The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (301 page)

Newell worked very hard for Granada and the BBC for some fifteen years before he did features: along the way, he worked on
Coronation Street
and
Budgie
, a lot of serials, and a ton of plays. In this respect, he is both a contemporary of and a rival to Michael Apted, with whom he shared duties on
Big Breadwinner Hogg
.

Four Weddings and a Funeral
is his big hit—though
Enchanted April
did very well, too, and helped fashion the modern Italian travel movie. But his best work was on
Dance with a Stranger
, which is very good on class, casual cruelty, and the suppressed emotional energies of Britain (and has a superb performance from Miranda Richardson), and
Donnie Brasco
, which gets the mob talk and idleness to perfection, and made better use of Al Pacino than anyone had managed in years.

There are also failures
—Amazing Grace and Chuck
—and fascinating adventures
—Into the West
. But Newell has a clear respect for material and scripts (his screenwriters range from Clive Exton and Shelagh Delaney to Ian McEwan, Charles Wood, Richard Curtis, and Paul Attanasio). If there was anything like a reasonable movie industry, pledged to reliable entertainments without excuses or pretense, Newell would be a much better known name. As it is, he has all the right qualifications (and the experience) now to make a great picture if the script and the players come along. He turned out to be a strange master of exotica moving from Harry Potter to García Márquez to a video game with an acrobat’s agility—but not much more.

Paul Newman
, (1925–2008), b. Cleveland, Ohio
Since so many people all over the world found Newman so appealing, it matters very little that I am skeptical of such blue-eyed likability. He seems to me an uneasy, self-regarding personality, as if handsomeness had left him guilty. As a result, he was more mannered than Brando when young, while his smirking good humor always seemed more appropriate to glossy advertisements than to good movies. The crucial film in his career was
The Hustler
(61, Robert Rossen), in which George C. Scott surveys and dismisses him as a born loser, a flashy athlete without stamina or character. Repeated viewings of
The Hustler
only show up the “sensitive” muscularity of Newman’s part. Scott’s intended heavy grows in interest and appeal, and I find myself rejecting Rossen’s sentimental drama, barricaded as it is by billiard balls, and itching for Scott’s insight to be vindicated. Hawks, surely, would have stood
The Hustler
on end and rubbed Newman’s nose in the chalk.

That said, Newman was very good impersonating Rocky Graziano in
Somebody Up There Likes Me
(56, Robert Wise), a fair comedian in McCarey’s
Rally Round the Flag, Boys!
(58), perfectly if unknowingly used in
The Hustler
, and reduced to rather arty animal high spirits by Arthur Penn in
The Left-Handed Gun
(58), even if his Billy the Kid was very much the intellectual’s noble savage, a character that had badly betrayed Newman’s earnestness in other parts. His millions of fans would point to his string of prestigious boxoffice successes—for Richard Brooks playing Tennessee Williams’s heroes in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(58) and
Sweet Bird of Youth
(62); as
Hud
(63) for Martin Ritt; as the hero in Preminger’s
Exodus
(60); as
Harper
(66, Jack Smight) and suspended forever on the brink of middle age in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(69, George Roy Hill). I would answer that he, and those films, cheat the real picture of insecurity and opportunism that Tennessee Williams offers; that his Hud is genuinely heartless; that his contempt for
Exodus
shows his poor understanding of the cinema, that in
Harper
he is like a teenager aping Bogart, and that
Butch Cassidy
is a castrated Western.

To revert to beginnings, after war service in the Pacific Newman studied at the Yale School of Drama and at the Actors’ Studio, appearing on Broadway in
Picnic
—in which he met his second wife, Joanne Woodward
—The Desperate Hours
, and subsequently,
Sweet Bird of Youth
. He made his debut in Victor Saville’s nonsensical
The Silver Chalice
(55) and in
The Rack
(56, Arnold Laven) before taking the part intended for James Dean in
Somebody Up There Likes Me
and building up his smoother, romantic appeal in
Until They Sail
(57, Wise),
The Helen Morgan Story
(57, Michael Curtiz),
The Young Philadelphians
(59, Vincent Sherman), and
From the Terrace
(60, Mark Robson)—a pack of bad films.

