Paul Newman names his most harshly treated movies: “The critics shit on it”
As anyone would expect from one of America’s finest actors and a silver screen legend, the good outweighed the bad when Paul Newman appeared in front of the cameras.
His filmography wasn’t flawless, even if he remained adamant that he got the worst movie of his career out of the way early after going out of his way to urge people not to watch his feature debut in 1954’s The Silver Chalice when it aired on television, which realistically meant that, in his mind at least, the only way was up.
That turned out to be true, with Newman enjoying one of the most storied careers in Hollywood history. He was nominated for an Academy Award in five different decades, earning eight nominations and one win to go along with his two honorary prizes, and even during his most fallow periods, he was only a picture or two away from reminding everyone of his generational talent.
From early showcases like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, and Hud, through to the effortless cool he exuded in Cool Hand Luke and The Towering Inferno and the renaissance that yielded Absence of Malice, The Verdict, and his Oscar-winning crowning achievement in The Color of Money, Newman was about as reliable as leading men have ever been in terms of consistency and quality.
That said, he didn’t think all of his pictures got a fair shake of the critical stick. One of the many films to remake Akira Kurosawa’s seminal Rashomon, 1964’s western The Outrage fell well short of recouping its budget at the box office and was widely panned as one of Newman’s worst-ever releases at the time. It remained on the bottom rung, even if he firmly disagreed.
“The critics shit on it,” he lamented to Rolling Stone. “The studio wasn’t very hot on it, and neither were the reviewers.” He thought the movie stood up to scrutiny, even if he was in the minority. Several years later, and with bias almost certainly in play, he also suggested that 1970’s conspiratorial drama WUSA, in which he co-starred alongside wife Joanne Woodward, was unfairly treated.
“The same thing happened,” he explained. “It was a seriously flawed picture, but to me, the significance of Joanne’s performance, which was funky and fucky, voluptuous, and all those incredible things. If you ask me how a picture like that happens to go down the train, I have to say I don’t know. I don’t know. There are just mistakes. But that was probably one of my better performances. So was the part in The Outrage.”
Those two very rarely come up whenever the subject of Newman’s best movies or greatest performances is broached and with good reason. Neither of them belongs in the top tier, which is a testament to how good he was for such a long period of time, even if he was willing to die on the hill that they deserved to be treated better.
