I guess Paul Newman will be most remembered for the films he made alongside Robert Redford - The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - smart films, entertaining films, that stand the test of time. It's a long time since I've seen The Hustler or Cool Hand Luke, but I did see Torn Curtain recently and there was something about him which didn't fit the part in a Hitchcock film. A generation gap. Perhaps it's that you can't see Julie Andrews as a Hitchcock ice blonde, or that he wasn't the right sense of gent of Grant or Stewart. Perhaps it's because he acted characters not Paul Newman.
More recently two outstanding performances - The Hudsucker Proxy and The Road to Perdition - showed he still had it, and he could still hold the screen. I'd forgotten he'd directed Sometimes a Great Notion, a tamed version of Ken Kesey's frankly too complicated second novel, with Henry Fonda and himself. Another icon falls.
More recently two outstanding performances - The Hudsucker Proxy and The Road to Perdition - showed he still had it, and he could still hold the screen. I'd forgotten he'd directed Sometimes a Great Notion, a tamed version of Ken Kesey's frankly too complicated second novel, with Henry Fonda and himself. Another icon falls.
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