A New Newman

If you're anything like me -- and again apologies if so -- then you watched The Last Movie Stars, that long-form episodic documentary on Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, when it aired last summer like religion. And the words "fuck hut" haven't stopped echoing in your head since. Well there's a new scratch for that specific itch out this week -- their daughter Melissa has dropped a large photography book called Head Over Heels on the same subject, which apparently includes lots of never-before seen of her world-class sexy moms and pops. Like that amazing shot above. Sign me up! I just hope we get to see inside the fuck hut. 

Good Morning, Pride Month

Let's kick this one off right.

5 Off My Head: Siri Says 1956

It is Election Day here in the US and I am desperately trying to distract myself -- I mean I have real work I should be doing, but I can't focus on that. But it's easy enough to focus on one of our "Siri Says" series posts, they ask very little of me while also being extremely time consuming at the same time. It's perfect! It's been a few months since the last one of these that I did, as film festivals began eating up my time, but as I've made clear a few times this year we have very few years left to choose from at this point! Only a handful, and today's pick -- the movies of the year 1956, which the post's title gave away -- brings us to the end of the 1950s. We've now chosen our favorite movies from every year that decade! 

Here are my favorite movies of 1950

Here are my favorite movies of 1951

Here are my favorite movies of 1952

Here are my favorite movies of 1953

Here are my favorite movies of 1954

Here are my favorite movies of 1955

Here are my favorite movies of 1957

Here are my favorite movies of 1958

Here are my favorite movies of 1959

It's a pretty great decade for movies, right? One of my favorites mainly because you had Brando and Dean and Clift and Newman and Rock Hudson and Steve Reeves (good lord), and you had two of my favorite film directors -- that'd be Sir Alfred Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk -- hitting their strides. Hitch alone has faves in like half of the years from 1950s, and both of them make today's list twice, including a runner-up each.

One other weird side-note about this year in the movies -- an inordinate number of movie titles were very long this year. Around the World in 80 Days, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Girl Can't Help It, The Teahouse of the August Moon, Somebody Up There Likes Me, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Best Things in Life Are Free.... and those are just a handful. I feel retroactive pain for all of the people who worked putting titles up onto the movie theater marques in 1956, truly. Anyway let's get to it...

My 5 Favorite Movies of 1956

Written on the Wind

(dir. Douglas Sirk)

-- released on December 25th 1956 --

The Bad Seed

(dir. Mervyn LeRoy)

-- released on September 12th 1956 --

Forbidden Planet

(dir. Fred M. Wilcox)

-- released on March 23rd 1956 --

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

(dir. Don Siegel)

-- released on February 5th 1956 --

The Man Who Knew Too Much

(dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

-- released on May 16th 1956 --

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Runners-up: Giant (dir. George Stevens), The Searchers (dir. John Ford), Somebody Up There Likes Me (dir. Robert Wise), The Ten Commandments (dir. Cecile B. DeMille), High Society (dir. Charles Walters), Ilya Muromets (dir. Aleksandr Ptushko), Bigger Than Life (dir. Nicholas Ray)...

... The Red Balloon (dir. Albert Lamorisse), The Girl Can't Help It (dir. Frank Tashlin), Friendly Persuasion (dir. William Wyler), Rodan (dir. Ishirō Honda), Baby Doll (dir. Elia Kazan), There's Always Tomorrow (dir. Sirk), The Wrong Man (dir. Hitchcock)

Never seen: The King and I (dir. Walter Lang), Love Me Tender (dir. Robert D. Webb), Around the World in 80 Days (dir. Michael Anderson), War and Peace (dir. King Vidor), The Rainmaker (dir. Joseph Anthony), Bus Stop (dir. Joshua Logan), Lust For Life (dir. Vincente Minnelli), Bob Le Flambeur (dir. Melville), Carousel (dir. Henry King), The Killing (dir. Kubrick)

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What are your favorite movies of 1956?

Good Morning, World

(via) Good lord, a photo of Paul Newman shirtless which I have never seen before? Will wonders never cease. Anyway I keep forgetting that a brand-new Paul Newman memoir came out this week -- I've been so busy I haven't had time to focus on anything except unimportant, non-Paul-Newman things. But no longer! I'm ordering my copy as I type this! Anybody gotten theirs and plowed through it already? Mmmmmm "Paul Newman" and "plowed"...

