Cloris Leachman's memoirs, Free Love

Cloris Leachman: As Miss Chicago, I was automatically a contestant in the Miss America Pageant. I was spinning from the way things were happening so I called my mother. She flew first to Chicago and then on to Atlantic City with me. Today contestants have all kinds of people to assist them in the Miss America contest, but there was no one there to aid or guide us. In the formal part of the contest, I wore the one evening gown I had from college. Right before I went out, Mama said, “Sparkle, Cloris!” And I sparkled. I was third runner-up. That was fine with me. I didn’t care about being Miss America. I much preferred winning the prize of one thousand dollars and having no further responsibilities. Three months after I’d arrived in New York, I met Irving Hoffman, an executive with the Hollywood Reporter. He invited me to the opening night of a play, Mr. Peebles and Mr. Hooker. During the intermission, Irving introduced me to William Liebling, a prominent theatrical agent. They were looking for someone just like me, a sincere, average American girl type. He told me that tomorrow morning I should be at the Broadhurst Theater. Bill Liebling and his wife, Audrey Wood, had one of the classiest agencies in the city. Liebling represented actors; Audrey represented authors, particularly Tennessee Williams. Kazan was the monarch of the New York theater. 

Kazan had directed most of the recent stage hits and nearly all of Tennessee Williams’s plays, including the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Marlon Brando. In 1947 Kazan had forged an exclusive group whose members included the cream of young New York actors. He’d called it the Actors Studio. Liebling was very smart. I took his advice about everything, and so the next afternoon I was at the building where the Actors Studio was housed. Kazan introduced himself. He said he’d seen me in A Story for a Sunday Evening and Come Back, Little Sheba, and he’d heard from other people how talented I was. He said we could start anytime we were ready. I had command of my emotions, and I could select out of the past only the part I wanted, only what was useful to me. I was welcomed into the Actors Studio, and was in the company of the best young actors in the country: Julie Harris, Kim Stanley, Eli Wallach, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Steve Hill, James Whitmore, Maureen Stapleton. When I met Marilyn she was even more gorgeous, more voluptuous—her eyes, her mouth, her body—in person than she appeared in her pictures. They asked me to understudy Nina Foch as well as another role in John Loves Mary, and I agreed. At the same time, I was understudying five separate roles in the play Happy Birthday, including the lead role, which was being performed by the first lady of the American theater, Helen Hayes. 

New York was different then. I walked all the way home one night from the Old Nick, on the Lower East Side, on Eighty-seventh Street on upper Fifth Avenue, near the Metropolitan Museum Of Art. I walked the whole way without a suggestion of fear. It occurs to me as I look back that there were two possibilities: either New York wasn’t dangerous in those days or I was just plain ignorant. Marlon became very close to Ellen, Stella Adler’s daughter, and their relationship lasted all through Marlon’s life. Kazan  and his buddies took care of me like I was Snow White, always making sure I had a place to stay. I managed to get small jobs on TV shows, nothing important, but I earned enough to keep myself in New York. Marlon took me to dinner at Sardi once but his stare looked so cruel that I couldn't handle it and I left crying. Marlon asked me out several times, but I didn’t go. I felt he’d want to take me to his apartment and probably it wouldn’t be clean. 

Also, Marlon was after every girl that twitched, and I didn’t want to be one of the multitude. “I always thought Cloris was the most talented one at the Studio,” Marlon said later. “That made me curious as to who she’d wind up marrying. What’s it like? Pretty madcap, George?” “Madcap, madhouse. Something with mad in it,” replied my husband George Englund. I can’t say that overall and through the years, I was close to Marlon. I think he saw me as an obstacle to his having the friendship he wanted with George. Marlon was unpredictable to me. The worst thing that happened between us came right after his son Christian killed Cheyenne’s boyfriend in Marlon’s house. I was sad for Marlon, but it didn’t occur to me that he’d like to hear from me. I imagined the whole world was sending condolences and trying to speak to him, and the absence of anything from me would not be of particular notice. And yet Marlon told George he would never forgive me for not contacting him after the tragedy had happened in his life. And he didn’t. George was a college graduate, while Marlon didn’t finish high school. They both went to military school. Marlon was thrown out of his, George was the highest-ranking officer at his. Both in military school and in the navy, George learned an ethic that he lived by. Marlon didn’t seem to me to have any moral commitment. 

