The Paul Newman Retrospective: Sweet Bird of Youth, 1962

Welcome once again to the Paul Newman Retrospective. Sweet Bird of Youth is an adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, just like Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, only not as good. That being said, you can guess that there were some changes from Broadway to Hollywood, so let's just get that out there. The play ends with Chance Wayne's character being castrated and Heavenly Finley gets a venereal disease. Question, how does a character get castrated onstage? These things will not be happening in Hollywood in 1962. What I do love about Tennessee Williams is the hint of truth of the south in them. Take this story for instance, the corrupt southern governor who attempts to converge politics and morality. Yeah. Also, take the names Chance and Heavenly. What more white trash names could we have come up with? If anybody was going to get mixed up in the plot of this film, it would be two characters named Chance and Heavenly. I think this trailer makes note of the fact.



You know, I think it probably means something when we have Paul Newman with his shirt off in the trailer. They had to get the audience in somehow.

So, let's get to the story. Paul Newman plays Chance Wayne a gigolo/actor/ne'er do well. He is driving around his latest client/patroness Alexandra del Lago played by Geraldine Page, a movie star and drinker/pot smoker. Chance is driving her and they stop in his hometown of St. Cloud where he hopes to regain what he lost along with his youth, his sweetheart, Heavenly Finley.

Heavenly's father is Boss Finley, played by Ed Begley in an Academy Award winning performance. He deserves it, he's a pretty good jackass. Interestingly, a lot of the cast of this film stayed in tact from its run on Broadway. Paul Newman originated the role of Chance Wayne alongside Geraldine Page. Madeleine Sherwood, Sister Woman from Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, plays Miss Lucy. Rip Torn is Finley Jr. The two notable deviations are Mildred Dunnock plays Aunt Nonnie and Shirley Knight who plays Heavenly Finley. I can't find anything to really like about Shirley Knight's performance even though she got an Oscar nomination. She just seems not there and maybe she's supposed to be not there, but it really hampers the ending.


Okay, I find myself extremely mixed up about this film. When I first saw it, I really liked it. I liked and still like the interplay between past and present, the way that the past is such a huge part of these characters, it haunts them. I like the way it seems to say that what you love the most can in fact be what tortures you the most. I haven't seen this as a play, although apparently Nicole Kidman and James Franco are going to do a revival of this on Broadway. Yet when I read about the play, it seems as if this thing got gutted. They couldn't have venereal disease or castration- not that I really want to see Paul Newman get castrated- so they did the abortion plot and beat Paul Newman up some and then out of nowhere, Heavenly suddenly has the guts to stand up to her father and we have a happy ending. I just don't find her transformation very believable and I think I let it slide past me the first time because I was like, "Of course she should run off with Paul Newman. She should have done that two hours ago. What the hell took so long?"

Geraldine Page is fantastic in this part, though. She plays a fading actress who feels like her time in the spotlight has run out. She has this great scene where she's on the phone with Walter Winchell where she discovers she's not through, and she goes from has been to somebody in record time. Her changes in mood and disposition are believable, she does the crazy actress thing quite well. Also, Madeleine Sherwood is such a joy to watch in this movie. Her Miss Lucy is flawless and I love her as the governor's mistress with a heart of gold. She really pulls off southerner not just in accent, but in affect and it couldn't have been easy because she was actually Canadian. Also, you would probably never realize she was Sister Woman in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof if you weren't looking at the credits. She is just so transformed.

So, what does this play bring from Broadway? The stars. Something about youth and beauty, but instead of saying you can't recapture it, this movie somehow says you can. Anyway, my new handbook, Shaun Levy's Paul Newman: A Life says that the actors were forbidden from talking about this movie to the press. There's a hint. So, I think I've somehow talked myself out of liking this movie. I guess it's okay as a melodrama, something Douglas Sirk might have directed, but otherwise it kind of seems to suck. There are good moments to distract you, but the overall effect just feels lacking.

Okay, so what did you think? Am I too hard on the adaptation? Would you have wanted to see Paul Newman castrated? Do you think this story takes place in Florida or does the combination of corruption and oil spell Louisiana to you? Anyway, let me know all in the comments section.

