The Stigma of the Brook (1956), by Robert Wise
Based on the autobiography of boxer Rocky Graziano, The Stigma of the Stream was the next film for James Dean after his consecration as the star of his time, after Rebel Without a Cause (1955). His death in a car accident left that future cut short and opened the doors for the entry of Paul Newman as heir to that trail of rebellious and talented young people that Marlon Brando had inaugurated. In addition, Graziano's story would end up modeling that early Newman archetype, with defiant beauty and violence always on the brink of explosion.
Set in New York City, during the years of his harsh upbringing and passage through successive juvenile reform schools, The Stigma of the Creek -also known as Marked by Hate- closely follows Graziano's rise in the world of boxing as something more than a refuge from the marginality: his powerful punch and his elusive presence in the ring are the perfect expressions of that explosive personality. Newman, together with a young Steve McQueen and the rising Sal Mineo, embodies that post-war youth struggling to find a place in the world.
Long Feverish Night (1958), by Martin Ritt
It was always said that William Faulkner's literature was impossible to take to the movies, not to the extent of its thickness. Despite this tacit prohibition, in the era before the Hays Code, a languid version of Sanctuary was filmed, in the 40s a pioneering racial look from Intruder in the Dust -financed by the director himself Clarence Brown outside of MGM-, and the rest of Faulkner's appearances in the film credits were scripts motivated by the need for income.
However, Martin Ritt decided to take several of his stories, especially "Spotted Horses" and "Barn Burning", and model on that letter that catchy and inbred South that was the heart of southern gothic. Long and Feverish Night -also known as The Long and Hot Summer- was also the first film that brought Newman and Joanne Woodward together on screen, after several years of sharing the passion and theater tables, and established one of the most important collaborations fruitful for the couple. Woodward conveyed like no one else the intoxicating splendor of the South, subject to family mandates and historic defeats, painful in its festive and decadent agony. And Newman was etched in the public's memory in that sweaty T-shirt and sloping hat, exuding the rebellious beauty of him as the perfect bastion of that lost paradise.
A Cat on a Hot Roof (1959), by Richard Brooks
The year 1958 was one of the most prolific for Paul Newman. Along with Long Feverish Night, The Daredevil –the original version of Billy The Kid filmed by Arthur Penn, taking the cowboy into the realm of psychoanalysis-, and a late Leo McCarey comedy with Woodward and Joan Collins –which was locally baptized as The Unconquerable weaker S-, Newman gave life to one of the most complex male characters in the work of Tennessee Williams: the Brick from A Cat on a Hot Roof. Silencing the obvious suggestions of homoS- that Williams slipped into the play, Brooks turns the young and troubled husband of an ardent Elizabeth Taylor into the best exponent of the masculinity crisis of those years.
In addition to the history of the patriarch and the inheritance, of the southern airs that defined that theatrical gothic, what the ambiguous interpretation of Newman achieves, with his leg in a cast as symbolic evidence of his silenced impotence, is to give body to that very uncomfortable world. for that era of prosperous reasoning. Greed and hypocrisy are the two keys that remain from Williams' work, even in those times of resistant censorship.
The Bold (1961), by Robert Rossen
Starting in the 1960s, Paul Newman headed towards a slow emancipation from his rebellious and youthful characters, associated with provocative beauty. This was what he had inherited as Brando's unforeseen successor, as a student of Elia Kazan, and as an exponent of a radical transformation of the star system. But in the 1960s his anti-heroes were born, losers who added to that iconoclastic rebellion a strange mischief, a kind of furtive resistance to the punishments of the system. The audacious was the first of those notable performances, that of a virtuous and conceited pool player who decides to unseat the legendary Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason) and challenge his capitalist (George C. Scott), only to end up giving in to exhaustion and bad luck. plays of his own ego. Eddie Felson, fearless on the pool table and on the tough paths of life, is a key character for Newman, earning him his second Oscar nomination and conspicuous use of his irresistible smile. Rossen achieves a perfect setting for the time, a thermometer of visual ideas that would shake classicism from its very foundations.
