Newman had been kicking around Hollywood for a couple of years — starring in the stodgy Biblical epic The Silver Chalice, being turned down for the role of James Dean’s brother in East of Eden — when he got to play Graziano, the petty criminal who became middleweight champ, in this MGM biopic. A fighter on the ropes is surefire for a tough-guy actor, as William Holden (Golden Boy), John Garfield (Body and Soul), Kirk Douglas (Champion), Marlon Brando (On the Waterfront) and many others had proved. Though mimicking Graziano’s stumblebum manner and Lower East Side patois didn’t suit Newman’s style — he’s not so much being Rocky as doing him — the performance won him rave notices and helped him earn stronger roles. At 31, Young Blue Eyes was Hollywood’s hot new kid.
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.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
