Paul Newman’s least favourite Paul Newman movies: “I made a couple of really bad ones”
Paul Newman was one of the greatest actors of his generation, a star who bridged the chasm between Old and New Hollywood and became an icon of both. He started and ended his career as a heartthrob, but he transcended those classic movie star looks by seeking out challenging, rough-edged roles. Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Hustler remain stone-cold classics.
While he may not have received the same amount of breathless adoration for his acting as contemporaries like Marlon Brando, Newman demonstrated his versatility and bankability for nearly six decades.
Like most young actors in Hollywood, however, Newman had to compromise with his work early on, taking whatever roles he could get for the sake of climbing that slippery ladder to the top of the Hollywood pile. In 1954, he starred in The Silver Chalice, Victor Saville’s two-and-a-half-hour Biblical epic. At the time, Newman was still languishing in the dark recesses of television. Most actors in his position would have been thrilled about the exposure of a big-budget studio feature, but he was so mortified by how terrible the film was that he took out an ad in the newspaper, begging people not to see it. As one would expect, it had the opposite effect.
While The Silver Chalice was undoubtedly one of Newman’s least favourite of his own films, it went unmentioned during a 1981 interview with The Washington Post in which he discussed the movies he was least proud of. During the conversation, he was perturbed by his two most recent films, When Time Ran Out… and Quintet, saying, “I made a couple of really bad ones back to back.”
When Time Ran Out… is a disaster movie in the mould of all the disaster movies that had grown so popular in the ’70s. It featured a star-studded cast including Newman, William Holden, and Jacqueline Bisset, and centred on the real-life eruption of Mount Pelée in Martinique in 1902, which killed tens of thousands of people in only a handful of minutes. Critics were scathing, calling it one of the worst disaster movies of all time and decrying the shonky special effects. Newman called it “a terrible mistake,” and explained that he had taken the role because he wanted to see what it was like to be in a big commercial film.
Quintet was a more surprising debacle. Directed by Robert Altman, whose 1975 film Nashville had been a visionary critical smash that earned him two Oscar nominations and eternal respect, it could easily have been a hit. Set in the distant future during a new ice age, it chronicles a gruesome game called Quintet that a group of surviving humans play, using their fellow citizens as pawns.
Critics panned it for being embarrassingly self-important and drowning in pseudo-profundity. Newman referred to his decision to star in the movie as “whimsical,” suggesting that he might not have thought about it particularly deeply or cared greatly about the outcome. It died a swift death at the box office and was a financial disaster for its backers.
Neither of these cinematic trainwrecks can be blamed on Newman, but as was he wont, he seemed to hold himself to account for taking part in them. All actors have to compromise on material at some point, but Newman was particularly tortured by the movies that weren’t up to his high standards.
