I’ll throw in a good word for Where the Money Is. Not an Oscar contender, but a fun little caper film. And Newman had great chemistry with Linda Fiorentino, for whom I would crawl over a football field of rusty nails and broken glass.
I saw it on television with Newman in the pitcher’s role. The catcher wasn’t as good as DeNiro or maybe just different, but Newman was just fantastic. He brought that athleticism he had in Somebody Up There Likes Me and added a caringness, a not-quite masculine fragility, that I have never seen him have before or since. It was (as I remember it) incredible.
Just an observation or two about the man.
Having grown up with Newman, Eastwood, Connery, Hackman, DeNiro, Pacino, Redford, Duvall and the others in that rough age bracket, all of whom were adults while I was still a teenager (or younger), I have had varying degrees of response to their aging process. Of all of that list, in spite of his being near the older end of the group, I just can’t think of Newman as an old man.
Until the last decade or so, he was still getting away with acting “middle aged” and only with his most recent roles has he “gotten old.”
Do any of you respond that way? Or has he always been of the Old Crowd for you? Is there some particular age you have frozen in your mind for Newman? I guess he’s always Cool Hand Luke to me.
I came in here to say this very thing. I tried to rewatch it a few weeks ago… by today’s standards this movie really sucked.
It’s going on a year since the last post to this thread.
Seems fitting to add this:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090225/ap_on_en_mo/paul_newman_resolution