Brando and Newman and Me

This week's entry is a short one. It started as another email conversation with my father, poet Rowell Hoff, who currently lives with his wife Carol in China.

Dad:

We just watched last night the Paul Newman movie "Nobody's Fool". We sort of think he may be, if there is one, the best actor around. What I notice is that I forget about Newman; the person I am seeing is the person in the movie.

I read a review of this movie, the reviewer mentioned that Newman and Brando started out at the same time, the same classes, etc. But what happened to Brando after all? He started maybe imitating himself, maybe just tired of it all, maybe confused (certainly confused!) maybe whatever. Newman perfected his art, there is no other word for it. Did you see him in the movie about Earl Long (don't remember the title)? Cool Hand Luke? Butch Cassidy? The Sting? etc. etc. etc.

Me:
That movie was called Blaze, but no, I haven't seen it. Interesting that you should mention Paul Newman. He is by far my writing partner's favorite actor, Cool Hand Luke his favorite film. And of course both Butch Cassidy and The Sting are two of my absolute top films. I too think he is close to the best actor around. Nobody's Fool was not a great film, but certainly a very good one, and he was fine in it. That particular class at the Actor's Studio produced a lot of wonderful actors, not the least of which were my two acting instructors in college who met and married there. (In other words, my training was second hand the same as Newman's and Brando's. Sort of... Okay, that's really inconsequential to the conversation at hand, but what the hell.)

In terms of raw acting ability, I do think Brando far outweighs Newman, but Brando got very bitter about the industry very early on and Newman just dove in and made it work for himself, becoming a director, producer and better actor. After just "phoning in" (I hate that phrase, but it does describe it) performances for many years, and doing things just for the money, (such as Superman for goodness sakes. A fun film, but what the hell is he doing in it? Not much. Feh) Brando did kind of disappear. He didn't make a movie for almost ten years after Apocalypse Now (what a performance that was!) and The Formula. You can see that he probably had resistance to his whole life by looking at his physical body over those years. Then he started doing some small roles in things and it looked like he was choosing movies he wanted to do and really did his homework. He had only one scene in a movie called Dry White Season with Donald Sutherland in which he never stood up from his chair but walked away with the film. (It was one of those films that bother me a bit because it is about a non-white ethnic group, but seen through White Man's eyes as if that were the only way to communnicate the strange, bizarre Other. Or as if to say, the white oppressor isn't all that bad, see? Look how he feels for the downtrodden. Feh. In this case, the movie is about the struggle of blacks in South Africa but seen through Sutherland's eyes, who plays an upper middle class Afrikaner. But Brando is so wonderful, subtle, he almost makes up for that.) Of course, he followed that up with The Freshman, a movie even he disparaged.

Brando did a slightly bigger role in a caper film a few years before he died called The Score that was a hoot (although one major plot point didn't make a lot of sense) with two other actors that are close to being in Newman and Brando's league: Edward Norton and Robert De Niro. (De Niro was also an Actor's Studio alum, although much later.) I think it was Brando's last movie. Before that he went back and forth between great stuff and trash, following Don Juan DeMarco, a delightful film in which he is delightful, with The Island of Dr. Moreau, a dreadful film in which he is dreadful.

Newman has done some clunkers (don't see Twilight, even though it has another couple of favorites of mine in it, it's almost unwatchable...) but I will see anything he's in and I rarely see a film just because Brando is in it.

Geoff Hoff is co-owner of Joseph Coaler Productions and, with Steve Mancini, co-wrote the satirical novel "Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend".