The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961)

Paul Newman in The Hustler

Cast: Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, George C. Scott, Myron McCormick, Murray Hamilton, Michael Constantine, Stefan Gierasch, Clifford A. Pellow, Jake LaMotta, Gordon B. Clarke, Alexander Rose, Carolyn Coates, Carl York, Vincent Gardenia. Screenplay: Sidney Carroll, Robert Rossen, based on a novel by Walter Tevis. Cinematography: Eugen Schüfftan. Production design: Harry Horner. Film editing: Dede Allen. Music: Kenyon Hopkins.

You can't say The Hustler isn't educational: It made me Google the difference between pool and billiards. Otherwise, it stands as a direction the American film might have gone in the 1960s, after the breakup of the studios, the waning of anticommunist hysteria, and the weakening of Production Code enforcement. Instead, the movies went in the direction signaled by the Oscars for that year, in which Academy voters chose West Side Story (Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins) over The Hustler as best picture, indicating a trend toward big, bright entertainment rather than gritty, intense films of the sort that were being turned out in Europe and Japan during the 1950s and '60s. The Hustler seems more like a film from the 1970s than one of the better films of the 1960s. It did land Oscars for Harry Horner's production design and Eugen Schüfftan's cinematography, as well it should have. CinemaScope could be an unwieldy format, especially in black-and-white, but Schüfftan mastered it beautifully, working with director Robert Rossen to make the most of Horner's unglamorous and sometimes cramped settings. The camera sometimes gives us the full spread of a set and lets us search for the key figures in it: The introduction of Piper Laurie's Sarah is not a grand entrance or a tell-all closeup but an at first insignificant figure in a train station diner, gaining prominence only through the eyeline of Paul Newman's Fast Eddie Felson. Later, when Sarah returns to that diner, Eddie is seated at the far right of the frame, not front and center as you'd expect the protagonist of a movie to be. Pool, being a horizontal game, is more in line with the demands of CinemaScope, and it's here that Dede Allen's editing works particularly well. As for the actors, Newman, Laurie, George C. Scott, and Jackie Gleason all covered themselves with glory -- and Oscar nominations, which of course Scott declined. If I have reservations about The Hustler it's that the bluesy score by Kenyon Hopkins is laid on a little too thickly and that its story, hinging on a suicide and a redemption, strays to the edge of being contrived and melodramatic, but at least doesn't fall completely into happily ever after mode.

Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963)

Cast: Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Neal, Brandon De Wilde, Whit Bissell, Crahan Denton, John Ashley, Val Avery, George Petrie. Screenplay: Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frank Jr., based on a novel by Larry McMurtry. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Tambi Larsen, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Frank Bracht. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

Hud and Mud as back-to-back blog entries: Purely accidental, but I rather like it. It set me to thinking that if Hud were ever (god forbid!) remade, Matthew McConaughey would be a good substitute for Paul Newman. Or rather, would have been, since McConaughey is 50, where Newman was exactly the right age when he played Hud. But both actors have that innate charisma blended with a soupçon of something not quite trustworthy that makes them such fun to watch. And fun to watch is what Hud is, despite the title character's anti-heroicness and the story's serious overtones about the passing of a way of life. On the latter count, think of the hopefulness of the cattle drivers in Howard Hawks's Red River (1948) as compared with the sour fate of the Bannons in Hud. The mantra of Red River was Dunson's "Good beef for hungry people. Beef to make 'em strong, make 'em grow." In Hud it might be Homer Bannon's "It don't take long to kill things, not like it does to grow." But mostly the pleasures of Hud are in the performances: Newman's obviously, and Patricia Neal's as Alma, but most especially Melvyn Douglas's as Homer, when you remember Douglas as the actor who wooed Irene Dunne in Theodora Goes Wild (Richard Boleslawski, 1936), Marlene Dietrich in Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, 1937), and Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (Lubitsch, 1939). The movie won Oscars for Neal and Douglas, as it should have. Only Brandon De Wilde's performance didn't quite work for me: He seems a little too soft and well-scrubbed for someone who grew up in a landscape as lean and hard as the one James Wong Howe's (also Oscar-winning) images display. We have to think of the randy teenagers in The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971), also based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, to see what the character might really have been -- a young Jeff Bridges would have been wonderful as Lonnie Bannon. Hud is still hamstrung a little by the moribund Production Code: Characters in it say things like "crap" and "crud" instead of "shit." Like a lot of very good pictures, Hud sometimes has the feeling of having been made at the wrong time in film history.

The Hudsucker Proxy (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 1994)

Cast: Tim Robbins, Paul Newman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Charles Durning, Jim True-Frost, John Mahoney, Bill Cobbs, Bruce Campbell. Screenplay: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Sam Raimi. Cinematography: Roger Deakins. Production design: Dennis Gassner. Film editing: Thom Noble. Music: Carter Burwell.

