I’ve never thought much of Paul Newman as an actor, but I did like very much your favorite of his films (HOMBRE) and BUTCH CASSIDY & THE SUNDANCE KID. Well, and COOL HAND LUKE and one or another wich title I can’t recall right now.
anyway, I’m sorry for his passing away.
R.I.P. Mr. Newman.

The Beguiled is a great piece of Southern Gothic, for sure. In fact Eastwood and Newman have in common their being smart enough to be producers of their own films. Eastwood obviously directed too, but fairly early on Paul Newman was responsible exec-producing his stuff, something that’s a lot more common for actors today.

I think this signals the last of the last of the great men: actors who weren’t afraid of anyone or anything. Men who carried authority in whatever they did. Lee Marvin. Bob Mitchum. William Holden. Robert Ryan. Perhaps Stanley Baker in this country. I agree about Mr Depp, however. Beyond the grandstanding he’s proved himself several times over (Dead Man, in particular).

And Hombre IS a great, peculiar film. One where magic seems to occur in retrospect, like the brilliant and overlooked The Beguiled.

Cheers,

Martin.

Wiley: Hombre is the closest you’ll get to seeing Paul Newman do the minimal say-little-but-act-with-authority thing that Clint Eastwood was doing. I love Sergio Leone’s westerns, they often work better than the American films of the period because Hollywood had turned a historical genre into a tired formula. And if you think the films were bad, the TV shows were far worse. Leone did try to get other American actors for the Dollars films but they wanted too much money. Clint came cheap!

Hombre is great for its acting and script but the music is awful and many of the sets are as dull as other westerns of the period, although not as overlit, which makes a change. The good Hollywood ones were all trying something different: Hombre turns around the traditional theme of the outsider protecting the community; Ulzana’s Raid (very harsh and violent Robert Aldrich movie) shows just how bad the Apaches could be and also acts as a comment on the Vietnam war; The Wild Bunch is totally out there, one of the most nihilistic films ever made and probably far closer to the brutal reality of that time than the cliches we’re used to.

I’ve always felt, contrary to all the old men in my town, that the best westerns of the sixties were to found amongst the Italian spaghettis. Plenty of them, especially Leone’s, included American actors. I wonder what Newman could have done with one of them. I am always doing that, asking what if with the past, kind of useless thing to do.