Paul Newman was a moral man, no question. He didn’t do things self-consciously to get applause, to get noticed. He just went about being one of the great movie stars of all time and one of the kindest men of his century. George and me saw a lot of the Newmans. I did two movies with Paul: The Rack (1956) which was my first film after Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and then WUSA in 1970. It was a depressing political drama. George and me had had trouble in our marriage. I didn't know if the Newmans might have had theirs.  George had confessed to me he had been seduced by Joan Collins. We were talking about divorce. 

I remember one night that Joanne was busy in the wardrobe department, I couldn't resist to initiate an overture to Paul, something I'd later regret, since Joanne was one of my best friends. Of course, Paul, always the gentleman, acted as if nothing had happened. Our boys grew up parallel to the Newmans’ three girls, Nell, Lissy, and Clea. We and the Newmans shared parallel tragedies—the death of Paul’s son Scott and the death of our son Bryan, both from drugs. Paul Newman was put on the stage of life, and in his walk across it, he did indeed prove, in all the ways a man can, he was the most loyal. —Cloris (2009) by Cloris Leachman and George Englund

Paul Newman: "I don't like to discuss my marriage, but I will tell you something which may sound corny but which happens to be true. I have steak at home. Why should I go out for hamburger? It's not because I've been called a sex-symbol that I have to commit adultery."

In the notes for his poem Queen Mab (1813), Percy Shelley declares that ‘love is free’. He rejected monogamy, and tried to convince the women in his life to do the same. Not many people today would be shocked by this. A YouGov survey in 2020 of adults in the United States found that, of those who are in a relationship, more than a quarter are non-monogamous. But free love – by which I mean the idea that both men and women should be allowed to have sex outside of marriage, and to carry on multiple relationships at once, without judgment or persecution – was not always with us. It had to be invented. For centuries in Europe, nobody openly defended, and few dared to imagine the possibility of, greater sexual freedom for both men and women. Free love was invented in 1792, the year Shelley was born. It started when the French Revolutionaries challenged the absolute power of King Louis XVI, they energised radicals, and terrified conservatives, by questioning all traditional values. Suddenly, sexual morality was up for debate alongside monarchist government. 

The French Revolution had an electric impact on radical thinking around the world, and inspired people to reconsider the values of their own societies. At the time, Britain’s radical intellectuals were mostly a tight-knit group, centered around the publisher Joseph Johnson. His stable of authors gathered at his London home to debate the issues of the day. One of its brightest lights was Mary Wollstonecraft, the child of a shiftless, alcoholic father, who watched her family come down the social ladder fast. Forced to earn a living without formal education, she tried her hand at working as a governess before making her way to London in 1787, determined to become a writer. 

Charismatic, intellectually voracious, she blazed in conversation, fascinating and intimidating the mostly male authors who made up Johnson’s circle. And she made questions of gender and sexuality a major topic for debate. Wollstonecraft was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution. She wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), defending the Revolutionaries from the attacks of Edmund Burke. She followed this with her feminist masterpiece A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she attacked the well-established double standard whereby male libertinism is tolerated while women’s lives are punished by sexual transgressions. But her central purpose was to make the case for female education. 

Another of the authors whom Johnson published, Thomas Holcroft, showed the influence of Wollstonecraft’s feminism in his novel Anna St Ives (1792), as well as that of the French Revolution’s most radical ideas. Though his book was published the same year as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Holcroft had had a preview of Wollstonecraft’s arguments, which he heard her discuss at Johnson’s dinners. Unlike his best friend William Godwin, who was put off by Wollstonecraft’s domineering conversational style, Holcroft was entranced by her. He would later write her a gushing fan letter, calling her ‘the philosopher that traces, compares and combines facts for the benefit of future times.’ Holcroft’s novel dramatises Wollstonecraft’s guiding ideal: that of an educated woman who cultivates a friendship with an equally enlightened man, based on reason and shared values. The novel’s main character, Anna, spends her time in conversation with her friend Frank, imagining what a perfect society would look like. They decide that any future utopia must abolish private property. 

