The U.S. House of Representatives honored Paul Newman last month. In a resolution only Rush Limbaugh could oppose, he was acclaimed for his "humanitarian works and incomparable talents." The humanitarian accomplishments came from advocacy and philanthropy. Newman plowed the proceeds from his product line of sauces and salad dressing into a foundation supporting environmental and other causes.
But lest younger generations think of him only as the friendly face from the supermarket aisle, an affable presence on the spaghetti sauce jar, the Milwaukee Art Museum is hosting a Paul Newman retrospective this weekend, March 20-22, at the museum's Lubar Auditorium. The festival spans most of his career, from the first film that earned him favorable notice, Somebody UpThere Likes Me (1956), through his popular movies with Robert Redford, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973). Alas, it stops short of the movie that finally earned him an Oscar, The Color of Money (1986).
Along the way from young rebel to elder statesman before his death last year, Newman helped define a certain kind of cool in the body language of alienation. Studying at the Actors Studio, he absorbed the Method maxim that informed the careers of Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean and other characteristic dramatic stars of the 1950s. Early on Newman competed with Dean; hoping to be cast as the misunderstood Cal in East of Eden (1955), Newman saw the role fall to his rival. When Dean declined to star in The Silver Chalice (1954), Newman picked up his first movie credit as the star of this forgettable picture. Dean was slated for Somebody Up There Likes Me but died in a high-speed car wreck. Also a race driver, but confining his rubber burning to the track, Newman got the part. It marked the beginning of a great career.
It's impossible to know what Dean might have become had he lived. Would he have been reduced in his graying years to playing bitter old cranks? Newman had other options. With classic matinee looks, he straddled outlaw with romantic lead. It's hard to imagine Dean taking himself less than seriously, but Newman was able to play lighter roles, notably in the period comedy The Sting.
Not everyone in the generation preceding Newman understood his appeal. Dwight McDonald, the great and demanding film critic for Esquire in the '60s, called him "simply not an actor and possibly not even alive... his one expression an agonized grimace as of wood trying to smile." McDonald didn't see the agonized grimace standing for the response of many younger people to a world of mutually assured destruction, institutional racism and Vietnam. In a measure of his talent Newman outlived his era with reputation intact and resume still growing, playing the wintry crime lion in Road to Perdition (2002) and cheerfully lending his voice to the Pixar racing cartoon Cars (2006).
March 20
Somebody Up There LikesMe, 6:30 p.m.
Newman plays boxer Rocky Graziano in a film by Robert Wise (The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story).
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 9 p.m.
Newman is strangely disinterested in his gorgeous wife (Elizabeth Taylor) in a truncated version of the Tennessee Williams' psycho-drama.
March 21
Exodus, 10:15 a.m.
Newman plays a determined Jewish partisan in this 1960 epic on the founding of Israel.
Hud, 2:45 p.m.
Newman earned his first Oscar nomination for his role as an arrogant, irresponsible modern-day cowboy.
March 22
Cool Hand Luke, 10:15 a.m.
Newman plays a prisoner who refuses to conform to the unyielding regimen of a Southern labor camp.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 12:45 p.m.
Newman and Redford play a light-hearted duo of bank robbers in the declining days of the Old West.
The Sting, 3 p.m.
Regrouping for a second hit movie, Newman and Redford play a con game on the cons in this Depression-era romp.
