirley Knight). Her father, Tom “Boss” Finley (Ed Begley), a former governor on the Gulf Coast, wanted Chance out of the way, and so he disingenuously encouraged Chance to leave St. Cloud and seek his fortune in New York. Chance found minor success in show business, including a cover of Life magazine as one of three chorus boys in a Broadway show (identified as Oklahoma! in the play, but nameless in the movie). Though he continued to believe in his potential for film stardom, Chance scored bigger as a sexual companion to wealthy ladies. As a beach boy in Palm Beach, he had latched on to Alexandra Del Lago (Geraldine Page), an apparently washed-up movie queen who is afraid to face the press and the public.

Like The Fugitive Kind, Sweet Bird of Youth is concentrated on a male character but utterly dominated by female forces. Geraldine Page’s Alexandra has about half the screen time allotted to Newman’s Chance, but the person you remember is Page's Alexandra, just as in The Fugitive Kind it’s Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward's characters who overshadow Marlon Brando's. Chance is a fairly naïve young man, never quite sharp enough to be the equal of the monsters he will encounter throughout this Easter weekend. (The play takes place entirely on Easter Sunday.) Chance, in the movie more than the play, seems surprisingly innocent despite his past, and his and Heavenly’s unwavering love is treated as something eternally pure, no matter what, all of which seems intended to provide balance with the film’s more sordid elements. Chance is presented as a love-struck man trying hard to be a shameless conniver, though conniving doesn’t come as naturally to him as it does to most of the characters around him. 

The Hollywoodized version by Richard Brooks is quite faithful to Tennessee Williams' play, where Chance, however sleazy his actions have been in the past, will be redeemed by his lost love. The only problem presented to the viewer is that Newman is simply too good-looking to be totally convincing as loser Chance Wayne. We suspect any Hollywood studio would sign this guy about five seconds after looking at him. Years ago, Chance, content to remain in St. Cloud and marry Heavenly, was swayed by Boss Finley into following the go-getting hordes destined for New York's show-business, staked with a train ticket and a hundred dollars. Newman is convincingly guileless as a starry-eyed hopeful, but this scene stresses the point that Chance’s dreams were not his own. In the play, in the Act Two, Chance's tactics to show the town of St Cloud that he is now somebody are obvious. After popping pills and drinking vodka, he brags to Scotty and Bud that Alexandra Del Lago has signed a contract, giving him the lead role in a film called ‘Youth’. Immediately, Scotty and Bud point out the ridiculousness of the title, seeing through Chance’s transparent lies. 

However, Chance’s fantastical schemes reveal that he still buys into the Hollywood dream of glamour and youth. He even keeps in his wallet the snapshots that Chance took of Heavenly on the beach, capturing and immortalising her young body when they were dating. Williams, in essence, reveals that there is no way to turn back the clock, no way to wipe the slate clean, and thus there is an uphill battle to achieve real redemption. The passing of time, as Williams writes in his 1947 essay ‘The Catastrophe of Success,’ is "Loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposite. It goes tick-tick, it’s quieter than your heartbeat, but it’s slow dynamite, a gradual explosion, blasting the world we live in to burnt-out pieces. Time... who could beat it, who could defeat it ever? Maybe some saints and heroes." Chance is ultimately a hero.

The lighthouse sequence is among those scenes that make us feel for two crazy kids in love simply trying to beat the outside forces against them. This particular myth, rooted in the American consciousness, commonly referred to as ‘the American Dream’, recalls a tradition depicted in American Realist novels such as Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925). Like Clyde, the protagonist of Dreiser’s novel, Chance strives to rise above his poverty and in doing so, he compromises his ethical and moral codes. Del Lago’s character is not merely a diva, she's struggling to survive in the movie industry that turned her into a monster, her alias leads back to Williams’s discussion of the ‘Cinderella story’ as well as suggesting that before being consumed by this Hollywood dream, she was capable of kindness, generosity and grace – traits that in fairytales lead the princess to winning her prince. Like Chance (and Cinderella, who cleaned and toiled for her step-sisters), Del Lago was not always rich and famous. She began, like all them, with only beauty to boast of. 

