Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward acted together in ten films, but they never really hit the jackpot, quality-wise. Only their first outing, Martin Ritt‘s The Long, Hot Summer (58), holds up reasonably well by today’s standards. The next four — Leo McCarey‘s Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys! (’58), Mark Robson‘s From The Terrace (’60), Martin Ritt‘s Paris Blues (’61) and Melville Shavelson‘s A New Kind of Love — are on the dicey or strained or underwhelming side.
James Goldstone‘s Winning (’69) and Stuart Rosenberg‘s WUSA (’70) are decent but unexceptional. Rosenberg’s The Drowning Pool (’75), a Lew Harper detective film, wasn’t anywhere near as good as Jack Smight‘s Harper (’66). Harry and Son (’84) was never anyone’s idea of a knockout, and their final film together, James Ivory‘s Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (’90) is…well, it’s okay.
And yet nobody acknowledges in Ethan Hawke‘s The Last Movie Stars that the Paul-and-Joanne brand was never that stellar. Separately they were great from time to time (Newman more than Woodward) but never as a couple.
One of Hawke’s strategies is to choose clips that reflect Paul and Joanne’s real-life issues. Example: Prior to shooting The Verdict director Sidney Lumet challenged Newman to use his own drinking problem to give dimension to the character of Frank Galvin, a lushy, ambulance-chasing Boston attorney. It would follow that Hawke might also use a clip from Mark Robson‘s The Prize (’63), in which Newman plays an alcoholic novelist who’s been awarded a Novel Prize in Literature. But he doesn’t.