Marilyn Monroe's myths reconstructed in "Blonde"

In Dominik’s eyes, Marilyn Monroe is a weirdo artist, a clever and experimental mind who was thwarted by things beyond her control, poor mental health and the Hollywood system, mostly. But as much as Dominik seems to appreciate Monroe on those merits, he eventually puts her through a nightmarish ordeal leading to her death that is  harrowing and relentless (and, eventually, tiresome) on film. Ana de Armas can’t do much to conceal her Cuban accent as she approximates Monroe’s breathy vocal melodiousness. Unfortunately, she lacks the necessary nuance which is far off her reach. We don’t necessarily get to know the reality of Monroe here; the movie offers precious little of her at work, or in her social element. It’s pretty much all pain, all the time, crafting a vivid and frightening picture of the madness of fame. 

Throughout her numerous travails, Monroe conceives and then loses several babies, either by coerced abortion or miscarriage. That becomes a heavy emotional throughline in the film, as does Monroe’s yearning to know her father, whom she’s never met but idolizes nonetheless. Dominik explores several noted film productions (Don’t Bother to Knock, Niagara, The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot are all attenuated through interesting moments) and significant license is taken when examining her more famous romantic, troubled relationships. And it's especially insulting the portrait of Joe DiMaggio and President John F Kennedy as abusive chauvinists. In May, Christie’s sold Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn portrait of the actress for a staggering $195 million. It is the most expensive 20th-century artwork to ever sell at auction. In the summer, Madame Tussauds installed a wax sculpture of the film legend at the Lexington Hotel, a place Marilyn and her husband Joe DiMaggio once called their home. In 2020, Forbes listed Monroe as the 13th-highest-paid dead celebrity, raking in $13 million her estate earned the year prior. The outlet reported that her likeness was officially licensed by nearly 100 brands globally, including Dolce & Gabbana, Zales, and Lego Group. 

As art historian Gail Levin told PBS’ American Masters about Monroe, “She could, arguably, be the most-photographed person of the 20th century.” By her own admission, the woman she presented onscreen to the American public was just the façade of a glamorous sex bomb Hollywood decided to market her as, not the insecure Norma Jeane Baker who grew up in a string of foster homes. A persona that now, decades after her death, threatens to totally eclipse her actuality and erase any genuine human complexity that doesn’t align with her best-selling tragic paradigm. In Blonde Marilyn Monroe is no longer a real person but a more of a void that members of the public can fill with their own vague desires. In her essay “Thirty Are Better Than One: Marilyn Monroe and the Performance of Americanness,” academic Susanne Hamscha writes that Monroe has become “a surface on which narratives of American culture can be (re-) constructed” and “functions as a cultural type that can be reproduced, transformed, translated into new contexts, and enacted by other people.” 

As Ana de Armas says in the trailer’s voice-over, “Marilyn doesn’t exist. When I come out of my dressing room, I’m Norma Jeane. I’m still her when the camera is rolling. Marilyn Monroe only exists on the screen.” We've abstracted this woman so far from herself, even during her own life, that she was always essentially a figment of our imagination. What we conceive of as Marilyn is actually just the output of our collective projection of her. And, as a heavily fictionalized version of her life, Blonde makes no attempt at correcting the legends surrounding this woman or grounding her in reality, instead adding yet another layer of illusion to her already mythologized existence, and a particularly scandalous one at that. Source: vanityfair.com

“One of the bright spots in Ladies of Chorus (1948) is Miss Monroe’s singing,” wrote critic Tibor Krekes. “She is pretty and, with her pleasing voice and style, she shows promise”—hardly a rave, but nevertheless a gratifying first review that altered Marilyn's career. Marilyn’s singing is more than pleasing, and she displays a remarkable control of pitch and range. Perhaps more remarkable is her on-screen lambency. Even in this early role, when Marilyn appears in-frame, everything around her fades into the background. Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures, was not impressed and her contract was not renewed. Her dismissal from Columbia did not have the same impact on her as her earlier dismissal from Fox. After a brief hiatus, Marilyn’s next appearance on film would be in a Mary Pickford production, featuring her in a scene with Groucho Marx in Love Happy (1949).

Natasha Lytess was the staff drama and acting coach at Columbia when Marilyn signed her six month contract. Natasha left Columbia and became Marilyn’s formal drama coach, a function she performed through the filming of The Seven Year Itch. Marilyn’s directors, co-stars and many other Hollywood notables blamed Natasha over the years for what was occasionally termed Marilyn’s stiff mannered speech. Harry Cohn was probably the most despised man in Hollywood. Later, after Marilyn’s rise to international fame, Cohn admitted his mistake of not having renewed her contract at Columbia. 

Marilyn was just one of several female stars that Cohn pursued, along with Rita Hayworth, Mary Castle, Kim Novak and Evelyn Keyes. Lucille Carroll, whose stage name was Jane Starr, she worked as a Broadway actress and she would become the first female studio executive in Hollywood. According to Lucille Carroll, “Under Marilyn’s baby-doll, kitten exterior, she was tough and shrewd and calculating,” was Lucille’s assessment. One day during her last summer in 1962, Marilyn told her confidante Susan Strasberg: ‘Hollywood will never forgive me—not for leaving, not for fighting the system—but for winning, which I’m going to do.’ Maybe Hollywood has not forgiven her after all this time. —Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (2014) by Donald Spoto

"Blonde" (spoilers), Lotusland, The Hustler

“It soon became clear that Marilyn was no pushover,” Anthony Summers wrote. “She worked the Hollywood system to her advantage.” And yet, in an interview with Summers, director John Huston describes what he saw in Marilyn Monroe: “Something so vulnerable, something you felt could be destroyed.” In interviews with over 700 people, Anthony Summers, author of Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2017) encountered nothing to suggest that Daryl Zanuck or another Hollywood producer assaulted Marilyn Monroe. Summers is suspicious about Andrew Dominik's film Blonde: "When Oates’ novel Blonde came out, her defence was that, in a work of fiction, she ‘had no particular obligation’ to the facts. In my view, that is not so. The people she named in her novel were real people with real reputations – and historical legacies – and such fictional fabrication is unjustifiably cruel. The fact that the individuals concerned are dead is no defence." Joyce Carol Oates's only defence was her warning: What follows is fiction. Biographical facts should be sought elsewhere. 