The power struggle between Chance Wayne and Alexandra Del Lago is, in part, fuelled by their recognition of their similarities. The demanding and self-absorbed actress constrasts starkly with Heavenly: "a nude image of a fifteen-year-old girl with the tide beginning to lap over her body like the sea desired her as Chance would always desire her’; Heavenly's nude photograph that Chance took signifies youth and Chance’s desire to possess that youth forever. Del Lago, like others of Williams’s heroines, 'she is an agent of truth forcing lost men to face their reality.’ Miss Lucy, wen she makes her entrance in Act Two, Scene Two in the play, she is described as ‘dressed in a ball gown elaborately ruffled and very bouffant like an antebellum Southern belle’s. A single blonde curl is arranged to switch girlishly at one side of her sharp little terrier face’. Like Scarlett O’Hara, to whom Chance compares her, she holds on to her dignity and pride even under attack and scorned by her former lover Boss Finley. But her gentility and girlish behaviour is, Williams suggests, a façade. Like a terrier, she is quick and wily, and Miss Lucy wastes no time in retaliating. She immediately approaches a heckler and tells him ‘come to hear Boss Finley talk.’ 

Chance and Heavenly are just as much in love in the play but appear much more bruised by their traumatic experiences. In the play, Chance accuses Boss Finley's son: "Hear that, Tom Junior? Give your father that message. This is my town. I was born in St Cloud, not him. He was just called here down from the hills to preach hate. I was born here to make love to Heavenly. Whatever happens to me, it’s already happened." In the previous act, Alexandra asks Chance: "What are you trying to prove?" Chance: "Something’s got to mean something, doesn’t it, Princess? Well, something’s still got to mean something." Like Joanne Woodward's climactic car-ride offer of Carol to Marlon Brando's Valentine in The Fugitive Kind, sparked by another premonition of doom, the gesture of help by Alexandra is rejected by Chance, but Sweet Bird of Youth turns imminent horror into romantic redemption. The message of the film disparages the hunt for big success and promotes true love above all else. Chance is thereby decontaminated of his erotic opportunism, leaving Alexandra and Boss Finley to continue fighting their nasty battles to stay on top.

Chance runs to the front of the Finley mansion, screaming Heavenly’s name when two cars pull up and four men emerge, including Heavenly’s violent brother, Tom Junior (Rip Torn). As he is beaten, Chance continues to call her name before being dragged by his legs to one of the cars. Tom Junior, holding his daddy’s cane, tells Chance he’s about to “take away loverboy’s meal ticket.” Bloodied and swollen, Chance is reunited with Heavenly in a bittersweet happy ending—with the added bonus of political trouble for Boss Finley, ignited at a rally when heckling about Heavenly’s abortion raised questions about his family values. Behind the production, Newman had pushed his wife Joanne Woodward for the role of Heavenly, which probably would have been expanded and resonated more. Although The Long, Hot Summer (1958) and From the Terrace (1960) were blazing box-office hits, Newman's next film with Joanne Woodward Paris Blues (1961) was a sound failure, thus halting them as a popular screen team for a while.

It was under Sidney Lumet that Newman hit a new peak, playing the alcoholic, ambulance-chasing lawyer in The Verdict (1982), a very fine courtroom drama, satisfying and well-paced and handsomely crafted by David Mamet. The Verdict is basically good pulp, featuring a femme fatale, corporate evil, a surprise star witness, and Newman’s do-gooding crusader, an underdog desperately seeking redemption through a medical malpractice suit. Its archetypal components were freshly spruced, creating a compelling character study. Newman was finally a skillful enough actor to encompass a multi-faceted role, which brings real value to the melodrama of the court case. Newman rarely was better, charting his character’s reckless struggle to regain his idealism and fight his insecurities. Without Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’s Brick making him the hottest new leading man of late-fifties Hollywood, and without Sweet Bird of Youth’s Chance confirming his legitimacy as a theatre star, perhaps he wouldn’t have gotten all the way to The Hustler, meaning that his career might not have lasted long enough for him to do The Verdict, The Color of Money, or Blaze. 

Audrey Wollen’s “Sad Girl Theory” bears resemblance to the anti-optimism of Lauren Berlant, Jack Halberstam, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sara Ahmed, all of whom point to the ways that everyday culture asks us to buy into an aspirational fantasy of “the good life,” while keeping that life ever more inaccessible. In this context, sadness, failure, and shame might constitute a kind of resistance, or, as Halberstam puts it, “not succeeding at manhood or womanhood can offer unexpected pleasures.” —Sources: "Tennessee Williams and Company: Paul Newman" (2011) by John DiLeo and "The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female in Sweet Bird of Youth" by Cambridge University Press (1998) edited by Matthew C. Roudané 

Paul Newman (Cool Hand Luke), Steve McQueen

Cool Hand Luke, directed by Stuart Rosenberg in 1967, is maybe the most iconic role of Paul Newman as Lucas Jackson, a veteran of World War II. Luke has just committed a petty crime and is subsequently sentenced to the brutal punishment of a prison chain gang in the oppressive rural regions of Central Florida. The danger that Luke poses—one could argue like Jesus did returning to Nazareth—is that he sees completely through the game. He sees that the whole established order is built upon the absurd notion that human beings are enslaved by some kind of paternally malignant "God", and that taking this position allows humans to rationalize their exploitation, control, and destruction of other human beings. According to Albert Camus, the world is not in itself absurd; life becomes absurd due to the incompatibility between human beings and the world they inhabit. 

