Last week I watched three Paul Newman movies as part of my Summer of Paul — The Rack, The Hustler, and A New Kind of Love. The Summer of Paul is what I am calling my plan to watch as many Paul Newman movies as I can this summer.
The Rack:
Ooh boy. This one was a tough one to watch. This is a very early Paul Newman movie, (his third only in fact) and it was loosely based on a play by Rod Serling (Twilight Zone fame). His acting skills aren’t sharpened just yet, but that is not why it was difficult to watch. It was difficult because it splayed open PTSD from war in a way most movies of the time never did. It showcased what really happened to prisoners of war and stripped away the idea that war creates only unmarked heroes who fought and died for their country and suffered only from being away from their family.
This movie was a very raw depiction of patriotism run amok, how military brass thought they would punish men who collapsed under the heaviness of months and months, if not years of brutal mental and emotional torture and call them traitors, all the while not admitting their own culpability in the mental, emotional, and physical ruin of these men (and later women as well). I support and absolutely stand by our military but our country’s politicians and military leaders are often blind to the hollowed-out husks they abandon when they deny the impact war has on those who fight it on the ground level.
As much as this is a commentary on the effects of war it is also about the stoic relationship between many military leaders and their families and how they can emotionally shut themselves off because of their training.
A lot of the movie features the court room drama of Newman being court marshalled for supposedly collaborating with the enemy, which were the North Koreans at that time. There was one point I wanted to climb right through my computer and absolutely thrash the prosecuting attorney. It is such a brutal scene and I’m guessing many a modern military courtroom drama scene was crafted after it. It certainly stirred up emotion in me. Enough I could have screamed and my heart rate increased at the cruelty of what was being done to Newman’s characters but also what is done to our own soldiers.
The topic of PTSD from our veterans is close to my heart because not only were there two suicides by Vietnam vets within a very tiny area around my house when I was young, in a little grouping of houses of less than 100 people, but after a local soldier was killed in Iraq, many of the soldiers who returned after his death either killed themselves or suffered horrible PTSD. It infuriates me to hear the prosecutor in this film mocking Newman’s obvious mental trauma after being tortured.
Sadly, this film ended in an off way for me. This is a little bit of a spoiler but Newman pretty much says he missed being a magnificent person because he was too mentally week. Ick.
I felt like soldiers with PTSD were made to feel like they are wrong for their actions under duress, but then again, maybe that was the point of the writing of the film (since the film actually changed Serling’s television play quite a bit) — to show that many soldiers will apologize for their weakness under mental stress, instead of admitting it is an actual issue.
The movie is still a good one that makes you think, so I definitely recommend it. It’s also fun to watch Newman start to become the great actor he later became (though he definitely is not there in this one).
If you want to know more about the movie, how it was made, and Paul’s part in it, you can read this story on Roger Ebert’s Blog (https://www.rogerebert.com/streaming/on-the-rack-with-paul-newman-and-stewart-stern)
The Hustler:
This movie did not have as much action in it as I had hoped. I wanted more pool playing and less melodrama between Paul and the woman in the movie. I think the only reason I felt like I didn’t like this movie is because I was expecting something completely different.
Paul plays a professional hustling pool player who travels the country pretending he doesn’t know how to play pool and then swindles people out of their money. The 1986 film, The Color of Money, which stars Paul and Tom Cruise, was the sequel to this film. Yes, it is also on my list of Paul movies to watch this summer.
In the middle of the movie the woman Eddie (Paul’s character) is living with yells, “What else are we going to do?”
And I said I hoped Eddie would go back and play pool because we needed some more action in this movie already. I seriously thought the movie was more about playing pool than Eddie just being a huge jerk.
At one point Paul asks his girlfriend after they’ve spent most of the movie drinking away their days, “So, do you think I’m a loser?”
The Husband, The Boy, and I all said, “yes” at the same time.