William Godwin was at that time writing his tract, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) – essentially, a defence of philosophical anarchism. Pressed by Holcroft, Godwin added a section on intimate relationships. Godwin concludes that marriage should be abolished, and monogamy along with it. People should be free to have as many relationships as they want. He makes it clear, however, that sex is something he doesn’t personally enjoy, and doesn’t think other people should either. He says that, in a society where government and property are absent, humans would develop into more refined beings who had no need for ‘sexual intercourse’. If Godwin was the first person to openly defend polyamory, he also managed to take all the fun out of it. At the end of 1792, Wollstonecraft returned to England, where she began a new relationship – with Godwin. The two could not have been more different – she was passionate and charismatic; he austere and preacherly – but they made it work. Wollstonecraft was soon pregnant, and in order to spare their child the stigma of illegitimacy, they decided to get married. 

Percy Shelley was in his late teens when he first encountered the works of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, He had a prodigious talent for poetry, the looks of an angel, and an insatiable appetite for controversy. As his widow later attested, he was ‘like a spirit from another sphere’. Kicked out of Oxford for his open atheism, he had allied himself with various radical political causes. And he used ‘the Godwinian plan’ as a short-hand term for free love. In 1812, on learning, to his surprise, that Godwin was still alive, Shelley sought out the old philosopher. Later that same year, he met Godwin’s daughter Mary, then 15 years old, and he was immediately entranced. Shelley, who was married at the time, spent his days in philosophical conversation with Godwin, then snuck away in the evenings with Mary. She took him to her favourite refuge: Old Saint Pancras churchyard, where her mother was buried. They may have first had sex on Wollstonecraft’s grave.

Shortly after they left England, Shelley insisted Mary read one of his favourite books, The Empire of the Nairs; or, The Rights of Women (1811). It was written by the most extreme of Wollstonecraft’s free-love disciples, the eccentric aristocrat James Henry Lawrence. Born in Jamaica in 1773 to a wealthy planter family, Lawrence was a friend of Godwin’s, whom he had encountered many times at the British Museum. The novel, which pays tribute to Wollstonecraft in its title, is a utopian depiction of the Nair people of Malabar, on the southwestern coast of India. Lawrence portrays the Nairs as devotees of unrestricted sexual liberty. In his novel’s introduction, Lawrence borrows Wollstonecraft’s attack on the double standard of chastity, while neatly inverting her conclusion. ‘Let every female,’ he declares, ‘live perfectly uncontrolled by any man, and enjoying every freedom; let her choose and change her lover as she please.’ The novel’s closing words are a salute to Wollstonecraft: ‘Success to the rights of women!’ 

Shelley rejected mere promiscuity, as he said in a review of Hogg’s novel, The Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff (1813). Hogg adored Shelley, and the book was a clumsy attempt to fictionalise Shelley’s ideals. But Shelley wrote that he could not regard the novel’s endorsement of ‘promiscuous concubinage without horror and detestation’. Shelley did not think sex could be divorced from love, and he saw love in elevated, indeed spiritual, terms. He believed we are moved to love by the beauty we see in others – be it ‘in thought, action, or person’. This doctrine was inspired by Plato’s Symposium, which Shelley devoted a summer to translating in 1818. In Plato, he found confirmation of Wollstonecraft’s idea that true love represents a partnership of equals. For the poet, there was something almost supernatural about such a union: ‘We should make that another’s nerves vibrated to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood.’ Sex, he believed, was a natural and integral part of this mystical union. When we are in love, physical passion irresistibly follows. He condemned chastity as ‘a monkish and evangelical superstition’.While she was in Paris, a Frenchwoman, trying to impress Wollstonecraft told the author that she saw no need to engage in physical affairs. Wollstonecraft replied tartly: ‘Tant pis pour vous.’ (‘The worse for you.’)

Wollstonecraft, like Shelley, believed that an ideal relationship was born from a union of romantic love and physical passion. She too saw it in almost mystical terms. She told her lover Gilbert Imlay that he could never know ‘the ineffable delight, the exquisite pleasure, which arises from a unison of affection and desire, when the whole soul and senses are abandoned to a lively imagination, that renders every emotion delicate and rapturous.’ For her, it was this fusion of love and sex that alone could provide ‘the distinctive characteristic of genius, the foundation of taste, and of that exquisite relish for the beauties of nature, of which the common herd of eaters and drinkers and child-begeters, certainly have no idea.’ Shelley could not have put it better. Shelley died in 1822 and, in Britain, his ideas on free love were mostly forgotten as the country lurched towards the conservatism of the Victorian era. What we now know as the Free Love movement began in the US in the 1850s, and was shaped by the ideas of the French socialist Charles Fourier and the anarchist Josiah Warren. The Free Lovers’ objectives were closer to those of Wollstonecraft than to Shelley. They sought to give women easier access to divorce and birth control, but mostly left the norm of monogamy unchallenged. 