A Newman For All Seasons

Since I don't want to illustrate a post with a gigantic photo of my dumb face I'll give y'all two snaps of Paul Newman to stare at, while I talk about myself -- it's not entirely random, as Paul does get a mention in my "Thankful For" list (about what got me through 2021) that went up at The Film Experience over the holiday, which you can read right here. It's a small one but when it comes to Paul Newman there are no small ones, am I right? Right. 

Good Morning, World

Yesterday would've been that god-among-men Paul Newman's 96th birthday -- cue me running to my calendar to put "Paul Newman Centennial" in the January 26th 2025 square -- and as if speaking to me from beyond the grave Paul pushed a little something-something in front of me yesterday that I'd somehow never seen before! Talk about a gift -- in 1956 (the same year he played Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me) Newman starred in three episodes of "The United States Steel Hour," a TV anthology series transferred over from radio that put on little dramas for the folks at home. 

One of the three was Bang the Drum Slowly, an adaptation of a novel from the same year, about two baseball players, one of whom's dying from some unspecified illness. (It was also adapted into a 1973 movie starring Robert De Niro, which I have never seen.) Anyway thanks to the magic of the internet you can watch the entire hour-long play on YouTube! And yes, as seen here, it includes not just one, not just two, but several locker-room scenes. We are hashtag blessed. Hit the jump for more gifs and the video itself...

5 Off My Head: Siri Says 1958

My "Siri Says" series always starts and comes and goes and stops in fits and starts, but after last week's enormous 2016-a-thon -- where I named my 25 favorite movies of that absolutely fabulous year in film -- I'm feeling like pushing the rock a little further down the hill, checking off one more year in the history of cinema. So I asked Siri today to give me a number between 1 and 100 and (after several answers that we'd already done) she gave me the number "58." Which means today I'll be talking The Movies of 1958!

I've probably admitted this before in one of my other posts about the end of the 1950s but this period in movies, save a couple of bright spots, isn't especially my bag. It's all Rat Pack and technicolor Movie Musicals and bloated war epics, blah blah blah. Most of the mainstream respectable shit reduces me to groans. (Except Paul Newman, who reduces me to... different groans.) But on the sidelines there's some fun sci-fi / horror happening, and I've been known to enjoy me a sword-and-sandal picture now and again. This year introduced both Steve Reeves as Hercules and Christopher Lee as Dracula! Neither of those make my top five though...

My 5 Favorite Movies of 1958

Vertigo

(dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

-- released on May 28th 1958 --

Invention For Destruction

(dir. Karel Zeman)

-- released on August 1958 --

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

(dir. Nathan Juran)

-- released on December 23rd 1958 --

Mon Oncle

(dir. Jacques Tati)

-- released on November 3rd 1958 --

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

(dir. Richard Brooks)

-- released on August 29th 1958 --

------------------------------------------------

Runners-up: The Fly (dir. Kurt Neumann), I Want To Live! (dir. Robert Wise), Touch of Evil (dir. Welles), Bell Book and Candle (dir. Richard Quine), The Blob (dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.), Hercules (dir. Pietro Francisci), Dracula (dir. Terence Fisher), Elevator to the Gallows (dir. Luois Malle), Terror in a Texas Town (dir.Joseph H. Lewis), The Long Hot Summer (dir. Martin Ritt), A Time To Love and A Time To Die (dir. Douglas Sirk)

Never seen: South Pacific (dir. Joshua Logan), The Hidden Fortress (dir. Kurosawa), The Left Handed Gun (dir. Arthur Penn), Indiscreet (dir. Stanley Donen), The Defiant Ones (dir. Stanley Kramer), Separate Tables (dir. Delbert Mann), Damn Yankees (dir. Abbott / Donen), The Young Lions (dir. Edward Dmytryk), Bonjour Tritesse (dir. Preminger), Lonelyhearts (dir. Donehue), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (dir. Juran), The Magician (dir. Bergman)

------------------------------------------------

What are your favorite movies of 1958?

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Elmer Gentry (1960)

Lady in red on Christmas Eve: That's the trouble
with this stinking world. Nobody loves nobody.

108 years ago today the director Richard Brooks was born.