Maybe the central theme of Cool Hand Luke is the cruelty of man’s will for power over his fellow man. In the attempt to gain power, one must not only mislead others into “Laws of God and Nature”, but he must also lie to himself for misleading the rest. The chains the prisoners wear are symbolic of the chains that our civilization itself puts on the individual. "Everywhere man is born free and everywhere he is in chains," as the French philosopher Rousseau put it. He also says in his political treatise, The Social Contract, “Show me where I wrote my signature on the contract agreeing to accept the laws and dictates of my fellow man”. Luke is an enigma at first to the powers that be, after destroying municipal property, a rather ridiculous crime. “Ripping the heads off parking meters”, Luke tells the Captain, who replies, “We never had one of those before.” The Captain becomes even more puzzled when he reads Luke’s war record, where he was decorated with medals. Even the prisoners have a pecking order, with Dragline (played in an academy-award winning performance by George Kennedy) is top dog on the chain. “You don’t have a name until Dragline gives you one”, another inmate (ironically named ‘Society’) tells the new inmate.

Luke is on a collision course with the established order, first with Dragline, who beats him mercilessly in the Saturday boxing ring made for inmates to settle grudges. Luke is a man whose nature is to be free and he can not change that fact, and he keeps rising with every punch. “You will have to kill me”, he tells Dragline, and consequently earns the respect of the inmates but raises the radar of the bosses, who intuitively understand that Luke is an existential threat to their authority by making that declaration. When Luke answers the punitive measures of the Captain with sarcasm and is cane-whipped, the Captain (Strother Martin) replies with one of the most famous movie quotes of all time: “What we have here is a failure to communicate”. That line struck a chord in America, especially at a time when the gap between generations was growing and the traditional structure of society was unraveling. The line signified, on a deeper level, the alienation of man (and woman) from one another. Here in Cool Hand Luke these are all men (prisoners and guards alike) who are mimicking a game on the micro level that is also being played on the macro societal level.

Luke is the only one who can see that Western civilization became fundamentally absurd the moment that atomic bombs were thrown on other human beings. Robert Oppenheimer, chief engineer on The Manhattan Project once remarked after completing his task, "it's perfectly obvious that the entire world is going to Hell, and the only way we can possibly prevent this is by doing nothing." It is no accident that the emergence of existentialism coincided with the end of the second great world tragedy, just as in the visual arts the surrealist and dada movement came out of the first world tragedy. How can man do such unspeakable crimes to man? What is it that drives man to throw out rationality and reason, not to mention the emotional empathy and compassion, for the sake of murder? These are not easy questions to answer. Philosophy and psychology are fields of study which can explore the reasons, but if they are honest in their practicality, they recognize their impotence in finding a solution to the question of “why?” I think it is only art, the field that seeks to find answers through the negation of that which has been rigidly structured into binded patterns of the mind, that can break open the hard shell of the absurd state of existence in which we find ourselves. 

Paul Newman as Luke is the Everyman. Like Jake Gittes in Chinatown battling the entire bureaucracy of Los Angeles, Luke is engaged in a losing fight. As isolated as Christ, he must ultimately be sacrificed. It is clear that Rosenberg has purposely chosen the Christ motif to affirm this point. Luke lies prostrate with his arms stretched as if on a cross when he accomplishes the impossible (“No one can eat 50 eggs”), and the scene where he tells the others to “stop feeding off me!” is reminiscent of Christ in the Garden of Gethsmane, Christ already in spirit moving beyond the body. The final frame pans away from the road where the inmates are sharing tales of their savior, and the roads from which they toil form a cross. Although the other inmates are incapable of the courage to be so free in spirit, they are redeemed by the example of Luke. Even his prison number (37) is a reference to a higher spiritual cause. Luke 1:37: “For with God nothing shall be impossible." Luke the Existentialist is pointing this out to all of us. The philosopher Alan Watts (author of Myth & Ritual in Christianity) remarked: "I have often contemplated the stars in the heavens and wondered if at one time they were also planets which became self-aware and in an atomic blaze of glory blew themselves up, spewing debris into the fields around them which eventually formed new planets, and so the game goes throughout this particular universe. The secret of life is knowing when to stop." 