Shelley’s more radical ideas would have to wait another century to find a mainstream audience. Not until the sexual revolution of the 1960s did radical groups like the Weathermen turn ‘smash monogamy’ into a rallying cry, making free love an integral part of the counterculture. The 21st century has taken non-monogamy mainstream. And there are plenty of options: from polyamory, to swinging, to friends with benefits, to something called relationship anarchy, the structure of which ‘is the lack of structure itself’ – whatever that means. The relative merits of these choices are discussed endlessly in the media and online. Shelley would have undoubtedly surveyed this bewildering landscape with some pride. But what would Wollstonecraft have made of it all? It is hard to say. Perhaps she would, at the very least, view it with the same equanimity that she ultimately found in dealing with Imlay’s compulsive philandering. Realising he was never going to change, she told him, simply: ‘Be happy!’ Source: aeon.co

John Garfield retrospective, Paul Newman

The Criterion Channel is hosting a November retrospective of films featuring the late John Garfield, a superstar of the nineteen-forties whose body of work has long gone under-recognized. In the course of a career that stretched from the height of the studio system to the depths of the Red Scare, Garfield pioneered a new, naturalistic approach to acting for the camera, one rooted in the same techniques that would soon be called the Method. Garfield died in 1952, his performances overshadowed by the actors who followed him—particularly Marlon Brando, who rose to fame playing Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” a role that Garfield had turned down in fear of being eclipsed by Vivien Leigh. It’s tempting to see Garfield, who worked as the doorman for the first session of the Actors Studio, in 1947, as also holding the anti-hero's door open for Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Paul Newman, and others to walk through. 

He was far better than his contemporaries at solving the puzzle of how to take the new acting techniques coming out of the New York theatre during the thirties and forties and adapt them for the screen. His best performances have a timeless brilliance; they feel classical and contemporary at once. John Garfield never wanted to be a movie star. He was a creature of the Great Depression whose early life included familial neglect and riding the rails reciting “The Raven” for his supper. In the mid-nineteen-thirties, he acted with the Group Theatre, a company responding to the Depression with a utopian, left-wing vision of the American character. The Group included many of the future stewards of acting instruction in America—Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner—as well as the directors Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman. It was the most exciting theatre company in America, but it rarely found financial success. Garfield left the company to better support his family and because he felt cheated out of a role that had been promised to him. He moved to Los Angeles, making his film début, in 1938, in “Four Daughters,” for which he received an Oscar nomination. "He never lived long enough to become an icon like Humphrey Bogart", said David Heeley, one of the producers of "The John Garfield Story" on TCM.

One of the best examples of Garfield’s combination of deep feeling and minimalist restraint can be found in “Dust Be My Destiny” (1939), the earliest film in the Criterion series. In it, he plays Joe Bell, a defiant drifter who is wrongfully accused of murder, running from the law with his wife, Mabel, who’s played by Priscilla Lane. His performance is a perfect mixture of sweetness and rebellion; it reveals both the exoskeleton his character has grown to protect himself from the deprivations of the Great Depression and the good kid hiding underneath it. In 1945, John Garfield gave a lecture to the Actors’ Laboratory Theatre, a Stanislavski-based school and playhouse run by alumni of the Group. “I would much rather talk about the theatre because I think the movies are not an actor’s medium,” he said. “Movies are a writer’s and director’s medium.” At the time, Garfield was nearing the end of his contract with Warner Bros., and growing increasingly discontented. While his films had mostly succeeded at the box office, he was personally proud of only a few of them. 

“My problem in movies has been to find the truth,” he told the Actors’ Lab. “When I don’t, I fail miserably.” In the next few years, he turned down several projects—including future noir classics such as “Out of the Past” and “Nightmare Alley”—to work with Enterprise, an upstart independent production company that promised artists near-complete freedom. After making “Body and Soul,” Enterprise’s lone profitable film, he moved back to New York City to return to his first love, theatre, starring in “Skipper Next to God,” which was directed by his old mentor Lee Strasberg. His career, with its emphasis on versatility, seriousness, artistry, and political commitment, provided a template that generations of male movie stars to come, from Marlon Brando to Paul Newman to Robert De Niro, would follow. 