A major star by the early 1960s, Newman worked hard to be something more than the vehicle for other people’s fantasies. In 1968, he directed his wife in
Rachel, Rachel
, a very creditable movie albeit made solemnly and ostentatiously to provide her with a decent part. After that, Newman also codirected
Sometimes a Great Notion
(71) with Richard Colla, and directed his wife again in
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
(72). As a director, he is full of good intentions, thematic gravity, and the wish to foster sensitive acting. But not much more; not enough, certainly, to prevent the feeling of a diligent, intelligent, reformed hustler trying to work for the good of the community.

That may seem an unkind characterization. But there were early and unmistakable signs of a young middle-aged man wondering what could replace prettiness. Just as his habitation of rugged “wild ones” was never totally convincing
—The Long Hot Summer
(58, Ritt); as the punch-drunk boxer in Hemingway’s
Adventures of a Young Man
(62, Ritt);
Hud; The Outrage
(64, Ritt);
Hombre
(67, Ritt);
Cool Hand Luke
(67, Stuart Rosenberg);
Pocket Money
(72, Rosenberg);
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
(72, John Huston)—so, too, his “straight” parts seem neutered and derivative:
Torn Curtain
(66, Alfred Hitchcock);
Winning
(69, James Goldstone);
WUSA
(70, Rosenberg);
The Mackintosh Man
(73, Huston); a pickled schoolboy pretending to be a confidence man in
The Sting
(73, Hill); and
The Towering Inferno
(74, John Guillermin). Could it be that Newman was always uncomfortable with his natural assets—such handsomeness—and never convinced by them? That would account for the uneasy mixture of porous cockiness and mumbling naturalism, just as it fits with his urge to prove himself as a serious citizen.

He was with his wife once more in
The Drowning Pool
(75, Rosenberg); he was fascinating amid the failure of
Buffalo Bill and the Indians
(76, Robert Altman), more surely identified than ever before in the longhaired fraud, and finding pathos in the living legend’s fuddle—the performance needed more support from the film and its director. The urge to disabuse doting and middle-aged fans was evident again in
Slap Shot
(77, Hill), where he played a raucous, battered, and unscrupulous hockey coach—a good ol’ boy making use of Newman’s delayed adolescence. He was still slick and sly, but sleaziness fit that face so much more interestingly than nobility.
Slap Shot’s
shallow tour de force may have been a first reminder to the Academy that Newman had not yet collected his Oscar.

But
Quintet
(79, Altman) gave one the feeling that age was shaving away all the early charm and making any award less likely.

Newman did get his Oscar, at last, as the character from
The Hustler
twenty-five years older in
The Color of Money
(86, Martin Scorsese). It was not Newman’s fault, but
The Hustler
is so superior a film that the Academy’s mercy seemed like a model for the decline of movies. Newman had been more deserving as the alcoholic lawyer in
The Verdict
(82, Sidney Lumet), a film in which the action and Boston’s winter light got through his mask and into a raw soul—but Newman lost that year to Ben Kingsley as
Gandhi. The Verdict
is a tormenting picture for it shows what Newman is capable of once his aversion to intimacy can be broken down. He could have been an actor for great parts,—for the cockiness was gone—but somehow he seemed bitter and granitic about his own art.

He also appeared in
When Time Ran Out
(80, James Goldstone);
Fort Apache, The Bronx
(81, Daniel Petrie);
Absence of Malice
(81, Sydney Pollack); as General Groves in
Fat Man and Little Boy
(89, Roland Joffe); and grimly inhibited in
Blaze
(89, Ron Shelton)—he was not the actor for sexual delight, let alone abandon. He was well cast as the enclosed husband in
Mr. and Mrs. Bridge
(90, James Ivory); and as the tycoon in
The Hudsucker Proxy
(94, Joel Coen).

At the same time, he continued to direct: the very moving
The Shadow Box
(80), for TV, which starred his wife;
Harry and Son
(84), in which he acted with Robby Benson and Joanne Woodward; and a worthy but overcontrolled
The Glass Menagerie
(87), starring Woodward, John Malkovich, Karen Allen, and James Naughton.

After that, he did six portraits in gruff old age—more relaxed, grumpier, and truly likeable: the excellent
Nobody’s Fool
(94, Robert Benton), showing sweet awe for Melanie Griffith’s breasts, and for which he picked up an eighth Oscar nomination;
Twilight
(98, Benton);
Message in a Bottle
(99, Luis Mandoki);
Where the Money Is
(00, Marek Kanievska);
Road to Perdition
(02, Sam Mendes)—a ninth nomination; as the stage manager in
Our Town
(03, Naughton).

When he died, it was as if strangers had lost a reliable friend—the stardom was never in question. In truth, he didn’t leave enough good films. But he was uneasy and he never told us why.

