Jerusalem Cinematheque pays tribute to actor, director, and sex symbol Paul Newman

The Jerusalem Cinematheque will celebrate the late Paul Newman, one of the greatest Hollywood stars of all time, with Paul Newman: A Tribute, a retrospective running from September 10 through October 3.

Newman is remembered for many things: first of all, his incredible good looks, especially his piercing blue eyes, as well as his talent as an actor in a wide variety of roles, from outlaws and rebels to heroes to despairing guys who once knew better days.

He was great in straight dramatic roles but always brought out the playfulness and sexiness in the characters he portrayed, and he shined in comedies.

Despite his looks, he was especially convincing when he played outsiders, making wry comments on what was going on around him. Even children today know him through his voice acting as Doc Hudson in the Pixar classic, Cars.

He was also known as an acclaimed director who made several highly regarded movies starring his wife, the Oscar-winning actress Joanne Woodward, some of which are part of the program.

One of the movies in the program that will have special resonance for Israeli audiences is Otto Preminger’s 1960 epic Exodus, in which Newman played Ari Ben Canaan, the Hagana commander who helps bring Jewish refugees to pre-state Israel.

Based on Leon Uris’s best-selling novel, the movie played a huge role in shaping the image of the new Jewish state for international audiences. Newman’s father was Jewish, and Newman himself identified with his Jewish heritage.

Unusually good review of Newman's career

The cinematheque retrospective offers an unusually good overview of that career, starting with Somebody Up There Likes Me, Robert Wise’s 1956 biopic about boxer Rocky Graziano, which gave Newman his first major movie breakthrough.

The program features many movies that are not widely available to see today.

They include Richard Brooks’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, adapted from the Tennessee Williams play, in which Newman stars opposite Elizabeth Taylor as Brick, a former football hero drinking himself into oblivion as his wealthy Southern family gathers around its dying patriarch.

In Robert Rossen’s The Hustler, he plays “Fast Eddie” Felson, the brilliant but brash pool player.

In Cool Hand Luke, directed by Stuart Rosenberg, he memorably played a prisoner whose defiance turns him into a hero to his fellow inmates and a threat to the men running the prison.

It featured the memorable line, “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate,” delivered by a brutal, corrupt warden.

Martin Ritt’s The Long, Hot Summer, which co-stars Woodward and Orson Welles, features Newman as a charismatic outsider who disrupts an entire community just by showing up.

It also has special significance because it was the first movie Newman and Woodward made together. They married in 1958 and became one of Hollywood’s most enduring acting couples, appearing together in 10 films.

Three movies directed by Newman available

Three movies Newman directed are included, all starring Woodward. His 1968 directorial debut, Rachel, Rachel, features her as a lonely, unmarried schoolteacher whose carefully circumscribed life slowly begins to change.

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, adapted from Paul Zindel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, casts Woodward as the troubled mother of two daughters, and one of her on-screen children in the film was played by Nell Potts, Newman and Woodward’s eldest daughter.

Woodward won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for this role.

The Glass Menagerie is Newman’s adaptation of the Tennessee Williams classic, which starred Woodward and John Malkovich, and received critical acclaim, with some calling it the best filmed version of the play.

The retrospective also includes one of Newman’s most entertaining films, George Roy Hill’s The Sting, in which he teamed up with Robert Redford after their megahit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, this time as Depression-era con men plotting an elaborate swindle.

Movies from Newman’s later career include Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money, in which he reprised the role of Eddie Felson, the pool hustler he had played a quarter-century earlier in The Hustler, this time opposite Tom Cruise.

Newman won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the performance.

The Coen brothers’ quirky The Hudsucker Proxy, in which he played an overbearing corporate boss, and Sam Mendes’s Road to Perdition, in which an aging Newman gave a melancholy performance opposite Tom Hanks, are also on the program.

Audiences will enjoy seeing Newman’s gorgeous eyes and chiseled features on the big screen, but his acting skills will make a far more lasting impression than his looks.