"He was shy, vibrant and very intelligent. And so ahead of his time. He had terrific magnetism. I wish we had him back," said John Garfield's 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' co-star Lana Turner during a 1973 film homage for her at New York City's Town Hall. "The only co-star I know that he had an affair with, actually, was Lana Turner," Vincent Sherman (director of Saturday's Children, The Young Philadelphians, etc.) remembered. In 1950, Warner Bros. quietly released “The Breaking Point” and pulled it from theatres shortly after its release; it's probably Garfield’s greatest film. An adaptation of Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not,” the movie stars Garfield as Harry Morgan, a down-on-his-luck ship captain who runs into financial trouble in Mexico and takes a job smuggling Chinese migrants to the United States. The job goes wrong, and Morgan ends up under investigation and in dire financial straits. Later Garfield said of the film, "I think it's the best I've done since 'Body and Soul'. Better than that." 

In "Movieland: Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture" (1996), Jerome Charyn writes: "In The Hustler Robert Rossen tried to grapple with the texture of failure and success, all the peculiar twists of talent, and the kind of vulturous deadness that attaches itself to talent—eating it alive. This is a different Newman, not an acting mask. He's lithe, possessed. He's not a beautiful sleepwalker like in Hud. He reeks of promise and vulnerability. Perhaps it's Fast Eddie's own deep flaw, his need to wound himself, that touched Paul Newman, and opened up his own wounds. It's certainly the best performance that Newman gave in the 1960s. 'The Hustler' was almost a companion film for 'Body & Soul' and has the courage to investigate those dark corners of the psyche where few American directors had gone before. It's a film about human dirt". Source: www.newyorker.com

Of Boys and Men, Rethinking "Slap Shot"

Richard V. Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., is internationally recognized for his scholarship on equality of opportunity, with a focus on divisions of social class and race. But in recent years, he has become concerned about a less-scrutinized axis of inequality: the myriad ways in which boys and men are falling behind girls and women educationally, economically, and on many indicators of social well-being. In his new book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, Reeves examines the difficulties that millions of boys and men are having in school, at work, and in the family. As an advocate for gender equality, who has devoted considerable study to closing the pay gap for women, Reeves rejects right-wing calls to repeal feminism. But he also contends with those on the left who believe that focusing on men’s problems distracts from the challenges still faced by girls and women. “We can hold two thoughts in our head at once,” he writes in his new book. “We can be passionate about women’s rights and compassionate toward vulnerable boys and men.” And the problems of boys and men falling behind — in absolute terms as well as relative to women — are real and serious. For example, the 2020 decline in college enrollment was seven times greater for male than for female students. The wages of most men are lower today (in real terms) than they were in 1979. One in five fathers is not living with their children. Single and divorced men account for hugely disproportionate numbers of drug-related deaths. Men account for two out of three “deaths of despair,” either from a suicide or overdose. 65,000 more men than women died of COVID in this pandemic. Source: www.niskanencenter.org

In Slap Shot, Paul Newman played Reggie Dunlop, the ageing player-coach of the fictitious Charlestown Chiefs, a sad-sack minor league ice hockey team in a collapsing steel town. Dunlop confesses his worries about the future: Charlestown's steel mill is closing and the Chiefs will fold after the season, his losing record as a coach raises doubts about his future in hockey, and he cannot imagine himself "in one of those bullshit nine-to-five jobs." Trying to encourage him, the experimental lesbian Suzanne tells him: "Hey, use your imagination. That's what I've been doing." Dunlop will embrace that mantra, even use that quote to encourage one player's unhappy wife, but neither he nor the male characters display the creativity that many of the women do in dealing with the uncertainties facing them. At the time of its release, Slap Shot seemed so profane and violent many viewers found the film objectionable, and certainly beneath an actor of Newman's stature and popularity. The New York Times reported that Slap Shot may have been the "most obscenity-sprinkled major movie ever made," while famed critic Rex Reed called the film "violent, bloody and thoroughly revolting." Not all reviews were so negative--noted critic "Pauline Kael raved that Slap Shot was Newman's best work to date: 'one of the best performances of his career,' but the film was widely disparaged. The New York Post critic Frank Rich observed that "Nancy Dowd has an ear for American vernacular that Ring Lardner might have appreciated; she realizes that cussing can be an exhilarating folk art".

