Paul Newman names his most original movie: “Nobody had ever seen anything like that”
It feels like originality is in shorter supply than ever in modern Hollywood, with the onslaught of sequels, remakes, reboots, and adaptations increasingly turning truly original films into outliers. That said, if anybody looks hard enough, they can see patterns emerging in any actor’s career, including Paul Newman.
One of the ‘New Hollywood’ era’s foremost leading men and a legend of the silver screen, Newman didn’t want to be a movie star. The downside is that in addition to being one of his generation’s most talented performers, he was also an incredibly handsome lad with a pair of the industry’s most distinctive blue eyes.
That made him a dream for marketing departments and publicists across Tinseltown, despite his constant fears that his entire body of work would be distilled to his peepers and nothing else. To combat it, Newman tackled various disparate, complicated, and challenging characters, making him an above-the-line star and a fixture of the awards season circuit.
Still, as mentioned above, there were patterns. In the space of four years, Newman headlined Hud, Hombre, and Harper, three movies where he played the protagonist in pictures with one-word titles that all began with the same letter.
He made five consecutive movies in the 1970s that started with ‘The’, with Harry & Son, Fat Man and Little Boy, and Mr & Mrs Bridge marking three films out of five consecutive performances where he played the lead in a movie with an ‘and’ in the title. Of course, they were all completely different stories requiring completely different performances, and the recurring theme was that they were all original.
Newman favoured original storytelling throughout his career, with ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson and Lew Harper the only characters he played more than once, excluding posthumous voice roles in Pixar’s Cars franchise. As for the most unique credit in his back catalogue, he told The Scotsman that he’d never been in anything like the cult classic sports comedy Slap Shot.
“What a deeply original film that was,” he marvelled. “I mean, nobody had ever seen anything like that: a movie about a second-rate hockey team.” Reuniting with his Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting director George Roy Hill, Newman’s foul-mouthed turn as Reggie Dunlop was completely against type.
It remained one of Newman’s favourite roles and even influenced his personal life. Before shooting the foul-mouthed caper, he didn’t swear too often. However, he developed a habit of turning the air blue thanks to Reggie. “There’s a hangover from characters sometimes,” he admitted. “There are things that stick. Since Slap Shot, my language is right out of the locker room.”
Mainstream sports comedies boasting an A-lister in the leads and focusing on a slumming team full of misfits were hardly prevalent in the late 1970s, and the concept stuck out to Newman for decades as being the most unique opportunity he’d ever been presented. Naturally, he seized it with both hands.