At Paul Newman’s forty-fourth birthday party—held at his Benedict Canyon house—Robert Stone (author of A Hall of Mirrors/WUSA) and his wife Janice (Mattson) met Anthony Perkins, Cloris Leachman, and Jay Sebring, a celebrity hairstylist who would be murdered by the Manson Family in the doomed house on Cielo Drive, in August 1969. The WUSA's producer John Foreman introduced Janice as a character from Stone’s novel and script—“the real Geraldine.” Maybe Foreman was stoned at the time. Robert and Janice Stone were surprised that dope-smoking was as prevalent in Hollywood as in other places they’d recently been, though Newman and Woodward didn’t indulge in it. Newman had a pool table in his home, where he also liked to cook for guests; he taught Janice how to eat an artichoke leaf by leaf.

As for the lifting of conventional constraints on the movie business, Stone’s feelings were mixed, more on the negative side. “I thought liberation from the failing grip of the censors did not seem to be making pictures any better. In fact, it seemed increasingly permissible to trivialize on a more complex level, and to employ obviousness in treating stories whose point was their ambiguity.” That was a bad augury for Stone’s film adaptation of A Hall of Mirrors. Stone’s first conversations with the director Stuart Rosenberg were enough to let him know “that we had very little in common in terms of the stories we wanted to tell.” Janice also mistrusted Rosenberg and she even thought his recent picture with Newman, the iconic Cool Hand Luke, had been a failure, at odds with the audience that shelled out $16 millions. 

The critic Pauline Kael, in her review of Slapshot, asserted: "Paul Newman is an actor-star in the way that Bogart was. His range isn't enormous; he can't do classics, any more than Bogart could. But when a role is right for him, he's peerless." Although I'm not sold on her Bogart-Newman analogy, I tend to accept that Newman defined a sort of damaged masculinity far better than the fellow actors of his time. “Nobody should be asked not to like Paul Newman,” Kael suggested. The director John Huston went further, calling Newman “a moral and ethical man. Superb in every way.” And many would agree.

Along with Paul Newman and Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen was the biggest of the young male movie stars of the sixties. The UK had its share of exciting young leading men like Michael Caine, Albert Finney, and Terence Stamp, but of the young sexy guys in America—that were also genuine movie stars—we had Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Warren Beatty. On the next level down: James Garner, James Coburn, and George Peppard. James Garner was actually popular enough to get scripts from time to time that weren’t covered by the top three, but not often. Once McQueen became a movie star with The Great Escape, he made a string of pretty good movies. In the sixties the only real dud in his filmography is Baby the Rain Must Fall. And that’s mostly due to the ridiculous sight of Steve trying to play a folk singer. Whereas Paul Newman for his whole career did a considerable amount of low-profile movies along with some iconic ones. I mean, some of the movies Newman agreed to do over the years are really baffling. When I was writing my adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch (which I retitled Jackie Brown), and I had to consider who was to play the novel’s likable lead male Max Cherry, I had a few choices. Gene Hackman was an obvious choice, as was Paul Newman. I also considered John Saxon. But there was something about Robert Forster in Alligator that really stuck with me. So I started writing the script right down to the discussion with Jackie about Max's thinning hair.

In real life everything suggests Steve McQueen could be a real hothead. In Don Siegel’s autobiography he relates that a few times during the making of Hell Is for Heroes the two men almost came to blows. Apparently McQueen and his costar on that film, Bobby Darin, also couldn’t stand each other. When actor/writer James Bacon once mentioned to Darin that McQueen was his own worst enemy, Darin replied, “Not while I’m alive.” But McQueen’s Lt. Frank Bullitt is no hothead. He is the epitome of cool. Paul Newman's kind of cool was different from McQueen, a more reserved kind. Oddly, actress Lita Milan had brief flings in the same year 1958 with both Paul Newman (co-star in The Left-Handed Gun) and with Steve McQueen while filming Never Love a Stranger (directed by Robert Stevens).

Lee Remick also had a brief affair with McQueen while filming Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965) and allegedly she had appeared interested in Newman while she played Eula in The Long, Hot Summer (1958). Of course, Newman ignored Remick as he'd go on to shrug off other of his co-stars' advances. One of the key differences, besides their acting styles between Newman and McQueen, is that Newman was only macho onscreen. Offscreen he was much more progressive and left-leaning than the womanizer and Republican McQueen.

