At the censors’insistence, Williams’Pulitzer Prize–winning drama — about an impotent ex-college football star with the punishingly ironic name of Brick (Newman) and his simmering, frustrated wife Maggie (Taylor) — was shorn of its homoerotic melancholy and given a hopeful ending. The play wasn’t denuded, exactly; instead, it was turned into the story of a married couple locked in frustration (hers) and hatred (his).
Scorn was one of Newman’s prime rhetorical gifts, and here he got to deliver dialogue in spit-takes, as if he’d just realized someone had laced his whiskey bottle with urine. “How in hell on earth can you imagine you’re gonna have a child with a man who cannot stand you?” Brick asks Maggie, who acknowledges that their marriage has disintegrated into a rancorous formality — “I’m not living with you! We occupy the same cage, that’s all” — but still loves the guy. She has to; he’s Paul Newman. And he must finally satisfy her; she’s Liz Taylor. That was the battle that ’50s Hollywood waged with its own teetering standards.
If Hollywood was turning some pedigreed book into a movie, Newman would now get the star role: in Faulkner’s The Long, Hot Summer, John O’Hara’s From the Terrace, Leon Uris’s Exodus. Tevis’s novel wasn’t in that exalted category, but it made a better movie, in part because it cast Newman as the hero-heel who’s a pleasure to watch in action, right up to the climactic comeuppance. His Fast Eddie Felson is a pool hustler, coming into some joint, pretending to be an average player and then, when some real money is put on the table, crushing the opponent with his remorseless skill. He has talent, no question; but what the smart guys, like Minnesota Fats (Gleason), think Eddie lacks is character — that he’s “a born loser.”
The fun in this moody, pounding, overlong, rewarding bring-down of a film is seeing the curled lip of contempt, which Eddie flashes at all the suckers, freeze into a rictus when he gets his. Yet what audiences took away from the exercise, as nearly always with a Newman role, was the need to see more of the character. They did, 25 years later, when Martin Scorsese directed Newman and Tom Cruise in The Color of Money, based on Tevis’s sequel novel. Newman’s older, wiser, not quite so Fast Eddie earned the actor his only competitive Oscar.
New system launch games are usually pretty dismal — look at what happened to the Nintendo 3DS — but the PS Vita’s looks unusually promising. Here’s a rundown of the seven Vita games we’re most looking forward to (and why).
In light of the Material Girl performing at Super Bowl XLVI, TIME takes a look at her life and career, both of which have been lived firmly in the public eye.