Robert Newton
(1905–56), b. Shaftesbury, England
The British comedian Tony Hancock used to do an excellent impersonation of Robert Newton’s Long John Silver, but Newton had done it before him, a character actor leaving a lasting memory of a man used to the company of a parrot. The eye-rolling exaggeration of villainy would have delighted Stevenson as much as it did children, but Newton had once been a frightening villain, possessed of a grinding, slow voice. With time (and alcohol), the voice slurred and the characters he played became inflated. Some sense of an abandoned, malicious intensity comes from Hitchcock’s admission that he would have preferred Newton to Louis Jourdan in
The Paradine Case
, a Newton “With horny hands, like the devil!”

He was a stage actor who, after a debut in
Reunion
(32, Ivar Campbell), settled for movies in 1937, largely at the instigation of the American director, William K. Howard:
Fire Over England
(37, Howard);
Farewell Again
(37, Tim Whelan);
The Squeaker
(37, Howard);
21 Days
(37, Basil Dean);
Dark Journey
(37, Victor Saville); as a centurion in the unfinished
Claudius
(37, Josef von Sternberg);
Vessel of Wrath
(38, Erich Pommer);
Yellow Sands
(38, Herbert Brenon);
Jamaica Inn
(39, Hitchcock);
Dead Men Are Dangerous
(39, Harold French);
Poison Pen
(39, Paul L. Stein);
Hell’s Cargo
(39, Harold Huth);
Bulldog Sees It Through
(40, Huth);
Busman’s Honeymoon
(40, Arthur Woods);
The Green Cockatoo
(40, William Cameron Menzies); in the short,
Channel Incident
(40, Anthony Asquith);
Gaslight
(40, Thorold Dickinson);
Major Barbara
(41, Gabriel Pascal);
Hatter’s Castle
(42, Lance Comfort);
They Flew Alone
(42, Herbert Wilcox);
This Happy Breed
(44, David Lean); as Pistol in
Henry V
(45, Laurence Olivier);
Night Boat to Dublin
(46, Lawrence Huntington); the painter in
Odd Man Out
(47, Carol Reed);
Temptation Harbour
(47, Comfort);
Snowbound
(48, David MacDonald); a brutal Bill Sikes in
Oliver Twist
(48, Lean); hounding Burt Lancaster in
Kiss the Blood Off My Hands
(48, Norman Foster);
Obsession
(50, Edward Dmytryk);
Treasure Island
(50, Byron Haskin);
Waterfront
(50, Michael Anderson);
Soldiers Three
(51, Tay Garnett); as Dr. Arnold in
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
(51, Gordon Parry); as Javert in
Les Miserables
(52, Lewis Milestone);
Blackbeard the Pirate
(52, Raoul Walsh);
Androcles and the Lion
(53, Chester Erskine);
The Desert Rats
(53, Robert Wise);
The Beachcomber
(54, Muriel Box);
The High and the Mighty
(54, William Wellman);
Long John Silver
(55, Haskin); and
Around the World in 80 Days
(56, Anderson).

Fred Niblo
(Frederico Nobile) (1874–1948), b. York, Nebraska
1918:
The Marriage Ring; Fuss and Feathers; Happy Though Married; When Do We Eat?
. 1919:
The Haunted Bedroom; The Law of Men; Partners Three; The Virtuous Thief; Dangerous Hours; What Every Woman Learns; Stepping Out
. 1920:
Sex; The Woman in the Suitcase; The False Road; Hairpins; Her Husband’s Friend; Silk Hosiery; The Mark of Zorro
. 1921:
The Three Musketeers; Mother o’ Mine; Greater than Love
. 1922:
The Woman He Married; Rose o’ the Sea; Blood and Sand
. 1923:
The Famous Mrs. Fair; Strangers of the Night
. 1924:
Thy Name Is Woman; The Red Lily
. 1926:
The Temptress
(codirected with Mauritz Stiller). 1927:
Ben-Hur; Camille; The Devil Dancer
(codirected with Alfred Raboch and Lynn Shores). 1928:
The Enemy; Two Lovers; The Mysterious Lady; Dream of Love
. 1930:
Redemption; Way Out West
. 1931:
Young Donovan’s Kid; The Big Gamble
. 1932:
Diamond, Cut Diamond
(codirected with Maurice Elvey);
Two White Arms
. 1941:
Three Sons o’ Guns
.