In Blonde, Cass Chaplin and Eddy G.— played, respectively, by Xavier Samuel and Evan Williams, and who in Oates’ book are as victimised by the Hollywood system as Monroe is—are conniving rotters in the film, with uncomfortable echoes of homophobic films of the 1950s. Blonde also contains moments of erotic surrealism, including a threesome filmed as an elegantly distorted kneading of flesh into strange new configurations, like a sexy version of the climax of Brian Yuzna's Society. Spoilers: The star’s death is reframed to directly implicate these former lovers rather than the Kennedys. The dialogue is cringey, the direction is misguided, and again, there is far too much skin shown. Blonde isn’t subtle, that’s for sure. Sometimes pushing the envelope helps a movie excel, but in this case it doesn’t work out. In fact, it drastically takes away from what this could have been. Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is exploitative. For most of the film the despair is palpable; the dramatic purpose is not. Blonde frames Monroe, stylishly and icily, as a hysterical woman. She deserves better. Source: empireonline.com

A femme fatale, at least in her own mind, Anais Nin was a woman of mystery and passion, known for extravagant sexual exploits which included a torrid affair with Henry Miller and his wife June. She was not known at the time for her bicoastal life where she had a husband stashed in New York and a younger husband in Los Angeles. "She was liberated decades before female liberation," said the chauvinist author Norman Mailer. "I never let her seduce me that day she came on to me at a party in Greenwich Village. She got Jack Kerouac instead." Anais told novelist James Leo Herlihy she was intrigued by Paul Newman, while Herlihy was lobbying to get Newman to star as Willart in John Frankenheimer's All Fall Down (1962), a role with similarities to Newman's Hud, that ended up on Warren Beatty's hands. Anais told Herlihy. "I suspect Newman will go far in an industry that is all about illusion. There is a self-awareness in this handsome young man. In spite of the hot sun, he already knows that California is a cold, harsh land. He does not want it to hurt him. So what must he do? 

I predict he'll have a miserable life in Hollywood. Beneath all of his swagger, I suspect there is a sensitive man lurking somewhere there. I feel sorry for Newman because if he wants to be a movie star, then he has to be as artificial as Marilyn Monroe. He has to become a sort of dream figure for the women of America. And American women are shallow. They always make gods and goddesses out of cardboard figures. I predict Newman will turn into a cardboard figure. There will be no reality to him. He can't be real. We'll never know who Paul Newman is, because he doesn't know himself. Perhaps one harsh, brutal morning, when that world tumbles in around him, he'll look into the mirror and see himself for the first time. But it will frighten him. A tragedy, really. But, this is, after all, Lotusland." Later, Herlihy confided: "I don't know if I learned anything about Paul Newman from listening to her. But Anais was not clever enough to conceal her own deceit. She was actually attracted to Newman, but could not admit that to herself. From the way she talked about him, I felt she wanted to add him to her stable of lovers. But knowing how hopeless that was, she chose to trash him instead, the way she did with Gore Vidal in her diary." –Anais Nin: The Last Days (2013) by Barbara Kraft

The Hustler's (1961) - Journey of Ambition and Redemption: One of Paul Newman’s most iconic films, it remains a frighteningly nuanced psychological study and societal portrait. The film delights in illuminating the dark “shadows” of our times: ruthless ambition, pangs of personal growth, capitalist dreams, and the pursuit of alcohol to provide a fleeting smile in times of sorrow. These themes are often silently stalking us, hiding around unforeseen corners, as we do not generally bring them up in polite discourse. As Fast Eddie Felson approaches his peak, the need for mastery looms. The drive for mere pleasure falters when confronted by the will for being recognized and having lasting power. And to Eddie, power is achieved by beating the greatest pool player in the country, Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). 

Eddie finds refuge in the form of the eternal feminine. His love interest, Sarah Packard, is attracted to the charming masculinity of Newman's character, yet she's painfully aware of his immaturity. Her instinct to introspection is actually frightening to him. Eddie secretly knows he must accept the instinct of Sarah to improve himself before he can embark on a disciplined and mature approach to life. However, success in his life will entail a confrontation with the Mephistophelian “devil” straight from the tragedy of Goethe’s Faust. This force is personified by Bert Gordon, a rich speculator, gambler and owner of men’s souls. Eddie’s “excuses” for losing do not gain any sympathy from such a Machiavellian character. In a deep conversation with Sarah, Eddie finds the source of his passion, likening it to a jockey having developed such precise control of the powerful stallion (his inner nature), that propels him towards an undeniable victory. Sarah calls Eddie a winner.

The Hustler culminates with an emotionally wrenching and tragic climax. Fast Eddie enters the Ames Pool Hall, the billiard coliseum, with his final $3000 dollars. Harnessing his remnant passion for the game and for life that he realized through Sarah, he now drags his damaged pride during his last pool match. Sarah’s insight helped Eddie find out the truth about his moral weakness. Rossen shows the pool game as a graveyard collection of dispassionate symbols. Fats is a champion, but his love for the game has been reduced to a “high percentage” ritual. Eddie won’t lose because he has someone who inspires him to fight for. Eddie says defiantly to Bert, “You don't know what winning is. You're a loser, Bert. 'Cause you're dead inside. You can't live unless you make everything else dead around you!”

