Decades before he became the friendly face in the pasta sauce aisle at the supermarket, which is to say a quietly effective philanthropist, Paul Newman helped define a certain kind of cool in the body language of alienation. Studying in the Actors Studio, he absorbed the Method of bottled emotional turbulence that molded the performances of Marlin Brando, James Dean and Montgomery Clift.
“The Paul Newman Tribute Collection” is a handsomely boxed, 13-film DVD set complete with a 136-page booklet of photographs and movie stills, biography and film descriptions. It’s not, by a long stretch, the complete catalogue of his screen work. During a career that ended in 2006 as one of the voices in Pixar’s animated feature Cars, Newman stared in over 65 movies. The “Tribute Collection” doesn’t even collect all the hits, but includes several of his biggest films, among them the Israel foundation saga Exodus (1960), the anti-western Hombre (1967), the Oscar-sweeping Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and the disaster epic The Towering Inferno (1974). Deleted scenes, commentaries and other extras accompany many selections.
Several of the less-known films in the Collection are fascinating for the light they put on Hollywood in the 1950s, the society reflected in those movies and, sometimes, Newman’s unexpected scope. He isn’t usually remembered as a comedian, but was game in Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys (1958), a good-natured romp poking gentle fun at mindless patriots, civic boosters and suburbia. Newman plays it bedroom-farce light, toying with infidelity in the dream houses of the upper middle class and the unhappiness stirring beneath the placid surface of an America about to explode into the ‘60s.
Many of those same themes were turned into drama, even melodrama, in From the Terrace (1958). Although directed Ernest Lehman, From the Terrace was at one with the lush films from the period by Douglas Sirk (All That Heaven Allows). Exquisitely filmed in DeLuxe color with a Romantic neo-classical score by Elmer Bernstein, From the Terrace is the story of a young man resentful of the privilege he was born to, yet seduced by the American ideology of material success. The role was ideal for Newman, gazing at his morally compromised world with the cold reserve of those striking blue eyes and the quiet defiance of a man who was just too cool to play the game indefinitely. Frank for its time in sexuality and language (“slut” was a word seldom spoken on screen before then), the view From the Terrace is of a society of hollow men and women, occasionally redeemed by the unexpected fluorescence of genuine love.