Former MCA Producer Jennings Lang offered the role of Dirty Harry to Paul Newman (probably sometime soon after Harper). But Newman turned it down. According to Lang, “Newman said he thought it was too tough a role, that he couldn’t play that type of character.” Universal sold the script by Harry Julian Fink and R. M. Fink to Warner Bros., where it was going to be made with Frank Sinatra playing Harry and directed by Irv Kirshner. Then Sinatra sprained his wrist, seriously limiting his ability to wield Callahan’s .44 Magnum. Warner offered it to Clint Eastwood, who agreed on the condition that he could bring Don Siegel over from Universal to direct. It was also Siegel’s most political film since his earlier masterpiece, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. With Body Snatchers, the liberal-leaning Siegel was able to have his cake and eat it too. On one hand, it can be read as a subtextual attack on McCarthyism (its most popular reading). But on the other hand, the film also plays into the Red Nightmare paranoia of the fifties, being the communists referred as The Pod People. In many of Siegel’s stories working for producers and studio executives he didn’t respect, the director referred to them as 'Pod People'. 

But in the seventies cop thriller, the subtextual attack is of a much different political bent. Dirty Harry tells the story of the quintessential Siegel protagonist taken to its logical extreme. Eastwood’s Harry Callahan is the baddest-ass cop on the San Francisco police force. In a different era he’d be portrayed as a by-the-book type. Except in the era and location the movie takes place (San Francisco in the early seventies), in Callahan’s opinion, the book has been rewritten in favor of the scum. Society is screaming police brutality. The public is siding with the crooks. And the gutless police brass, local government, and the courts are cowed into compliance with an increasingly permissive social order that favors lawbreakers over law enforcement. The genius of the film is it takes that transgressive character and pits him up against a fictionalized version of San Francisco’s real-life “Zodiac Killer” (this fictionalized “Scorpio” is another calculating mastermind). 

Master bank robber Doc McCoy, who’s just served four years in prison, is given parole in exchange for orchestrating a robbery for a local bigwig named Beynon (played in the movie by Ben Johnson), who sits on the parole board. The deal is brokered by McCoy’s robbery accomplice wife, Carol (it’s inferred in the movie it was her mistake that put Doc behind bars). The Getaway was put into production during a serious time of transition in Steve McQueen’s life. He and his wife, friend, and confidant Neile McQueen were finalizing their divorce. Steve had moved out of their Malibu home and taken up residence at the Chateau Marmont. After passing at the last minute on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (due to his rivalry with Paul Newman), McQueen embarked on three offbeat projects that all ended in failure. Who would play the female colead, Carol McCoy? Robert Evans had been aggressively pushing the idea of a teaming between his wife Ali MacGraw, and Steve McQueen. In retrospect, this is ironic, because it would be while she was making The Getaway she would leave the mogul and marry her costar Steve McQueen. I asked Walter Hill who he thought would have made a good Carol McCoy. He said he had favored Stella Stevens, but McQueen didn't want Stevens, he wanted Ali MacGraw. Hill said the actresses that got the most consideration were Lauren Hutton and Geneviève Bujold. But that idea ended up blowing up when McQueen waited in a bar to meet Bujold to discuss the film, and she came walking in with Maximilian Schell. Neile (ex-wife of McQueen) had decided to retaliate by having an affair with Max Schell. So when Geneviève Bujold walked through the barroom doorway with the man who screwed his wife, McQueen got distracted and proceeded to beat the living shit outta Maximilian Schell.

For Sam Peckinpah, Carol bedding Beynon was very important in the context of the story. For first time viewers it’s easy to assume, to get her man out of Huntsville, she was forced against her will into the sexual bargain. But Peckinpah decidedly does not dramatize it that way. The film insinuates she was not just willing to do it for Doc; she was willing to do it for Beynon. It even tries to insinuate that Carol has to debate her choice of which man to stay with. And in the confrontation scene where Carol shoots Beynon, the movie tries to convince us that maybe Carol is in league with the Texas power broker against her husband. Later Doc accuses her, “I think you liked it. I think he got to you.” Carol answers Doc back, “Maybe I got to him.” If Beynon wasn’t played by Ben Johnson, this whole three-way sexual dynamic could have worked. It’s not just you can’t imagine Ben Johnson having sex with Ali MacGraw, you can’t imagine Ben Johnson having sex. No less Ali MacGraw’s Carol seriously considering leaving Steve McQueen’s Doc for Ben Johnson’s Beynon. This whole subplot could have been far more effective if Beynon had been played by somebody a little closer to McQueen. Joe Don Baker would have been the fantastic natural choice. But I can also see Robert Culp or Stuart Whitman delivering what was required to make the triangle dynamic work.