Despite its reputation as a truly bleak film, it's somehow a story of moral triumph. A determined hustler can beat the system, no matter how far he has fallen. When Eddie invests all he’s got (his life savings), no mere percentage player can match his fervent determination. And yet it also warns us against chasing false symbols of success that prevent a deeper emotional connection. All the glitz and glam of a Las Vegas evening cannot fill that unquenchable human void that inspires the greatest of feats. “I think Robert Rossen had actually signed somebody else,” Newman remembered, “and then he found out I was available and called me and said, ‘Can I send you a script?’ I read half of it and called my New York agent at six o’clock in the morning and said, ‘Get me this film.’ And he did.” Rossen, whose major Hollywood career had been interrupted by encounters with the House Un-American Activities Committee, was now hobbled by a combination of diabetes and alcoholism, but he was determined to make a film about a world that he knew well, the demimonde of smoky billiard halls and itinerant pool sharks. It was a bravura bit of pulp, tightly atmospheric, filled with pinpoint detail and spare, snappy dialogue. 

Newman respected Rossen’s knowledge of the subject matter and his commitment to the job. “He just pulled himself together to do the film,” Newman remembered, “and he was incredible.” Too, Newman loved the material and knew it was the best thing he’d ever had in his career. In his view, Eddie Felson was a guy trying to find himself, to express himself and his talents in an unorthodox way, to burst into the world and be a somebody instead of a nobody, and mostly, to realize his true self. Newman told an interviewer, “I spent the first thirty years of my life looking for a way to explode. For me, apparently, acting is that way.” Newman always recalled The Hustler fondly, as one of his best roles. “It was one of those movies when you woke every day and could hardly wait to get to work,” Newman said, “because you knew it was so good that nobody was going to be able to louse it up.” Rossen was free to operate on the cheap and get an authentic feel; the picture was shot in mid-town Manhattan during the spring of 1961. Rossen used the Greyhound Bus Terminal, some dive bars on Eighth Avenue, and, especially, the Ames Billiard Academy on West Forty-fourth Street.

Piper Laurie, a promising young actress with a résumé rather like Joanne Woodward’s of a couple years before, would play brilliantly her bittersweet role as Eddie's love interest. Sarah is an alcoholic writer with a shady past, and she's partly lame. Laurie's chemistry with Newman is so powerful and disturbing that evokes the best noir dramas. To prepare for the film, Newman took lessons from the famed billiard champion Willie Mosconi; he moved a billiard table into his Upper East Side apartment where he lived with Joanne, getting good enough to play most of his pool shots in the film. The Hustler was in contention for an impressive nine Oscar awards: best picture, actor, actress, director, screenplay, cinematography, art direction, and two for best supporting actor. All these nominations were worthy, but Paul Newman’s was especially well deserved. He was the center of the film and carried it all—the naïvete, the swagger, the nervous tension, the sexual confidence, the crushing humiliation, the not-quite-focused calculation, the hard-earned redemption—with disarming certainty. 

—Paul Newman: A Life (2009) by Shawn Levy

Marilyn Monroe: not a blonde stereotype

“Marilyn Monroe has been given many labels, both during her life and after. Probably the two most insulting are that she was a dumb blonde and a victim. She was neither. The characters she played on-screen were often harebrained and made people laugh, but that did not mean that the real-life woman was dumb. She lost some battles and her ending was tragic and devastating, but that does not make her a victim. On the contrary, her determination to fight in such a male-oriented and hostile industry makes her one of the bravest women of her generation. Mental health is a topic that is still frequently dealt with behind closed doors, and the knowledge that Marilyn felt deep despair at times often makes people uncomfortable. Marilyn did have psychological issues, and to look at them can help spread the word about mental health, which is of paramount importance. Knowing that Marilyn suffered too may help those struggling with their own issues, and she would have been terrifically proud of that. The Marilyn Monroe seen in manipulated images, fake stories, and even false quotes is not the person who really existed. The exagerations around her character really have no bearing on the human being at all. By allowing ourselves to see only the legend, we reduce Marilyn to merely a character—someone who has no more bearing on real life than Betty Boop or Mickey Mouse.

Out goes the human being who loved poetry and music, and in comes a character like the ones she played on-screen. The real woman is still out there—she can be found in interviews and photographs that have existed for the past seventy years—and yet some still prefer her fake giggling blonde image. Perhaps the real woman is too much to handle. Maybe she was always too much and the fake version fits a certain mold that people are more accepting of. By humanising Marilyn, we are each given a lesson in empathy, hopefully inviting to see Marilyn in a more sensitive and caring light. For a woman who fought her entire life to be recognised as an intelligent, ambitious actress, the least we can do is understand that while she often played ditzy women on-screen, the opposite was true in real life.” —‘Marilyn Monroe, The Seven Year Itch, and the Birth of an Unlikely Feminist’ (2018) by Michelle Morgan

Amy Greene, now 92, was one of Monroe’s closest friends and confidantes. She was the Cuban model-turned-housewife of Milton Greene, a celebrity photographer who first photographed Monroe in 1953; hit it off with her; and had her as his and Amy’s houseguest at their home in Weston, Connecticut, where they lived with their infant son, for four years (1954-1957) while Monroe, at the height of her fame, took a hiatus from living and working in Hollywood, and eventually returned on her own terms, as the co-chief — with Milton — of her own production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions. Some highlights:

How did Milton and Marilyn first meet? (“It was the week before our wedding [that he was to photograph Marilyn, who had seen and been impressed by his work]. He flew out, and when he walked in she said, ‘But you’re just a boy!’ ‘Cause he looked like he was 12 years old. And then he said, ‘You’re just a girl! Let’s go to work.’ They hit it off right away.”) What was Marilyn’s state of mind at this time? (“At this point Marilyn was such a recluse that no one in the industry really knew her or said, ‘Oh, I saw her at a party,’ ’cause she never went anywhere… Really all she did was eat, sleep, and work… She wasn’t getting the life that she wanted in Los Angeles.”)

