Torn Curtain

Casting is TORN CURTAIN's blessing and curse.

It's a blessing because Julie Andrews and Paul Newman are strong, magnetic performers with whom we feel a natural affinity. It's a curse because Julie Andrews is too powerful to convince as the devoted lover who'll follow her man to the gates of Hell, and Paul Newman is too fundamentally decent to convince as the kind of guy who'd take her there. But hey, give yourself a little extra nudge in the suspension of disbelief department, and you're in for a tight little thriller.

Here's the setup: Newman is a physicist who has been working on anti - ballistic missile project, since cancelled. Andrews is his devoted assistant and squeeze (there's some talk about a wedding date, but most of it's from Andrews). They're attending a conference in Denmark when Newman gets a coded message, grows cold, and departs in a rush with a lousy explanation about a job in Sweden. Andrews, no fool, checks his tickets and discovers that - gasp - he's on his way to East Berlin. Is Newman actually a communist spy? What's going on?

Since a movie like this relies on twists and turns, I'm not going to say much more about its story. I will say that Alfred Hitchcock, the film's director, could generate tension in his sleep. Even as he chooses sets and photographic techniques that remind us he's merely spinning a yarn, the guy knows how to do it. TORN CURTAIN clips right along, maintains a sense of adventure and danger, and generally does what it sets out to do. Even if it isn't entirely successful, it at least gives us an opportunity to spend a couple of hours with Andrews and Newman. And that ain't bad.

Winning

WINNING is a lousy movie. It’s poorly constructed, features a show-stoppingly bad performance from a major supporting actor, and fails to excite even in its centerpiece racing scenes.

The film, set in the world of stock car racing, begins with Paul Newman winning a race. He has a few drinks at the victory party, wanders around town, and charms a local floozy. Three or four scenes later, they’re married, and the rest of the film depends upon my investment in their relationship. But here’s the thing: for a love story to work, we have to fall in love (even if it’s just a little) with the characters. With WINNING, I don’t even know who these people are, much less have a reason to care whether or not they make it as a family. There’s your weak foundation. The film is poorly shot and edited; with jagged and wobbly camera movements competing for your distraction with montages and transitions of such jarring mediocrity that it’s hard to believe this is a feature film. Finally, Dave Grusin’s dead-jazz score is so limp that it distracts us with its mediocrity.

While Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Robert Wagner are all as fine and professional as you’d expect, Richard Thomas (in his debut role, playing Woodward’s son) is remarkably bad. Now, I like Thomas. Some years back, I saw him do a “King John” in which he absolutely nailed the role. But here, just starting out, he so overacts that I felt like it was all the more seasoned professionals could do to refrain from smacking him.

So you’re got your bad construction and your distracting performance, but it’s a racing movie, right? The racing must be pretty good. Nope. It’s just a bunch of shots of cars and closeups of eyes, with an announcer telling me what’s actually happening. I admit that I’m not a race fan, finding the sport to be even more boring than golf. But a good racing movie should have drawn me in nonetheless, made me feel the rush when the good guy passes the bad. Nope. I fell asleep during the climactic race.

As performers, I like Newman, Woodward, and Wagner. I’d have loved to see them together in a better film. Unfortunately, this isn’t it. WINNING is a loser.

Cars

CARS isn't wildly funny or illuminating or anything else. It just sorta rocks along pleasantly for an hour and a half, content to be content in the journey.

Here's the setup: Lightning McQueen is *this close* to winning the coveted Piston Cup and making all his dreams come true. He's just gotta get to LA in time for the race and the meeting with the big sponsor and the fame and the fans and so on and so forth. But then he gets sidetracked, DOC HOLLYWOOD style, in a litte town on Route 66. Surprisingly, he learns some life lessons about community and selflessness, and he finds out that maybe what he wanted isn't what he wanted, at all. It's a fine chassis for a kids' story, and it works as advertised, with some particularly clever touches in the realization of an all-autos world. This is a Pixar production, so it looks fabulous and has all the marks of a precision machine. It hits its marks and, while not a masterpiece, it answers the mail.

What's more interesting is the trend to focus on the importance of sportsmanship and fair play in kids' movies that I've been noticing. It's a delightful change from the "2nd place is first loser" mentality that I see permeating much of popular culture and a message that's worth getting out there. There's nothing trite about class, and it's good to see that reinforced in popular entertainment.

Cool Hand Luke

I've managed to make it through 37 years thinking of COOL HAND LUKE only as "the movie where Paul Newman eats a lot of eggs." Since I'm not a particularly big fan of eggs, I never bothered to watch the picture before today.

My loss.

COOL HAND LUKE is, basically, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST on a chain gang. It's a movie about a guy who just can't conform, a guy who seems decent enough, but whose inability to work with or around authority figures fixes his fate before he ever leaves the home. This guy is an unrepentant square peg, and he's stuck in a world dedicated to grinding everyone down to the same shape.

(In my line of work, we fire guys like that as fast as possible because they're an unending stream of headaches. Yeah, yeah, you're an individual - I get it. Now can you do the job we're paying you to do?)

Thing is, I love ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, and I loved COOL HAND LUKE. In addition to spotlighting a virtuoso Newman performance, the movie gives us a real sense of time and place. From its somnolent Lalo Schiffren score to Conrad Hall's photography, we're immersed in the slow, almost eternal rythms of the rural south. The men work, and sleep, and carouse, and pass the time, and create a perfect backdrop for Newman's portrayal of a man who goes from rebel to hero to cynic. In a sense, he's doing even more than that, however. He begins the film as an emotional adolescent, progresses through manhood, and ends with the weariness of age. In the space of just a few short minutes, Newman gives us the human comedy on a chain gang. It's powerful stuff, and it's worth watching.

But I'm still not a big fan of eggs.