The movie Paul Newman admitted was a mistake: “Don’t know what happened to that one”
Picking a favourite Paul Newman movie is a fairly arduous task, like choosing between the best kind of pizza or which of your parents you like the most. The guy made a frankly ludicrous amount of quality films in his six decades on screen, including what, personally, I believe might be the greatest film ever made.
That would be 1967’s Cool Hand Luke, the prison drama that packs almost everything you could want from a film into its two-hour runtime, from iconic speeches to violence to great escapes to formidable bad guys to laugh-out-loud moments to ‘how many boiled eggs can you eat in one go’ challenges.
If you haven’t seen it, run, go and watch it now, but if you have, you’ll know it really sums Newman at his peak up perfectly; handsome, rugged, a mischievous grin with eyes that could wink him out of trouble no matter how bad and the ability to engrossingly lead almost any kind of story regardless of genre.
His highlight reel is unmatched, a genuine classic in every decade that he worked: 1958’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1961’s The Hustler, 1973’s The Sting, 1982’s The Verdict, 1994’s The Hudsucker Proxy and 2002’s Road to Perdition, among many, many more.
Of course, as with any actor who has worked for that long, not that there are many, there were a few missteps along the way, some of which Newman himself made reference to back in 1982 when he was asked by Time to run through a full list of his movies to that point and make a brief comment about each of them.
While he was predictably fond of the more memorable ones, there were some films that he expressed some regret over, notably in his earliest roles in the 1950s when he was still finding his feet as an actor. He dismissed the likes of his debut, 1954’s The Silver Chalice, as “junk”, 1961’s Paris Blues as “not great” and 1966’s Alfred Hitchcock-directed Torn Curtain as “not so good”.
And a film he made in the following decade, the western Buffalo Bill and the Indians, was also put under the microscope, resulting in the great man imagining what might have been. Speaking about the 1976 movie, Newman said, “Don’t know what happened to that one. Made a mistake somewhere along the line. Great potential.”
Directed by Short Cuts’ Robert Altman, Buffalo Bill probably should have been a bigger hit than it turned out to be, with a supporting cast including luminaries like the legendary Burt Lancaster and the acclaimed New Hollywood star Harvey Keitel. It also had a sizable budget for the time of $7m, but initial screenings for critics went badly, forcing Altman to do an immediate recut.
Altman’s idea of trying to cleverly skewer one of America’s most famous cowboys as a buffoon who couldn’t shoot straight didn’t go down well at all, especially in the year that the country was celebrating turning 200 years old, and as a result, it struggled to earn back what was spent at the box office.
Newman sensibly pivoted the following year to make one of his far more all-American roles as the coach of a failing ice hockey team that resorts to punch-ups in order to win games in 1977’s Slap Shot, which he described as one of his favourite characters of his career, albeit adding: “Unfortunately that character is a lot closer to me than I would care to admit – vulgar, on the skids.”