What appealed to Marilyn about moving in with them in Connecticut? (“She was excited because she loved the house, she loved our lifestyle… She would take walks in the woods everyday. Nobody bothered her… She felt protected.”) What was it like to share a house with the world’s most beautiful and famous woman? (“She was neat. She wouldn't cook… She was no problem whatsoever… She was a good sport… She was smarter than she looked… She read a lot.”)

Was she ever concerned that Marilyn might tempt her husband? (“I was secure in my marriage and I was secure with her… There’s no way she would shaft me to bang Milton.”) What was the impetus for Marilyn Monroe Productions? (“[The idea of creating an independent production company for Marilyn so that she could break out of her typecasting and make films that she wanted to make was] Milton’s, Lew Wasserman‘s, and Jay Kanter‘s… She loved it. She preened. She said, ‘I’m gonna be the head?!’… Milton owned forty-nine percent, Marilyn owned fifty-one.”)

What was the reaction of Marilyn’s second husband, the baseball star Joe DiMaggio, as he watched hundreds of New Yorkers watch Marilyn shoot the famous dress-blowing scene in the 1955 film The Seven-Year Itch? (“I’m standing next to him, and the man is turning white as snow… He said to me, ‘I can’t take it anymore!' I knew he loved her, though.”)

What did she make of Marilyn’s third husband, the playwright Arthur Miller? (“Arthur was a bore… a son-of-a-bitch… a creep. I saw through him the first time I met him.”) Why did Marilyn Monroe Productions ultimately break up? (“Because of Arthur. Not only was he jealous of Milton, but he was jealous of the time that they spent together… Arthur said, ‘It’s either him or me.'”)

What was her relationship with Marilyn like after the split? “We would speak on the telephone and, strangely enough, we met at her hairdressers meetings.”

What was the weird premonition that she had in July 1962 — just a month before Marilyn died — on the night before she and Milton were going out of town? “I was given to a midwife who was kind of a witch… Every once in a while I have these dreams where I can foresee something. This time I woke up and I said to Milton, ‘Call Marilyn… just call her. She needs you.’ He did call her, and they spoke for three hours.”

What did the heiress Alicia Corning Clark say to the Greenes and Marlene Dietrich while drunk at a dinner the night before Marilyn died? (“She said to me, ‘Well, how’s your friend Marilyn?… Then she blurted out, ‘Well, she’s gonna die soon’ I said, ‘Oh, I'll comment it to Milton, he must talk to Marilyn.'”)

What does she think really happened to Marilyn on the night that she died? (“It was a mistake. No doubt in Milton’s mind, no doubt in my mind… That doctor would have been shot at dawn… he gave her all those pills.”) Source: hollywoodreporter.com

As the filming of The Misfits neared its inexorable end during Nevada’s scorching late summer months of 1960, Susan Strasberg noticed Marilyn moving deeper and deeper into depression—not just a melancholy one, but the lament of a deeply wounded psyche. She told him one night about how, during July of 1957, she’d learned that she was pregnant of Arthur Miller. A month later, as she recalled, her doctor told her she’d been diagnosed as having an ectopic pregnancy. “After hearing that, my life went on a roller coaster ride to hell. After losing my little girl, I thought ‘to hell with my career.’ My marriage was collapsing, my life falling apart. Instead of Arthur making a rare appearance in my bed, I preferred to sleep with a bottle of liquor and bottles of pills on my nightstand. I’ve tried other men—Elia Kazan, Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum, Paul Newman.” “Paul Newman, really, how was that?,” Susan asked. “We met at the Actors Studio in New York. It was just deep necking, he looked a bit intimidated, to be honest,” Marilyn giggled. “I think he's not the flirty type. His last affair, as Arthur Penn told me, was with Lita Milan while they were shooting The Left Handed Gun, shortly before he married Joanne.” 

Paul Newman likened Lee Strasberg’s infatuation with Marilyn to Professor Unrath (Emil Jannings), who was fascinated by the charms of Marlene Dietrich (Lola) in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. Strasberg had almost nothing to say about his private life with Marilyn, but he issued high praise for her potential as an actress. “When I finally got around to seeing her films, I was not impressed. But when I met her, I saw that what she looked like was not what she really was, and what was going on inside her was not what you saw on the outside, and that always meant there was something to work with. In Marilyn’s case, the results have been phenomenal. It was almost as if she had been waiting for a button to be pushed which would open a door to a treasure of gold and jewels.” Although she received praise from the Strasbergs and fellow actors who included Kim Stanley, Marilyn lamented, “I was bad, very bad. I could just feel it.” 

However, Strasberg praised Marilyn for her “extraordinary and inviolate sensitivity. This sensitive core should have been killed by all that had happened to her in adolescence, or so I’ve heard.” In his public pronouncements about Marilyn, Strasberg became superlative: “She was engulfed in a mystic-like flame, like when you see Jesus at The Last Supper, and there’s a halo around him. There was this great white light surrounding Marilyn.” So far as it is known, Strasberg was the only person who ever compared Marilyn to Jesus Christ. Paula Strasberg agreed to become Marilyn’s new acting coach at a salary of $1,500 a week, which later rose to $3,000 a week on the set of The Misfits. Arthur Miller detested both Lee and Paula Strasberg. He said, “Without Paula, Marilyn felt lost. In effect, Paula was Marilyn’s mother all over again. A fantasy mother who would confirm everything Marilyn wished to hear.” In 1953, Frank Sinatra had taken Marilyn to see a performance of the Broadway play, Picnic, on an evening when a young Paul Newman was filling in for its star, Ralph Meeker. 