That's a picture of him (with some actor guy). Maybe you don't recognize Brooks' name? I wouldn't hold it against you because until a couple of weeks ago I could never remember it myself, even though the man's responsible for one of my all-time favorite movies (that would be Looking For Mr. Goodbar) and several others that I might not think of as "favorites" necessarily but that I still consider near perfect -- they would be the one-two "Paul Newman does Tennessee Williams" punch of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof & Sweet Bird of Youth...

... and then his brutally gorgeous 1968 adaptation 

of Truman Capote's true-crime tale In Cold Blood.

A man who directs those four movies should have his damn name remembered -- his understanding of how violence does and should register on-screen via just Goodbar and Blood alone is top tier! But for some reason Brooks' name was like sand through fingers and I never could keep it in place. Then TCM screened those two Tennessee Williams adaptations a couple of weeks back and I had this realization, regarding my Richard Brooks blindness, I really registered it, and I did what I usually do -- I tweeted about it!

I feel like, given the evidence of these four fantastic films, I should do a dive into Richard Brooks. What else should I see? I have never seen Elmer Gentry... https://t.co/1v7q3VlnYk pic.twitter.com/SQyO92WFUg

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) May 2, 2020

If you follow that tweet over to Twitter you'll see a lot of fine folks who follow me there then schooled me on what else I oughta been watching from Mr. Brooks' career, outside of those four films, and for once in my godforsaken existence I actually did the homework. In the past couple of weeks I've checked out Brooks' 1971 bank-robbery caper titled $ (yes just a dollar sign, although I think you pronounce the title in plural, as in Dollars) starring Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn...

Thanks to those of you who recommended $ (typing that title still feels silly), the 1971 bank robbery caper with Warren Beatty & Goldie Hawn -- watched it this morning and it's a ton of fun (And BONUS Warren gets real sweaty in his white dress shirt at one point) pic.twitter.com/IGrpyTpMtQ

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) May 2, 2020

... and I liked the film quite a bit. In fact it's one that's been sitting pleasantly on my mind, making space for itself, in the two weeks since -- I can feel that "like" turning into a maybe "love." I'm not a huge fan of Heist Films (I talked about this in relation to Hustlers last year) but $'s last act really goes weirder and more idiosyncratic than I expected, and now the movie kinda won't let me go. I have a feeling I'll be revisiting it often.

To make an already long post longer the second movie I did my Richard Brooks Homework with I just watched this past Saturday afternoon, and it's the one this post began with -- the Oscar-winning (and really very timely with regards to the world right now) movie Brooks made smack-dab in between his two Paul Newman adventures: Elmer Gentry with Burt Lancaster playing the drunk turned barn-storming phony-ass Christian Evangelist. The film got nominated for several Oscars and won acting statues for both Lancaster and for Shirley Jones as the preacher's daughter that Gentry long-ago corrupted, who comes back to get her vengeance in the film's final act.

Jones is good in the movie but seeing just now that she beat Janet Leigh in Psycho for that statue really clenches my fists into tight little balls -- no, she certainly did not deserve to win over Janet Leigh. If I was going to give an acting statue to any actress in Elmer Gentry it would've gone to Jean Simmons, who gives the best performance in the whole damn movie as Sister Sharon Falconer, a cynical maybe maybe-not true believer -- Simmons truly keeps you on edge every moment she's on-screen.

Lancaster though is great as well -- I never think of myself as a Burt Lancaster fan but then I see him in something and remember what a truly surprising and risky career he really gave himself. Going to Italy in 1963 to make a glorious movie with Luchino Visconti; strutting around butt-ass naked for a film truly as weird as they come with The Swimmer in 1968...

... he really didn't rest on his football-stud shoulders and call it a day. As an aside, speaking of those shoulders, you can see some pictures of Lancaster in his 1947 prison movie Bruce Force (which was written by Richard Brooks) over on our Tumblr. But I digress -- I'm not here to talk Lancaster but rather birthday boy writer-director Brooks. I can now say I have liked-to-loved all six of his films that I've seen, and I think I should dig deeper. Maybe his 1966 Western The Professionals with Lancaster again and Lee Marvin? Bette Davis and Debbie Reynolds in The Catered Affair?