Given the boorishness, violence, profanity, sexism and homophobia of many of its characters, Slap Shot is understandably associated with a retrograde vision of combative masculinity, but a closer look reveals the film is better understood as prescient and forward-thinking in its representation of women's superior adaptability in confronting the challenges of a changing economy. While the men look to cling, or return, to formulas that are increasingly unworkable, the women in the film operate with much greater creativity. Slap Shot's perceptiveness about changing gender roles, its dramatization of the decline of Rustbelt manufacturing, and the film's relentlessly negative portrayal of people involved in hockey, all combine to make this film much more profound than its image as a foul-mouthed glorification of hockey violence would suggest. At the film's start, the Chiefs are losing, despite their talent: Their roster includes the league's leading scorer, and in one pre-game pep talk Dunlop proclaims, "Man for man, we're better than any fuckin' club in the league."

But the announcement that Charlestown's steel mill will close at the start of April forces a reckoning. Dunlop initially maintains a brave front, confidently telling his estranged wife that he's not worried about the future because of his coaching experience. Francine (Jennifer Warren) tells him bluntly, "You're no good at it... you can't make 'em win." Once General Manager Joe McGrath (Strother Martin) makes it official that the team will fold after the season, Dunlop becomes more worried about the future. Most players join him in those worries. One has options: Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), a Princeton-educated American, has his Ivy League degree. But team captain Upton exemplifies the worries that he and most of his teammates face when he blurts out, "Fuckin' Chrysler plant, here I come!" Yet, as Charlestown's closing mill suggests, the high-paying, usually unionized manufacturing jobs that enabled the working class to enjoy a good standard of living on a single wage-earner's income were disappearing. The result is a much less certain future for working class men.

After the road trip where Suzanne tells Dunlop, "Use your imagination," the player-coach tries to win back Francine and save the team--and his job--by encouraging all of his players to fight, including Braden, who is the team's best player and league's leading scorer. Dunlop had been critical of violence at the movie's start. When the team thought their next opponent would include Ogie Ogilthorpe, who Upton called "the worst goon in hockey today," Dunlop said, "For the sake of the game they ought to throw this fuckin' guy in San Quentin. He is a criminal element." Initially, Dunlop was so appalled that the newly acquired Hanson brothers tape on brass knuckles--"every game!"--that he kept them benched. But, desperate to salvage a career in hockey, Dunlop embraces the violence he initially disdained. 

He also convinces gullible local sportswriter Dickie Dunn (Emmett Walsh) to publish stories, without identifying the source, about a possible relocation of the Chiefs to Florida--if they start winning. When a player reads one of Dunn's stories aloud to the team, Dunlop looks at the paper and says, "Dickie Dunn wrote this. It's gotta be true!" He then uses the lure of Florida to motivate his players. He taunts Long Island goaltender Hanrahan about his wife's sexuality until Hanrahan attacks Dunlop, earning an ejection. Since Long Island has no backup goalie, the Chiefs win easily--the win that ends their long losing streak. In the next game, Dunlop manipulates the sweetly sensitive Carlson into a fight that leaves him injured and out of the lineup, finally giving the Hanson brothers their chance to play. They escalate the fighting and violence to new extremes, helping the Chiefs beat and beat up most of their league rivals, and turning Charlestown into a title contender.

Despite their new, winning ways, the Chiefs have their critics. Francine responds to Dunlop's claim that "We got a whole new attitude--it's bringing us a lot of success" by telling him, "Any fool can fight." Opposing fans protest the Chiefs' style of play more vigorously. During one game in Hyannisport, an angry fan throws an object that hits one of the Hansons in the face, triggering a wild scene in which a number of Chiefs leave the ice and climb into the seats and fight with spectators. When the Chiefs are one win away from the league championship, Dunlop finally meets the team's mysterious owner, Anita McCambridge (Kathryn Walker). She tells him she cannot make enough of a profit to justify a sale, so she will fold the team for tax purposes after the season. Dunlop comes clean to the players about his deception before the final game, telling them, "I conned you guys. I just lied to you. We were never anything but a rich broad's tax write-off." Of the fighting he himself had encouraged, he tells his players, "We've been clowns... goons... We're a bunch of criminals. We ought to be in jail." 