While she was observing Paul Newman and Janice Rule, Marilyn felt intrigued with playing the female lead in the film version that was in development stages at the time. On Broadway, the role was interpreted by Janice Rule. After the performance, over dinner that night, Sinatra applauded the idea of pairing Paul Newman with Marilyn as co-stars in Picnic’s film spinoff. “You guys would be terrific,” Sinatra claimed. He was possibly spot-on accurate in his assessment. Monroe-Newman would have been dynamite onscreen, no doubt. But eventually the Hollywood version of William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play reached the screen with a different cast, the roles eventually awarded to William Holden and Kim Novak. 

Marilyn Monroe: "I think I had many problems as the next starlet keeping the Hollywood wolves from my door. These wolves just could not understand me. They would tell me ‘but Marilyn, you’re not playing the game the way you should. Be smart. You’ll never get anywhere in this business acting the way you do.’ My answer to them would be ‘the only acting I’ll do is for the camera.’ I was determined no one was going to use me - even if he could help my career. I’ve never gone out with a man I didn’t want to. No one, not even the studio, could force me to date someone. The one thing I hate more than anything else is being used. I’ve always worked hard for the sake of someday becoming a talented actress. I knew I would make it someday if I only kept at it and worked hard without lowering my principles and pride in myself.” According to her gynecologist, Leon Khron: “The rumors of her multiple abortions are ridiculous. She never had even one. Later there were two miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy requiring emergency termination, but no abortion.”  –Sources: "Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love" (2014) by David Heyman and "Mimosa: Memories of Marilyn & the Making of The Misfits" (2021) by Ralph Roberts

In 1961, Jonas Mekas perceived something significant in Marilyn’s performance as Roslyn in The Misfits: he christened her Marilyn Monroe, the Saint of the Nevada Desert. "She still remains there," Mekas wrote, "She haunts you, you’ll not forget her. It is Marilyn that is the film. A woman that has known love, has known life, has known men, has been betrayed, but has retained her dream of man and love and life. Is Marilyn playing herself or creating a part? Maybe she is even talking her own thoughts, her own life? There is such a truth in her little details, in her reactions to cruelty, to false manliness, nature, life, death—that is overpowering, that makes her one of the most tragic and contemporary characters of modern cinema, and another contribution to The Woman as a Modern Hero." In 1998, Dennis Schwartz saw the movie as "an attempt to debunk the Western myth of rugged individualism, by showing how vulnerable the cowboys are and how they try to mask their feelings by acting tough." Emanuel Levy, in 2011, suggested that the movie is a deconstruction of the cowboy myth, both real and reel, and presents them as degraded men who now drive a pick up and ride horses without saddles and also perceives a persistent Miller theme, the degradation of the American Dream. 

In August of 2012 writing for his “Agony & Ecstasy” blog, Tim Brayton opined that The Misfits is about: the universality of suffering and death, and how terribly things can go for those who insist on clinging to optimism and innocence in the face of such a universe. Christopher Lloyd, in 2013, offered this opinion: "America is forced to pull the shroud over the ideal of a land of limitless opportunity. And in the end, that’s what “The Misfits” is about: The death of the cowboy." Casey Broadwater, in his review of The Misfits for “Blu-ray.com” offered the following: "Miller’s script is emotionally perceptive and subtle in a way that few Hollywood films are, and his literary background comes through in dialogue that’s frequently “elevated,” that is, more poetic at times than the language your average cowboy drifter would actually use. This is common in literature and on the stage, but it’s never been as readily accepted in film. Still, this gives the otherwise naturalistic movie a kind of mythic, Faulknerian quality―it feels larger than life, more laden with meaning. The real problem with the script, and the film as a whole, is that the storytelling seems disjointed in places, as if unfinished." Source: marilynfromthe22ndrow.com

The Last Movie Stars: A Homage to Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward

This summer HBO Max broadcasted The Last Movie Stars, a six-part documentary series about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, disclosing for the first time several transcripts of interviews with Newman and Woodward by screenwriter Stewart Stern (Rebel Without a Cause, and Rachel, Rachel). Although Newman destroyed most of the recording tapes, Ethan Hawke gathered an insightful collage of narrative fragments who shed new light on the legendary couple's story. Some revelations—like their clashes of egos and Newman's heavy drinking—show us how their marriage was a story of intense romance, intense conflict, and serene strength. In 1953, in a Broadway production of Picnic, Newman and Woodward fell in love with each other, despite Newman being married to Jackie Witte, mother of his three first kids. Painfully honest, Woodward admitted to Stern: "I'm not a natural mother. I hope the children understand that though each and every one of them were adored, if I had it to do all over again, I might not have had children. Actors don't make good parents." 

Paul Newman was convinced that Joanne Woodward was the catalyst for "giving birth to a sexual being," since their association gave Paul Newman more confidence as an actor and sex-symbol: "Newman as sexual object was invented." After Newman's divorce from his first wife, he marrried Joanne Woodward on January 29, 1958, and they were together until his death in 2008. Woodward, now 92, has retreated from the public eye due to Alzheimer's.