“The Getaway was the last time Steve was in a movie as ‘the Steve McQueen’ we liked to see,” Walter Hill stated. “He did a few other movies and he did good performances, but that special quality that made Steve—‘Steve’—was really never on display again.” And I agree with Hill. I don’t even see The Getaway as a crime thriller about a pair of on-the-lam robbers, with a massive manhunt coming from both sides hot on their trail. I now realize what Peckinpah made and what McQueen and McGraw performed was a love story. The crime story is literal. The love story is metaphorical. Nevertheless, when it comes to Peckinpah fans, Steve McQueen fans, the one thing everybody seemed to agree on is that in the role of Carol McCoy, Ali MacGraw was lousy. And for the last forty years, I too was one of those Ali MacGraw bashers. That is until recently. It took me over forty years, but now I see Ali MacGraw’s performance differently. First off, let me start by saying, she’s not the Carol McCoy of the book or Walter Hill’s screenplay. If you want that Carol, then nothing is going to replace Peckinpah’s first choice of Stella Stevens (except possibly Linda Haynes). No, MacGraw’s Carol might not be one-half of the greatest bank robbing couple in crime film literature. But instead she is one-half of one of the greatest love stories in crime film cinema.

While she doesn’t offer the characterization of a professional armed robber, she does offer up the minute by minute, scene by scene, emotional reality of a woman trying to keep a relationship from crumbling into pieces. The couple pass through a physical and emotional gauntlet, and lurch from one catastrophe to another. While McQueen alternates between keeping his cool and losing his cool, Carol feels, Carol hurts, Carol is afraid. She’s heartbreaking and heartbroken when she loses the suitcase full of loot to Richard Bright’s cowboy con man thief. She waits there in the train station for Doc, not knowing for sure if he’s going to return, in utter despair. "Did I blow it? Did I just ruin everything? How could I be so stupid?" It’s my feeling that Ali MacGraw’s moment to moment work in this film is sensational. In real life she was living through everything that she was hired to portray as Carol. Carol with Beynon—MacGraw with her husband Robert Evans. She’s a woman having to deal with a very difficult, mercurial, masculine man amidst a grueling endeavor. Carol on the lam with Doc—MacGraw making this incredibly difficult movie with McQueen and Peckinpah. She’s a woman in love—so was MacGraw. When the film came out in the States and England, MacGraw was roasted by the critics. Everywhere,  except in France. From the very beginning, the French always saw the film as a love story. And in France the critics praised the emotional content of McGraw's performance.

While the couple rests in that torn apart Volkswagen bug at the garbage dump, Carol threatens to “split.” If Carol loses faith, all is lost. It’s Doc’s savvy and survival prowess that keeps them from getting caught. It keeps them getting a little further down the road. But it’s Carol that keeps them together. It’s Carol that saves Doc from his self-destructive impulses. It’s Carol that knows if they don’t make it together . . . they don’t make it. If she throws in the towel, it was truly all for nothing. Until Doc can not only forgive her for Beynon, but trust completely that she did it for the right reason, he’s still in Huntsville. Finally, Doc comes to this realization. But Carol demands from her husband, “No matter what ever else happens, no more about him.” And he agrees, “No matter whatever else happens—no more about him.” And the two finally are reunited. Walking together, one arm draped around her, holding her close. His other arm carrying the pump-action shotgun he stole from the sporting goods store. Backed by a sea of garbage, those terrible trash-eating birds flying around in the sky, and the dump trucks moving mountains of trash, yet for the first time in the movie we know they’re going to be alright. “Whatever else happens.” —Cinema Speculation (2022) by Quentin Tarantino

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward (Paradise)

 

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward (Paradise) video. Soundrack "Paradise" and other songs by Ellen Forrest and Artie Shaw.