Maybe the most divisive of the Coen brothers' movies. It's certified rotten on Rotten Tomatoes at 57%, but even there you'll find reviewers who think it "criminally overlooked and sinfully wonderful" and "A wickedly funny and incisive lampoon of big business." I had avoided it for years, but when I gave in and finally watched it I was occasionally amused and sometimes surprised. What doesn't work for me, however, is its hommage to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and '40s. That sort of thing is rarely worth doing, unless you do it with unabashed affection, as Peter Bogdanovich did in What's Up, Doc? (1972). Bogdanovich wisely took the tropes of classic screwball and updated them. The Coens and co-writer Sam Raimi, however, make the mistake of retaining for their film the period in which screwball flourished, and the contrast of their ersatz screwball with the real thing becomes apparent.

Torn Curtain (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966)

Julie Andrews and Paul Newman in Torn Curtain

Michael Armstrong: Paul Newman
Sarah Sherman: Julie Andrews
Countess Kuchinska: Lila Kedrova
Heinrich Gerhard: Hansjörg Felmy
Ballerina: Tamara Toumanova
Gustav Lindt: Ludwig Donath
Hermann Gromek: Wolfgang Kieling
Jacobi: David Opatoshu
Dr. Koska: Gisela Fisher
Farmer: Mort Mills
Farmer's Wife: Carolyn Conwell

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Brian Moore
Cinematography: John F. Warren
Production design: Hein Heckroth

I saw Torn Curtain in the year of its initial release and was never tempted to watch it again until last night. I had forgotten almost everything about it except its general dullness and the one great scene when Armstrong and the farmer's wife take an extraordinary time (for a movie at least) to kill Gromek. It's an exceptionally well-directed scene, harrowing in its unexpected realism in the midst of a film that's anything but realistic. I particularly like the way the struggle leaves Armstrong exhausted when it's over, a refreshing change from the usual movie action in which the protagonist picks himself up and dusts himself off after a fight as if it was no big deal. There is one other thing that struck me when I first saw Torn Curtain: the way Michael and Sarah supposedly blend in with the crowds in East Germany. I had lived in Germany for almost a year several years earlier, and I know how easy it is to spot American haircuts and clothes, like the kind Paul Newman and Julie Andrews have in the movie, so their going unnoticed on a bus full of Germans struck me as silly movie fakery. But almost everything about Torn Curtain feels fake. Andrews and Newman are miscast, apparently having been foisted on Hitchcock by the studio, Universal. Granted, Andrews's role is a particularly thankless one, the stand-by-your-man helpmeet, but it's particularly unfortunate in the context of a film by a director who had traditionally given women strong leading roles. And despite an opening scene that puts the two of them in bed, there is no sexual chemistry between Andrews and Newman. (Was there ever sexual chemistry between Andrews and a leading man? Is that a consequence of having been introduced to movie audiences as a nanny and a novice in a convent?) The one interesting performance in the movie is Lila Kedrova's Polish countess, trying to get Michael and Sarah to sponsor her immigration to the United States, but it goes on much too long, as if Hitchcock knew what a drag the rest of the film was and wanted to showcase this florid eccentric. This was the first film Hitchcock made without the team of cinematographer Robert Burks, composer Bernard Herrmann, and film editor George Tomasini, who had seen him through most of the glories of his 1950s and early '60s classics.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (John Huston, 1972)

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean belongs to a sub-genre that prevailed in the early 1970s; I think of them as "stoner Westerns." The huge success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969) spawned a lot of movies that took an irreverent look at the legend of the American Old West and were aimed at the younger countercultural audience. They include such diverse films as Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971), The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (Philip Kaufman, 1972), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973), and Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974). Most of them were seen as commentaries on American violence and the quagmire of the Vietnam War. Paul Newman, who had played Billy the Kid earlier in his career in The Left Handed Gun (Arthur Penn, 1958) as well as Butch Cassidy, found himself the go-to actor to portray Western legends: In addition to Judge Roy Bean, he was also cast as Buffalo Bill Cody in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (Robert Altman, 1976). The Life of Times of Judge Roy Bean began with an original screenplay by John Milius, who wanted to direct it and to star Warren Oates in the title role, but when Newman read the script, he arranged for the rights to be bought up and for John Huston to be brought on as director. There is a whiff of hommage to (or perhaps parody of) Butch Cassidy in the film: As in the earlier film, which has a musical interlude with Butch and Etta Place (Katherine Ross) larking around to the song "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," Judge Roy Bean has a scene in which the Judge, Maria Elena (Victoria Principal), and a bear lark around to the song "Marmalade, Molasses & Honey," which was written for the film by Maurice Jarre, Marilyn Bergman, and Alan Bergman. The song earned an Oscar nomination, but Huston was unable to find a consistent tone for the movie, which lurches from broad comedy (much of it provided by antics with the bear) to satire (the triumph of an avaricious lawyer played by Roddy McDowall) to pathos (the death of Maria Elena). It is laced with cameos, some of which provide the film's highlights, particularly the over-the-top performances of Anthony Perkins as an itinerant preacher and Stacy Keach as an albino outlaw named Bad Bob. But Ava Gardner simply walks through her scene as Lillie Langtry -- a decided anticlimax, given that she's been the off-screen obsession of Bean through most of the film.