A new book featuring these lost transcripts from Newman and Woodward will be published by Knopf on October 18, 2022: Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man—and two daughters of the celebrated couple (Melissa and Clea Newman) have contributed to the project with a foreword and an afterword, respectively. This memoir will offer us new perspectives of Newman and Woodward, both beloved movie stars who also became philanthropic powerhouses. Edited by David Rosenthal, this book promises to focus on Newman's stream of thought about his career and relationship with Woodward—his dependence on her, the way she shaped him intellectually, emotionally and sexually. 

When Woodward was asked by Stern about the key of her successful pairing with Newman, she tried to convey their dual complexity: "I was enamoured of him. I was in lust with him. I think we saw two entirely different images of each other. He thought I was very much in control, crazed but creative; none of which I felt about myself. And I thought of him as being heroic, smart, intelligent and handsome. None of which he thought about himself." The Last Movie Stars is also a quite comprehensive study of Newman and Woodward's film trajectory, and how some real life experiences oddly were conflated with their film versions, like in The Long Hot Summer, A New Kind of Love, Cool Hand Luke, Winning, or Mr. & Mrs. Bridge. 

As Newman said once: "Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience. Joanne believes my character in a film we did together, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge comes closest to who I really am. I personally don’t think there’s one character who comes close." Shawn Levy (author of a previous biography in 2009: Paul Newman: A Life) wrote: "Paul Newman had an intense discipline that demanded he earned, through sheer perseverance, a place alongside the Method gods Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean. He was ultimately the one true superstar to emerge from the original Actors Studio generation, the most popular Stanislavskyan actor in American screen history."

Nominated eight times for Academy Awards, Newman won only once, for Scorsese's "The Color of Money" (1986), in which he reprised his iconic role of "Fast" Eddie Felson in "The Hustler" (1961) directed by Robert Rossen. Rossen explained: "Fast Eddie wants to become a great pool player, but the film is really about the obstacles he encounters in attempting to fulfill himself as a human being. Eddie needs to win before everything else; that is his tragedy." In 1966, Cahiers du Cinéma's film critic Jacques Bontemps wrote about The Hustler: "in a universe dulled with leveling, the one who wins is not the one who concerns himself with the beauty of the gesture, but he for whom everything poses itself in terms of efficacy of return. Compromise and resignation are required.” As Claude Ollier had perceptively written, what gives The Hustler its staying power, is that “one has the constant impression that a sense of indecision hovers permanently, and the final explanations are not enough to dispel it.” 

Pauline Kael noted: "George C. Scott in The Hustler suggests a personification of the power of money. And there's a tortured, crippled girl (Piper Laurie) who speaks the truth: she's a female practitioner of the Socratic method who is continually drinking her hemlock." Roger Ebert wrote that The Hustler "is one of the few American movies in which the hero wins by surrendering, by accepting reality instead of his dreams." Alan Casty analyzes The Hustler in Robert Rossen: The Films and Politics of a Blacklisted Idealist (2013): "In Rossen’s parable of the artist in Hollywood, all are hustlers. The more one hustles and strives, the more he betrays his ideals and dreams. And the more he strives, the more he ends up placing himself in the hands of the moguls whose drive for power rises from an ego that is paradoxically both strong and uncertain. Pool is Eddie’s craft, what he does best; yet, until the very last game, it reveals the most destructive drives within him. His redemption comes not only from what he has won for Sarah, but what he is willing to lose for her. He gives up all that he has left to love. He has paid his debt—by winning and losing."

During the 1970s, Paul Newman called WUSA (1970): "the most significant film I've ever made and the best." Newman had fought Paramount Pictures, accusing the studio's executives of cowardice: “There aren’t many smart people who have power,” he declared to the studio’s vice president Peter Bart, “and you have to use your power to advance truth. What’s money and power worth if you don’t do that?” In WUSA, Paul Newman plays Rheinhardt, an alcoholic failed musician who is hired by a right-wing station. Rheinhardt finds his ideological detachment challenged by his lover Geraldine (Joanne Woodward), and by Rainey (Anthony Perkins) who is an idealist fighting against WUSA's sinister agenda. Based on Robert Stone's novel A Hall of Mirrors (1967), WUSA was the biggest commercial flop of Newman and Woodward's careers. The film was partially censored by the studio, due to its stance against the Vietnam War. 

In Conversations with American Writers (1986) by Charles Ruas, Robert Stone proffers in Rheinhardt only a moribund perversion of the American myths of individualism and innocence, co-opted by corrupt institutional forces. Stone explains to Ruas: “The affectless person is a person that fascinates me. Because of the general rootlessness and transience of American life, that character is, to some degree, celebrated. That character is a contributor to the American experience. Not only have we the Frontiersman and the Puritan and the Outlaw, but we have the Sociopath as a major cultural type, and there is a certain reverence for him in American society. I think what I was trying to do in A Hall of Mirrors was to recognize the importance of the emotionally crippled individual in American life.” 

Ruas adds: "The [right-wing] Restoration Rally thus functions not as a means of revivifying traditional American ideals, but of accelerating a serial process of simulation in which technology facilitates the absorption of the individual into the mass. Preparing himself to speak before the crowd, Rheinhardt momentarily imagines himself conducting an orchestra that might produce redemptive art. Stone elaborates on the impossibility of regenerative violence. Rheinhardt’s peculiar boast is that he can adapt to the cultural coldness. The rhetoric of natural evolution is splendidly ironic for its simulative forms, rather than authentic human ones." As an epilogue that we don't see in WUSA, in the last pages of A Hall of Mirrors Reinhardt's conscience arises due to having his heart broken over Geraldine's death. This twist might indicate that Reinhardt will end up losing his self-defense mechanism and, like Rainey and Geraldine, he'll perish as another victim of an unredeemable system. His affection for Geraldine allows Reinhardt to reclaim back his sense of humanity.

