“Just the grittiness of it”: the movie that changed Paul Newman’s life
At the drop of a hat, almost every actor will be able to rattle off a list of movies that had a profound impact on them and made a lasting impression that informed their careers, but not Paul Newman.
Initially, he claimed there weren’t any, but he eventually revealed that there was only one. It wasn’t a bad film to be inspired by, though, since it not only changed the entire profession forever, but reinvented Newman’s own approach to the art of performance, leading him toward legendary status.
The future legend rose through the ranks at a time when the pathway was as predictable as it was well-worn: if you want to be an actor, you have to spend the first few years honing your craft on the stage, and if you’re lucky, a gradual segue into cinema will eventually lead to bigger and better things.
That’s exactly what Newman did, albeit only to a certain extent. He spent his formative years treading the boards, as was expected of him, but when he made his feature-length debut in The Golden Chalice, he abhorred the result so much that he spent the rest of his life tearing it down whenever he could.
The most unfortunate by-product of all was that he’d also signed a lengthy contract with Warner Bros, which meant the studio controlled when and where he’d be making his future appearances. He got fed up with that agreement quickly and ended up spending $500,000 of his own money to buy himself out of it, which was a risky gamble that paid off incredibly handsomely in the long run.
Newman’s first love was always the stage, regardless of the success he enjoyed in the movie business, and when he was asked if there were any films he saw in his younger days that made an impression on him, he answered as definitively in the negative as you could hope to get: “Can’t remember one.”
However, that changed when he was 19 years old. “Until Waterfront,” the Academy Award winner added, with Eliza Kazan’s seminal On the Waterfront winning eight Oscars, but the most important of all was Marlon Brando’s ‘Best Actor’-winning turn as Terry Malloy, which instantly altered Newman’s perception of his chosen vocation.
“Just the grittiness of it, and the realism and the spontaneity of it, the reality of it,” he explained. “I was pretty much an oratorical actor up until then, from the old school, 1920s, early Barrymore, stuff like that. Go back and see The Silver Chalice. That was really wreckage.” Just like that, though, Brando’s naturalistic performance had made it clear that a new era was dawning, and he wanted in.
Before seeing On the Waterfront, Newman adopted the acting style of the times, reading the lines as written and adhering to the same template as everyone else. Afterwards, when Brando had shown him the possibilities of how a character could be injected with subtleties and nuances that aren’t there on the page, his mindset was forever altered.