Acting Method Training, Paul Newman

Examining the neural basis of dramatic acting. While all people play multiple roles in daily life—for example, ‘spouse' or ‘employee'—these roles are all facets of the ‘self' and thus of the first-person perspective. Compared to such everyday role playing, actors are required to portray other people and to adopt their gestures, emotions and behaviours. Consequently, actors must think and behave not as themselves but as the characters they are pretending to be, by assuming a ‘fictional first-person' perspective. Through a series of functional MRI studies, we sought to identify brain regions preferentially activated when actors adopt a Fic1P perspective during dramatic role playing. Compared to responding as oneself, responding in character produced visible reductions in brain activity and deactivations in the cortical midline network of the frontal lobe. Thus, portraying a character through acting seems to be a deactivation-driven process, perhaps representing a ‘loss of self'. Dramatic acting is the process of portraying a character in the context of a theatrical performance. Acting can be thought of as a form of pretence, in particular the act of pretending to be someone who the actor is not. This idea is central to the acting method derived from the writings of Stanislavski that dominates the teaching and practice of acting in North America. Despite the central importance of role playing to social interaction, the topic of role playing has scarcely been examined in experimental psychology or cognitive neuroscience. Instead, there is a large literature devoted to the perceptual phenomenon of theory-of-mind, which is the process of inferring the intentions, thoughts and emotions of other people. It is about decoding the intentions of others, and displaying those intentions to people in the context of a theatrical performance.

In a general sense, acting methods can be polarized along the lines of being either ‘outside-in' or ‘inside-out', although these approaches are thought of by most acting theorists as complementary methods for getting into character. Outside-in approaches are gestural methods that emphasize the physical and expressive techniques of the actor. In contrast to this, inside-out approaches are psychological methods that rely on perspective-taking and identification with the character. The Stanislavski's approach is strongly oriented towards interpreting the motivations and emotions of the character. Actors appear to be living through the performance as if the events were happening to them. Achieving this can involve a large degree of 3P perspective-taking with the character. However, it is important to keep in mind that, while the process of assuming a 3P perspective on a character may be a central part of the preparatory phrase of learning a role, it should not, according to Stanislavski's method, be an active process during a performance itself. The commonly understood goal of method acting is for the actor to ‘become' the character in performance. The principal objective of the current study was to examine dramatic acting for the first time using functional neuroimaging methods. The imaging results showed that acting led to deactivations in brain areas involved in self processing. These findings might suggest that acting, as neurocognitive phenomenon, is a suppression of self processing. The major increase in activation associated with role change was seen in the posterior part of the precuneus. If so, then the deactivations seen in the prefrontal cortex for acting would represent a loss of self processing related to a trait-based conception of the self.

It is telling to point out that acting theorists for over a century have talked about the ‘split consciousness' involved in the process of acting. The actor has to be himself and someone else at the same time, and this could lead to a splitting of attentional resources devoted to the focalization of attention and consciousness. This is not simply the ‘divided attention' of multi-tasking procedures, but a fundamental split of resources devoted to a maintenance of one's identity as a conscious self. According to this interpretation, activation of the precuneus would represent a dispersion of self-related attentional resources, whereas deactivation would represent a focalization or internalization of such resources. Neither gestural modification in the form of a foreign accent nor other-orientation in the form of 3P mentalizing had an influence on this neural mechanism, whereas the explicit psychological process of role change through character portrayal did, perhaps resulting in the double consciousness that acting theorists talk about. Again, acting was the only condition in which self-identity was explicitly split during the task. We conclude that the loss of deactivation in the precuneus for the acting process might represent a departure from a unified and focalized sense of consciousness, towards the dual consciousness that typically characterizes dramatic acting. The most surprising finding of the study was that gestural changes while still maintaining the self-identity led to a pattern of deactivations similar to that for acting. This study was approved by the Hamilton Integrated Research Ethics Board, St Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton (protocol no. 10-3457). Source: royalsocietypublishing.org

In the early 1950s, Paul Newman seemed the most unthreatening of Hollywood’s angry young men – less eruptive than Marlon Brando, less twitchy than Montgomery Clift, less surly than James Dean. Tempering the fury unleashed by the others, he played a redeemed hoodlum in Somebody Up There Likes Me and an introverted outlaw in The Left Handed Gun. Eventually, as a fated loser in Cool Hand Luke and a wise-cracking robber in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he settled down to be wry and irresistibly charming. Like the alcoholic husband he played in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Newman relied on liquor to ease him into a merciful numbness in real life. Newman developed his crackpot theory, probably concocted when he was sloshed, which maintains that the British never get as drunk as Americans do because they like warm beer and don’t put ice in whisky, which means that their bodies have no need to heat up the alcohol they consume to blood temperature before it can be absorbed. “My whole system,” he said, “was based on catching up with those ice cubes.” 