The Hustler and WUSA share the anti-hero/misfit and the fallen woman archetypes, besides the romantic notion of being faithful to your principles. In real life, on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, Paul Newman asserted: “Joanne, being married to you has been the joy of my life.” As well as in those films, Newman found a saviour in his wife and muse, Joanne Woodward. Reflecting on his tumultuous life and career, Paul Newman said: “I’d like to be remembered as a guy who tried to be a part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, and tried to extend himself as a human being.” 

In the coda of The Last Movie Stars, Tennesse Williams (author of Sweet Bird of Youth, The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) is quoted: "The world is violent and mercurial. It will have its way with you. We are saved only by love. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love." Article published previously as The Last Movie Stars: A Homage to Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward on Blogcritics.

Subversive Narratives: Taxi Driver, Joe, WUSA

Although Classical Hollywood had already been dealt a series of death-blows, it might have taken a much longer time dying had it not been for the major eruptions in American culture from the mid-sixties and into the 1970s. Overwhelmingly, the echoes of Vietnam, and subsequently Watergate, were part of the growing force and cogency of radical protest movements—black militancy, feminism, gay liberation. There are two keys to understanding the development of the Hollywood cinema in the seventies: the impingement of Vietnam on the national consciousness, and the astonishing evolution of the horror film genre. The obvious monstrousness of the Vietnam war definitively undermined the credibility of “the system”. Popular protest became common, the essential precondition to a valid revolution. The questioning of authority spread to a questioning of the entire social structure that validated it, and ultimately social institutions, the family, the symbolic figure of the father as superego. The possibility suddenly opened up that the whole world might have to be recreated. Yet this generalized crisis in ideological confidence never begat a revolution. Society appeared to be in a state of advanced disintegration, yet there was no serious possibility of the emergence of a coherent alternative. 

Central to the incoherence of Taxi Driver (1976) is its director Martin Scorsese, with his Catholic Italian background, his fascination with the Hollywood tradition, and his comparatively open responsiveness to contemporary issues. Travis (De Niro) becomes obsessed with the mission of washing the scum from the streets—the scum being both literal and human flotsam. The outcome of this obsession is his violent final release and the rescue of Iris in order to send her back to her parents, the act that establishes Travis as a hero in the eyes of society and the popular press. We see the big city is pure filth, Betsy as the angel of true love is an illusion; so what is left? During one of Travis’ conversation with Iris, he asks her if there is any place she wants to go to escape the squalor of her current existence. She replies tentatively that she has heard about “a commune in Vermont.” But Travis dismisses it immediately: he once saw a picture of a commune in a magazine and it “didn’t look clean.” 

Travis’ behavior is presented as increasingly pathological and antisocial, with his new ambitions he's become more  insane (among his plans, an assassination of a politician). Yet the film can neither clearly reject him (Travis remains, somehow, The Film Hero). I don't think anyone doubts that Travis’ finger-to-forehead gesture of mock suicide is ironically made, yet the irony seems curiously unfocused, and its aim is uncertain. The effect for the viewer is of a kind of paralysis. Being unable to achieve any clear, definitive statement about the hero, the film retreats into enigma. Travis becomes a public hero (ironic), feels satisfaction at what he has done for Iris and her parents, and reaches some personal serenity and satisfaction with himself. The spectator can think either that the hero will continue to cleanse the city of its filth, and he will explode again with another bloodbath. There is another alternative, which comes closest to rendering the action and narrative intelligible—the notion that Travis, while drowning in an obviously beyond-help society, has achieved through his massacre some kind of personal grace or redemption, and that is really all that matters, since civilization is demonstrably unredeemable.

Joe (1970) takes place over several days in New York City and focuses on the unlikely relationship that develops between two middle-age men: Joe Curran (Peter Boyle), a bitter tool-and-dye maker, and Bill Compton (Dennis Patrick), a wealthy advertising executive. While they have nothing in common socially or personally, they share a deep resentment toward hippie youth culture and the radical shifts in the American society. Joe is ranting and raving about “niggers,” “fags,” and “hippies,” grousing about his perceived disenfranchisement and an unfair system that coddles the lazy and punishes honest workers like himself. There is always the suggestion that Bill is just trying to stay on Joe’s good side out of concern that Joe might turn him in to the police, but the film also wants us to believe that these two men forge a real connection, one that feeds off their collective anger. 

Of course, that anger, to some extent, derives from jealousy, and when they have the opportunity late in the film to participate in an orgy with a group of hippies, their hesitation is minimal. They see the youth generation as cultural rot, but rot they want a part of, yet they can’t really share. At its best, Joe captures with raw, direct power the intensity of cultural animosity—one might say loathing—that was gripping the nation at the time, and in some ways it was prophetic; it was made just before the Kent State shooting and the subsequent Hard Hat Riot in New York City, both events that Joe Curran would have endorsed. The script merges zeitgeist-defining cultural awareness with a streak of vigilantism that is at times critical and at other times dangerously regressive. It’s hard to get a read on what the film’s ideological positioning is, which is compounded by Wexler’s choice of a contrived scenario about the violence of the generation gap.

Peter Boyle embodies the embittered Joe with a unique mix of angry bluster, coldness, foolish naivete, and dangerously coiled rage. He is simulatenousyl pathetic and scary, yet there is something relatable about him, even as he blurts out his generally misanthropic view of the world. In an interview with The New York Times, Boyle expressed his dismay that certain audiences misread the film and even cheered Joe’s violence (he contended that Joe was a clear anti-violence cry against U.S. involvement in Vietnam). The film seems to condemn Joe’s regressive social attitudes and love of violence, yet the objects of his derision are largely deserving, as most of the hippies portrayed in the film are criminals and frauds who betray any sense of progressive values or morality (it is clearly a post-Manson hippie world).

