I’d never seen a Paul Newman movie before this year*, and I think I commented here that when I watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, that although the opening scene was in sepia, when the camera came around for the first time so you could see Newman’s eyes, they were so arresting that I could have just sat there for ninety minutes gawking at that still frame. I’ve still only seen Butch Cassidy and The Sting (I had *no idea* he was in the Elizabeth Taylor Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I’ve got to see that!), but damn, even with as little as I know his work, I’m sad to hear he’s died. The man was a legend.
*Actually not quite true. I saw Message in a Bottle when it came out, but the only thing I remember about it was how I never, ever want to see it again.
Two of his best were “The Verdict”, where he plays an alcoholic lawyer with a last chance and “Nobody’s Fool, where he plays a sixty year old handy man in a small town in upstate New York who is in the middle of finding out who the hell he is, finally. It was also Jessica Tandy’s last film.
If you go to rent or buy “Nobody’s Fool”, make sure you get the proper one. There is another movie by that name out as well, not at all worth watching.
I suspect you would also enjoy “Long Hot Summer”, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams, with Orson Welles, Joann Woodward, Tony Franciosa and Angela Lansbury, among others. All of these are available on DVD these days.
By the way, when he played the sixty year old in “Nobody’s Fool”, he was actually 70.