The movie “not worth doing” that Paul Newman still did anyway: “A glorified soap opera”
It’s one thing for an actor to realise they’re about to make a bad movie and being unable to do anything about it, but it’s an entirely different matter for Paul Newman to try and talk the director out of taking on the job, even if his pleas fell on deaf ears.
Contracts tend to be binding, so there wasn’t much the actor could do. He starred in the films that the studio told him to star in, a period in which he discovered that some turds can’t be polished. Newman was powerless, which didn’t stop him from taking the moral high ground and trying to save others from the same fate.
That was the way things worked in ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood, though; the performers had very little, if any, power, and they were treated more like commodities than people. The suits placed them in whatever pictures they wanted, even if they were ill-suited for the roles, and Newman eventually had enough.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was 1959’s The Young Philadelphians, a literary adaptation that saw Newman playing an ambitious law student trying to make a name for himself. As his thirst for scaling the career ladder grows, he continues alienating those around him, culminating in a court case of intense personal stakes.
The picture was well-received, earning three Academy Award nominations, but Newman hated every second of it. He’d despised The Young Philadelphians from the moment Warner Bros informed him he’d be acting in it, and nothing he did could wash that bitter taste out of his mouth, and he tried.
“The mistake that you make is, it’s bad, and then you work on it like hell, and you walk in, and this scene maybe plays,” he reflected, having tried to whip the script into shape with a screenwriter. “And because things get better, so much better, you almost mistakenly feel that it’s good, until, of course, you see it, and then it comes back on you with terrible force.”
Even though he’d never worked with Vincent Sherman before, he still had a word with the filmmaker. “The property was just not doing,” Newman said. “It got to the point where, in talking with him, I said, ‘Don’t do the movie. Forget about whether I do it or not. Just don’t do the movie.'”
In the end, Sherman stayed the course, as did Newman, who ended up with a movie that he called “just a glorified cosmopolitan soap opera.” Clearly, he was no fan of The Young Philadelphians, but his biggest problems were at the highest level, forcing him to take drastic, and potentially career-ending, action.
The star was so disenchanted by the experience that he stumped up $500,000 to buy himself out of his contract with Warner Bros, telling Jack Warner to go fuck himself, striking out on his own, and eventually becoming one of his era’s defining leading men, so it was a risk worth taking in the long run.