One of the great joys of Stuart Rosenberg’s WUSA (1970) is the way it evokes the New Orleans that was still visible but disappearing even in the 1980s—the Canal Street department stores, the French Quarter dives, the jazz clubs, the bars with wood paneling. If that New Orleans resembled anything, it resembled the blue collar city that disappeared when the dot com boom remade San Francisco in the early 1990s. The YMCA building on Saint Charles Avenue was long gone, as was the Hummingbird Grill, an all-night diner on the ground floor of a residential hotel where ex-cons worked the grill, and the waitresses brought you a thermos when you ordered coffee. Oddly, WUSA can’t seem to make up its mind whether it wants to glorify or condemn Reinhardt’s moral apathy. In fact, apart from fringe elements on both sides of the political spectrum, moral apathy seems to be the defining characteristic of just about everybody in the movie. As in Yeats’s poem, in WUSA, only the worst are full of “passionate intensity.”

Reinhardt finds work as a disc jockey on WUSA; though he identifies as “liberal,” he doesn’t mind reading news with an openly conservative spin. In short order, Reinhardt and Geraldine (Joanne Woodward) move into an apartment in the French Quarter, meeting a group of disaffected hippies and Rainey (Anthony Perkins), a liberal southerner (also a judge’s son) who after a stint in Venezuela with the Peace Corps, has come home and started collecting data on New Orleans welfare recipients for some vague municipal entity. Rainey excoriates Reinhardt for working for WUSA, which pushes Reinhardt to a state of self-delusion. In the film, Newman turns in such a charismatic performance, it’s kind of a contradiction, since the apathy he makes so appealing runs contrary to what would seem to be the movie’s left-leaning political message. When he’s not with Geraldine or working at the radio station, Reinhardt spends most of his time drinking and getting high with the hippies downstairs, who seem as unfazed as him. Along with Reinhardt, they sneer openly at Rainey, the only idealist. 

In the novel, all three protagonists, Reinhardt, Geraldine and Rainey are self-destructive. In their film version, Paul Newman’s charisma, his on-screen chemistry with Joanne Woodward, and Anthony Perkins' obsessive personality, all cause the film to express a worldview much closer to Reinhardt’s ultra-individualism than it is to Rainey’s sincere, if somewhat patronizing liberalism—which is a problem, since the movie clearly wants us to sympathize with Rainey’s convictions. If this constitutes one of WUSA’s chief failures, nevertheless, it also makes the movie suggestive of the contradictory philosophical underpinnings of American counterculture, and maybe one of the reasons for becoming the biggest flop of Paul Newman’s career.

Over Neil Diamond's song Glory Road in a montage, Reinhardt walks through a derelict graveyard, grieving Geraldine while trying to find her tomb. In the movie’s final scene, ruefully, Reinhardt tells the hippie guru that he is “a survivor.” Then he flings his jacket over his shoulder and walks out the door, presumably to board yet another Greyhound for a different city. WUSA captures much that was (and is) wrong with American counterculture, which suffers from deeply conflicted philosophical underpinnings, not least the conflict between the individualism at all costs of Reinhardt and the communalism inherent in any leftist critique. Consider the hippies living below Reinhardt, who openly have mocked Rainey for not being “cool.” By all appearances, they’re card carrying members of the American counterculture of the time, and yet throughout the film, they behave so inconsistently. Granted, we realize Rainey is disturbed enough to resort to violence. And yet while the film’s hippies mock Rainey’s idealism, they seem untroubled by Reinhardt’s opportunism. Does this make them opportunists, or worse, radical capitalists? 

If anything, the movie posits a world where everybody’s on the grift, from Reinhart’s preacher friend (a conman from New York) to the African-Americans who are dependent on welfare. In point of fact, the WUSA conservatives have it right; in both the film and the novel, most of the welfare recipients Rainey interviews are collecting benefits fraudulently, a fact that only serves to justify Reinhardt’s moral apathy. In WUSA, the closest Reinhardt comes to a change of heart is a speech condemning the Vietnam War at the film’s climax. “When our boys drop a napalm bomb on a cluster of gibbering slants, it’s a bomb with a heart.” As a parody of Newspeak, Reinhardt continues, while the rally turns into a riot. “And inside the heart of that bomb, mysteriously but truly present, is a fat little old lady on the way to the World’s Fair, and that lady is as innocent as she is motherly.” And yet by the time Reinhardt’s lecturing us from the podium, the film’s one committed leftist, Rainey, is being beaten to death by an angry mob.

In one scene, Reinhardt and Geraldine take a night swim in Lake Pontchartrain. After they get out of the water, Reinhardt accuses Geraldine of being a “man-killer” for luring him into the lake. Is he really so paranoid? Among other things, in WUSA, we observe the uneasy relationship countercultural values have with traditional American ideas about maleness, and with the American mythology of the outsider as both hero and anti-hero, at odds with most leftist ideology. In A Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1991) Christopher Lasch argues that much of what passes for counterculture is countercultural in appearance only, since it actually apes the values of the mainstream culture; as an example, Lasch cites 1960s countercultural icon Jim Morrison, frontman of the commercial rock band The Doors. In WUSA, won over by the star’ charisma, we might forget Reinhardt’s apathy, and the film would seem to contradict itself. Nevertheless, in part because Newman embodies such a glaring contradiction, the film tells us a great deal about the contradictory forces shaping American culture both before and since it was made. —Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond: A Revised and Expanded Edition (2003) by Robin Wood