He professes to be "ashamed... really ashamed of myself." For his final game, Dunlop says, "I want to win that championship tonight. But I want to win it clean. Old-time hockey." He specifically singles out Toe Blake, Dit Clapper and Eddie Shore as "the greats" he wants to emulate in his final game. The Chiefs' opponents, the Syracuse Bulldogs, have different plans, though, and have fortified their roster with some of the worst goons from recent league history, including the dangerous Ogilthorpe. The Bulldogs pummel the suddenly pacifist Chiefs in the first period. When the general manager scolds the Chiefs at intermission for their refusal to fight back, and tells them NHL scouts are in attendance looking for tough players, Dunlop abandons his commitment to play it clean. In the next scene, all of the players on both teams, aside from Braden, are fighting on the ice in a comically appalling spectacle while Braden sits by himself on the Chiefs' bench. When his estranged wife Lily walks into the building, freshly made over by Francine, Braden sees her, looks smitten, then leaps onto the ice and does a strip tease, with musical accompaniment by the marching band. Braden's strip-tease triggers a protest by the Bulldogs' player-coach Tim McCracken. Furious that the referee refuses to stop Braden's "disgusting" display, McCracken punches the referee. The referee then declares a forfeit by the Bulldogs, and awards the game and the championship trophy to the Chiefs. The film ends with the Chiefs' victory parade but with a bitter taste. We suspect Reggie will keep on losing, as his ex-wife Francine abandons him for good.

This was an era of particular violence in professional hockey: the rapid expansion of the National Hockey League (NHL), from just six teams in 1966-67 to 18 in 1974-75, the establishment of a rival World Hockey Association in 1972, and a related expansion of minor leagues and teams, led to the watering down of talent. Players who previously would have lacked the skill needed to stay in pro hockey could do so through violence and intimidation; their presence forced teams to keep players whose main role was to fight opponents' goons. The situation was worsened by the fact that the NHL's initial expansion doubled the league to 12 teams, permitted established teams to keep so many players that few of value were available to expansion teams. This combined to create a race to the bottom in terms of fighting and thuggishness that led to frequent bench-clearing brawls and other episodes that made the hockey league a joke to many American sports fans in the 1970s. In the pre-expansion period the league's penalty-minutes leader for the season typically recorded fewer than 180, but this number ballooned after expansion; in the seasons starting in 1973-74 penalty-minutes leaders respectively recorded 405 and 472.

Slap Shot's portrayal suggests the decline of Rustbelt manufacturing, the process Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison in 1982 called The Deindustrialization of America. Johnstown, located about 70 miles south of Pittsburgh, was known for catastrophic flooding that got it nicknamed "Floodtrap City" and the "Valley of Death". Nonetheless, it had enjoyed a "golden age" of steel manufacturing and coal mining. In the 1970s, though, Johnstown joined other Rustbelt cities like Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Youngstown, Ohio; and Fort Wayne, Indiana in being hit hard by plant closures that eliminated thousands of industrial jobs. The loss for industrial workers continued into the 1980s, when "competition and new technology eliminated millions of jobs and permanently reduced the wages of millions of workers"--even during a period in which the economy as a whole enjoyed a period of sustained growth. At its peak in 1957, Johnstown had had 40,000 full-time jobs in steel-making and coal-mining; by 1996 that figure had declined by about 90 percent. Conditions for industrial workers had deteriorated so markedly that Jack Metzgar's 1985 Dissent article surveyed the loss of unionized jobs, the decline of manufacturing wages and benefits, and the relative generosity of pension benefits accrued during the 1950s and 1960s and scathingly concluded, "In working-class Johnstown... the best paying job is retirement".