I sort of feel like if a movie director needed someone to play a mopey, depressed and moody guy in the 1960s he said, “Call Newman. This role is for him.”
But then I see a movie like A New Kind of Love and realize that Paul could play light characters as well.
The Hustler is a good film, don’t get me wrong. It is well written and well-acted. It was just quite a bit darker than I realized and I would have liked more scenes with Jackie Gleason, who was nominated for an Oscar for the 15 minutes he was on screen out of the 2-hour and 16 minute movie.
A New Kind of Love:
A New Kind of Love was much lighter, but as a self-proclaimed prude, I was bothered by how flippantly sex was regarded by Paul’s character. I wondered when all the STDs would catch up with him if he’d been a real person and not a character in a movie.
Despite my prudish views, I did enjoy the movie overall.
Paul plays a reporter who is also a womanizer, which is always getting him in trouble. His latest fling causes him to be sent into exile in Paris where he meets Joan who is a fashion consultant visiting Paris from New York. Joan has no interest in love. She acts more like a man than a woman and when she first meets Paul, she hates him, of course. The movie takes some unexpected turns when Joan decides that love might be interesting after all when she gives herself a French makeover.
The movie was a nice distraction from the depression in the world.
Sadly, I think I might be sinking into more depression at some point when I watched From the Terrace and Rachel Rachel this weekend. But I get to stare at Paul’s blue eyes, so I guess it is worth it.
Have you seen any of these movies? If so, did you enjoy them?
With my eyes a little better I’m back to reading a little more and have added The Misadventured Summer of Tumbleweed Thompson by Glen McCarthy, an independently published book for middle school-aged children, to my reading list (again). It is so creatively written and I tried reading it to my daughter since I’m much better at Southern accents than British ones, but she rejected it and asked for Paddington again for her nighttime reading. In case you are interested in finding out a little bit more about the book, here is the blurb on Amazon: For Eugene Appleton, the summer of 1876 in Rattlesnake Junction, Colorado promises to be just as sleepy as the ones before, his only excitement provided by the pulse-pounding Dead-Eye Dan adventure novels he devours. But Eugene’s life takes an unexpected turn with the arrival of Tumbleweed Thompson, a gangly, red-haired boy who spins yarns about whaling voyages in the Atlantic and hidden stashes of gunpowder. Drawn into Tumbleweed’s orbit, Eugene soon finds himself chasing smugglers, firing rifles, and competing for the attention of the lovely Charlotte Scoggins.”
After seeing a preview for Wild Rose at one of the only movies I saw in the theater this year (Brittany Runs a Marathon, which was pretty good, but not my favorite.), I was interested to see it when it popped up on Amazon. The movie is about a young Scottish woman who wants to become a country singer in Nashville but lets her temper and her propensity for alcohol to get in her way. Her other issue is that she is a young, single mother with two children. The movie opens with her being released from jail and returning home where her mother has been raising her children for the last year.
The documentary follows the journey of a couple who starts a diverse farm in a fairly deserted area of California. Under the guidance of a consultant, they not only plant diverse crops but also begin raising various livestock, including sheep and chickens and one fat, pregnant pig. The couple started the farm to give their rescue dog a place to roam and soon learn their family dream will cost them a lot of pain, emotionally, physically and financially. There is a lot of bad (coyotes come to visit; there are other unexpected challenges) but there is also a lot of good (a booming egg business for one).
I like the predictability of the Cat Who books. I don’t always know who committed the crime but I know what the pattern will be to solve it. Qwill’s mustache is going to quiver and hum, alerting him to something that has gone amiss, but he’s still going to walk himself right into something questionable and his cat KoKo is going to help solve the crime with his uncanny ability to feel (and signal Qwill) when something is off. Also, a few women will fall all over the retired crime reporter and he will return some of that affection but he’s going to back away from the woman, choosing instead the comfort of the reserved librarian Polly Duncan from the small town of Pickax.