The Paul Newman Retrospective: A New Kind of Love, 1963

Welcome to the third edition of the Paul Newman Retrospective. Obviously, one of the best known things about Paul Newman is his long marriage to actress, Joanne Woodward. They collaborated on a few projects together and this is one of my personal favorites and incidentally the first part of the first Joanne Woodward back-to-back. let me clarify. There are ten Newman-Woodward films and I don't want to bore you by doing them all in a row. So, my plan is to take one Woodward-Newman film from the good column, one from the bad and do them as a back-to-back. For those of you unfamiliar with basketball parlance, I will be doing two entries, one after the other.

So, let me start with a story about how this picture came to be taken from the pages of Shaun Levy's Paul Newman: A Life. Joanne Woodward read the script and loved it. She showed it to Paul and he said, "Well, I don't think it's fun. I don't think it's anything." Then Joanne said she had the idea that they could do the movie together to which Paul said, "No, you do it and I'll watch and clap soundlessly from the wings." Joanne, to Paul's recollection, because I'll give her the benefit of the doubt even though I feel this would be justified said, "You son of a bitch!... Here I've made my career subservient to yours, I've raised your family and not only my children, but your children from another marriage... and now when I ask you to make a movie with me, you tell me there's nothing in it for you!" Paul, apparently not being an idiot, decided to make the movie. Well done, Joanne.

A New Kind of Love is the story of a woman named Samantha, played by Woodward, who steals fashion designs from all the big designers to sell them in a cheaper department store. Samantha is thoroughly engrossed in her work, with no time or tolerance for love. Newman plays Steve Sherman, a newspaper columnist whose affair with the boss' wife gets him sent to Paris. Samantha is travelling to Paris with her colleagues, Leena, played by Thelma Ritter and Joe Bergner, played by George Tobias, so they can steal designs from the French fashion houses. They have the traditional meet-cute on the plane where Steve jokes around and Samantha gives him the number for Alcoholics Anonymous.

Steve hangs around in Paris, womanizing, columnizing and Samantha gets to work with the aid of Felicienne Courbeau played by Eva Gabor. This starts a subplot where Joe and Felicienne start a courtship much to Leena's chagrin. The best part of this is that instead of that turning into a catfight, the two women become friends, chagrined that they like each other. By the way, this movie has the essentials for a movie set in Paris and made in the 1950s or 1960s: one of the Gabors and Maurice Chevalier. One day, Samantha drinks too much, can't sleep and realizes that everyone in Paris is having fun and falling in love except her. She goes for a makeover and becomes quite the fashion plate. So much so that Steve meets her and mistakes her for a high class call girl. She doesn't try to dissuade him from this, in fact leading him on by sharing false tales of her romantic escapades within this great sports motif the movie uses. I could try to explain it, but you should just watch the movie. Two problems: Samantha is falling for Steve and doesn't know how long she can keep lying to him or how she can possibly get out of this. Secondly, Steve is falling for Samantha and doesn't like the idea of the woman he loves being a prostitute because as the Narcoleptic Argentinean in Moulin Rouge told us, "Never fall in love with a woman who sells herself. It always ends bad!" (Hey, they go to the Moulin Rouge in this movie,too.)Steve drags Samantha to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, to try and save her soul and she runs out screaming. It is brilliant. Later, Steve tracks Samantha down to her hotel where he meets Joe and Leena who explain that Samantha is not, in fact, a prostitute, which makes him angry. He tries to entrap her by going to her and offering to pay her for a night's services. She shocks him by accepting the terms. He eggs her on, taking her back to her apartment and thinking she'll crack before anything happens. Steve would be wrong in this instance, because you may recall, Steve is played by Paul Newman. So, we have that scene because I couldn't find the trailer. I know, fail.



Steve exposes Samantha and she explains that she was just going to sleep with him and not actually take the money, which he doesn't think is a big improvement. Okay, how is that fair? It resolves, as you may guess, happily.

Anyway, Paul Newman was never as comfortable in light comedy as he was in other projects and this is an instance of that. He's just too good an actor to be content doing the kind of fluff best left to, I don't know, Ashton Kutcher? Yeah, that works. Though I think if you put Ashton Kutcher opposite Joanne Woodward in the film, it would probably ruin it. Joanne Woodward is brilliant, though, and I'm so glad that she had the foresight to see the potential in this project. I find it remarkably fresh after a lifetime spent watching romantic comedies. It's got everything: Paris, fashion, makeover, a woman with a job, way before Sex and the City caught on to the formula. What do you think? Does this belong in my good column? Was the film ahead of its time? is the fashion awesome? Or am I completely wrong? Let me know in the comments.