Part of what made Slap Shot prescient is that the decline in manufacturing, and in private-sector union membership, continued into the 21st century, as did men's difficulty in responding to it. Hanna Rosin's 2010 Atlantic article, "The End of Men," described the Great Recession in 2008-09 as doing most damage to predominantly male occupational categories. She found women were proving themselves much more adaptable than men, and that many men simply withdrew from the labor force rather than undergo retraining. Rosin's article dovetailed with findings in a July 2010 New York Times article that described male college graduates unwilling to settle for jobs they considered beneath them; that article led with the story of a newly-minted Colgate University alumnus who turned down a $40,000-per-year job because he considered it "dead-end work." In Slap Shot, the men similarly struggle to adapt to the changing economy. Dunlop tells Lily Braden, "Use your imagination. That's what I've been doing." But he, like most of the male characters, reaches backward, trying to recapture a disappearing past, rather than trying to look forward in genuinely imaginative ways. This is exemplified in Dunlop's belief that he can reclaim Francine's affections if his hockey team starts winning, despite her obvious loss of interest in the game. The male characters, rather than the film itself, are sexist. And even their sexism conceals admiration for the women in their lives. 

Dunlop tells his team what he had said to infuriate the goalie Hanrahan: "His wife is a dyke." But he adds sincerely, "She's a fantastic gal! I mean, fantastic!" Recalling the late Jackie St. Pierre, a teammate whose wife left him before "that great Peterborough game" in 1968, Dunlop says he thought Jackie was right to beg her to come back to him: "She was a dynamite broad." Dunlop also has a complicated connection with Lily Braden. As part of his mind games designed to get Braden to fight, Dunlop flirts with Lily, and encourages her to leave Braden. He tells her, "I think you're a champ. Only you've gotta stop killin' yourself." After Lily finally moves out of Braden's house and in with Dunlop, Dunlop taunts Braden by telling him Lily is a "terrific gal"--adding, "We've been havin' a hell of a time!"

While the men react with sexism, homophobia, and attempts to either cling to or return to formulas that are no longer likely to work, the women show much more ingenuity. Some of the hockey wives, admittedly, accept their sad circumstances passively, best exemplified by Upton's wife confessing that she "only drinks in the afternoon... Or before a game. or when Johnny's away." But other women act more forcefully. Anita McCambridge becomes the villain because she folds the team, but she is in charge, and will still be living very comfortably long after the team is just a memory. Suzanne goes well outside contemporary conventional norms with her approach to escaping her unhappy life with Hanrahan. After leaving Dunlop, Francine has become a successful hairdresser; by movie's end, with business collapsing in Charlestown, she has accepted a new job and is moving to a salon on Long Island. Lily leaves Braden, accepts a makeover by Francine, then gets her husband back, on what appears to be her terms. Even Jill St. Pierre, the "dynamite broad" who left Dunlop's teammate a decade earlier, showed initiative and an ability to imagine a completely different life than the one she had as a hockey wife. Not only are the female characters more creative than the sexist, homophobic hockey players, it is the male characters who perform the film's most memorable nudity, even though we see Suzanne's exposed breasts in her scene with Dunlop. There is Braden's strip tease in the climactic scene: with his wife sitting in the stands yelling, "Take it off!," he strips until he is naked except for his jockstrap and skates. 

Owner Anita McCambridge can't make "enough of a profit" from a sale of the team; she could make money, and provide her players with the chance to continue their livelihoods--"We're human beings," Dunlop tells her when they finally meet--but choses instead to hurt or end their careers to fatten her own, already substantial bottom line. General manager McGrath's gleeful performance of simulated masturbation in one early scene makes him appear perverted. When he learns that the team will fold because of the mill closing, he selfishly tries to conceal the news until he can find a different job for himself. He frequently speaks of his past work for Eddie Shore to establish his hockey credibility; when the players invoke Eddie Shore as an inspiration to play clean, "old time" hockey in the final game, McGrath, who wants the team to goon it up, hypocritically blurts out, "Piss on Eddie Shore!"

Paul Newman sees himself cornered by the narrow-minded characters around him, and somehow he gives up. Newman seems to capture in his expression a contradictory feeling of victory and defeat in the ending. So while Reg Dunlop and the hockey players in Slap Shot showed the lack of imagination that has made it harder for many men to adjust to changes in the economy, the people of Johnstown, like the female characters in Slap Shot, have used more imagination. After the golden age Johnstown enjoyed with coal and steel in the 20th century, its citizens and leaders understand that it, like other industrial centers, will be unable to make it "Right Back Where They Started From." —"Rethinking George Roy Hill's Slap Shot as a Tale of Feminist Empowerment and Male Struggle in a Post-Industrial World" (2020) by John Soares Source: galeapps.gale.com

Babylon, Liz Taylor, Paul Newman, Slap Shot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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