It’s a shrewd comment on his emotional refrigeration: those blue eyes do often seem glacial. Attending classes for method actors, who were expected to draw on their emotional memories when on stage, Newman realised that he “didn’t know enough about my own feelings to start examining them.” Fear and danger ejected him from this state of anaesthesia. Hence his obsession with racing cars, which began with a movie role as a grand prix driver in Winning but took him “outside that fictional experience into something real”. Newman also encouraged his son, Scott – an addict and an unsuccessful actor, with whom his relationship was “a dance of death” – to take high-speed risks on the road. Scott seemed to have never forgiven that his father had left his mother Jackie (now Robinson) for "that Southern magnolia," referring to Joanne. Paul warned Scott to control his words.

And Joanne, despite her good intentions, had difficulty in connecting with Scott. Joanne had help at home with some nannies and maids when it was necessary, but she was very warm with Jackie's children, and Paul felt Scott was ungrateful to her. At one lacerating moment, Newman recalls that he considered shooting himself to rid Scott of “the affliction that was me”; eventually, it was the unhappy Scott who died prematurely. Some friends wondered why Newman chose to direct a telefilm based on Michael Cristofer’s play The Shadow Box in 1980 because it dealt with death and terminal illness. His son, Scott, had not been dead for very long, and Newman’s mother was to die of cancer two years later (it might already have been diagnosed at this point). The truth was Joanne was friends with Cristofer and Newman would do virtually anything to please Joanne.

After his death, Elizabeth Taylor, who had starred with Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, claimed that “I loved that man with all my heart. He was goodness and kindness and pure integrity.” Given his psychological record, Newman refused to take credit for his much-praised philanthropy, that also applies to his political activities in support of candidates who opposed the Vietnam war; though he voted Democrat, Newman defined himself as “an emotional Republican” – stoic and self-contained. He was serious about giving back to the community — He knew he was lucky, good looking - but didn’t often feel worthy of all the accolades, so at least he could give his money to causes where it might make a difference. Recalling his not so extraordinary trajectory in romance when young, he says: I was 15. And just as Mary Jane Phipps was about to lay back in the hay and enjoy my advances, I started sneezing. I was absolutely crippled. There’d be no lengthy kisses, because there was no way I could breathe through my nose. My losing streak continued even after I enrolled at Ohio University before being drafted. I auditioned for a part in a student production and actually got the role. It didn’t take long before I became infatuated with another cast member, a statuesque French beauty who was likely a full head taller than me; I loved to dance with her because I could just lay my head on her chest. I think she was indifferent to me, but I did finally manage to get a real date with her. I had visions of, if not getting laid, then at least rubbing my lips across her neck. As I prayed for an invitation up to her room, she patted me on the head and affectionately said, “I like going out with you because you’re so harmless!” I was aware that beautiful girls thought I was a joke, a happy buffoon.

"Sometime in the late fifties, I saw a poll in a popular magazine where they asked a group of women which well-known personality or actor they had sexual fantasies about. Well, the “winner” happened to be me. Which I guess is pretty funny, until you consider that had I been killed in my bomber during World War II, had I gone down in flames, that was as hot as things would have gotten for me. My first sexual encounter, for the record, was with an educated young lady from Jacksonville, Florida, where I would undergo part of my naval training. At 18, I’d been laid only twice. Which is a fact that likely would have both elated and displeased my mother." Probably, this losing streak with the dames until Newman met Jackie Witte, it would shape his respectful yet distant rapport he'd share with his leading ladies.

Throughout Newman's account of his life in The Extraordinary Life of An Ordinary Man, there is a sense of real loneliness, a feeling like he wasn't always in control of his own life, and that he even resented the intrusion of fame. He found it boggling how women eventually found him to be such a sex symbol, as he could barely get a girl to even talk to him until after he had been discharged from the military. His mother Theresa treated him mostly like a prop and once he was married to his first wife, Theresa insisted they sleep in twin beds. Despite all his success, there was a clear message that Paul Newman wanted to live a private life. Newman felt he was an ordinary man gifted with extraordinary opportunities. Plagued with chronic insecurity, Newman felt for most of his life like an impostor who achieved success through mere luck rather than talent. Although he reached onscreen rare moments of revelation that proved his talent throughout his long career, Newman probably would not accept that he had much talent at all. There was nothing ordinary about Paul Newman, the Oscar-winning actor, prize-winning race car driver and philanthropist who gave away more than $700 million to charities. The problem of this memoir is that probably the reader won't feel no closer to understanding Paul Newman after reading this thoughts than before. Source: kirkusreviews.com