Brooks worked with Sidney Poitier a couple of times -- I've seen pieces of Blackboard Jungle but never the entire thing so maybe I should give that a go? Or what about Something of Value, Brooks' 1957 movie with Poitier that also starred Rock Hudson? Before I keep listing Richard Brooks' entire filmography let's end on that note, and hit the jump for a bunch of pictures of those two fine-looking movie-stars making for a mighty fine-looking pair...

Good Morning, World

.

Because I haven't seen it I have been putting off for ages doing a proper post about Paul Newman in the 1963 movie The Prize -- it's one of those cool-baby early 1960s comedies that sees a handsome fella grooving on a bunch of groovy ladies; it seems to me to be the sort of movie that all the guys in Mad Men would've worshiped. In 2012 I did do a little post here with a couple of pictures, ones from the scene where Newman infiltrates a hotel ballroom gathering of nudists (as one did in the 60s) and... well, now you understand why I want to see the film.

Try to be more like the large nudists trying to strip Paul Newman naked that you want to see in the world pic.twitter.com/K4PiHOJn2I

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) April 16, 2020

But I still haven't seen it! I suck! But suckage aside something has changed, something that means I had got to do a post immediately, and that something is the following new-to-me photo has been making the rounds:

What in the world! Paul Newman in tighty-whities! A photo of Paul Newman wearing tighty-whities exists in the world, has existed in the world for 57 years! Not just one photo either, but several!

What wonders there are in this world to be had! The thing about these photos is they are set photos, and you don't actually see Paul Newman wearing any tighty-whities in the movie itself... as far as I can tell -- again I refer you to the fact that I haven't actually sat and watched this film from start to finish just yet. This is what this specific scene in the film, which I did watch, actually looks like:

It's still Paul Newman being saucy while implying stripping naked! So not too shabby! But if there are more set photographs of those blessed tighty-whities out there I can only hope they will be uncovered, because obviously. For now we'll have to make due with those seen above... and I don't know about you but I, personally, can certainly "make due" with those. I can make a lot of due with those. Due has been all over the damn place. Hit the jump for a few more photos from the shooting of The Prize that I managed to scavenge up around the web...

Good Luck With That, Sam

.

Part of me feels like this role won't be big in the film at hand so there's no need to get worked up either way about it, but I think it's still worth a post -- Outlander star and stacked hunk Sam Heughan is going to be portraying no less than The Most Attractive Movie Star Of All Time Mister Paul Newman, in a movie about the relationship between the tremendously talented author Roald Dahl and the tremendously talented  actress Patricia Neal. Neal was Newman's co-star in the 1963 film classic Hud...

... and so I imagine the filming of that will come into play, hence Newman being a character. But that won't be the focus, so who knows how much we'll see of Heughan; it could be a cameo, a walk-on, a "Hey look that's Sam Heughan playing Paul Newman," the end. Anyway I never would've thought of this casting but since I happen to be biased enough to think that literally anybody's going to look like a ugly jackass trying to play Paul Newman on-screen I won't aim extra vitriol Sam's way. It's not personal! It's just impossible! He is just Paul Newman!

And Paul Newman in Hud at that. A couple of years ago I asked which era of Newman's career he was the hottest during and it was right in this time period where y'all voted. So this is Prime Newman Stuff. Nobody can hold a candle. Anyway the film was called An Unquiet Life but I guess it's not anymore; I don't recognize the actress playing Neal (although she has tons of credits) but Downton Abbey's Hugh Bonneville is playing Dahl.
.

Which is Hotter?

.

In honor of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

turning 50 today I ask the eternal question...

.

web polls

Brad Pitt Eleven Times

.

I am quite sure most of you who desire such things as this have already come across Brad Pitt's new GQ photo-shoot, which somehow manages to echo the Marlboro Man and Call Me By Your Name both at once...

.

Almost but not quite, Brad pic.twitter.com/mzYPt2PCUf

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) September 16, 2019

.

Also the ping-pong portion...

... brings to mind the famous photo

of Paul Newman and Robert Redford...

Basically all I'm saying here is Brad, if you're gonna go for it, go for it, and get nakeder. Your forebears didn't run so you can walk. Anyway it's been a busy day with NYFF screenings so you'll just have to make do with these, poor dears; hit the jump for the rest...