..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Paul Newman: 3 Scenes
by Larry Gross

In The Hustler, there's a scene when Newman as Eddie Felsen is in the last stages of recovering from having his thumbs broken.  He and Piper Laurie have diminished their alcohol consumption to the point where they can leave her apartment and have a picnic though his hands are bandaged and he's physcially fragile. It's conspicuously one of the few exteriors in this film that moves obsessively from one dark  b&w smoky interior to another.  In the scene, Eddie the poolwhiz is ruminating on having been called a loser, but then breaks off into a passionate monologue about what it means to be good at what you do, how pool can be an art, that any thing can be a work of art, if you do it with passion and precision..

"It's a great feeling Sarah" he says, "when you're playing the game the way it's meant to be played." 

I think this is probably the most imitated piece of screenwriting and performing in the subsequent 47  years of Hollywood cinema.  It's the prototypical moment that executives have been asking writers for ever since, the moment where the audience knows why it cares about this character and what's at stake for him. 

What's uncharacteristically unsentimental about the scene, is that Laurie than tries to get the same declaration of love from Newman, which his speech inspires her to make, and he gently refuses.  "You need the words?" he asks.  And she says with uncharcteristic simple candor, "I need them very much and if you ever say them I'll never let you take them back."   So unlike all the sentimental versions of this scene (see Good Will Hunting) the speech about the hero's singular qualities, honestly and authentically enforces the fact of his isolation as well as making him sympathetic.

The scene from Absence of Malice is one of Newman and Pollack's boldest. He is furiously angrily confronting a reporter, played by Sally Field. They've been slightly flirtatious heretofore, but she's been trying to grill him on his invovlement in a story and he's refused to cooperate.  So she's gone behind his back to his best friend to confirm details of the story. The friend, played by Melinda Dillon, has been shamed and humiliated by the publishing of her name with these details and has committed suicide. The way that Newman plays this scene of anger and revenge, 

It's very close to both murder and rape, but when he tears at Fields his character's real emphasis is his feeling of loss about his friend. I don't have the dialogue committed to memory but the gist of it is, "Did you even see who she was?...Didn't you LIKE her...?".

Here, Newman shows you the exact essence of what movie stars can do that the rest of us can't do. He goes into a morally dangerous place and makes you want to go there with him. You're frightened by how far he's prepared to go in hurting Fields and yet his energy and his authority are so confident that he doesn't lose you.  And so your sense of what you can respond to in human character is expanded. 

Not to put too pretentious a spin on it, but it's what happens when you respond to poetic characterization in Shakespeare.  You go places with the characters you didn't know existed.

The movie was an incredibly ahead-of-its time attack on tabloid journalism, albeit the "bad" behavior" of Sally Fields' character in that film is so high-serious in its motives compared to today's media that you almost have to get into a time capsule to comprehend the indignation expressed.

The other movie from the strong, immediately pre-Butch Cassidy phase of Newman's career (The Hustler to Butch was his greatest phase)  which goes insufficiently appreciated is Martin Ritt's Hombre, from a smart script by Harriet Frank and Irving Ravetch. Nominally, a "socially conscious" western - in that Newman was playing a half-Indian - the movie was decidedly colder, fiercer, and more intelligent than its nominal pedigree.  There's a particular edge of contempt for white people that Newman's character expresses when white fellow-occupants of a stagecoach are all in trouble facing a bunch of bandits and take turns wimping out.  His character takes a certain joyless joy in how weak and frightened they become that's both funny and disturbing. 

There's a negotiation over stolen payroll money between him and the bad guys lead by Richard Boone, where his dry concluding line "...and how'd you plan on getting down this hill," before he shoots Boone and several others, is one of the cooler deliveries of a prelude to violence that I can recall.

I share the sentiment Manhola Dargis expressed at the end in her Times piece, you wouldn't have minded if this guy had struck around a little longer.

- Larry Gross
September 30, 2008

Larry Gross is a 25 year screenwriting veteran and Winner of Sundance's Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for his most recent release, We Don't Live Here Anymore. He is also the author of The 48 Hr Diaries, currently appearing weekly on MCN

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