Credit: Far Out / Warner Bros
Everything that Paul Newman ever made tends to have that golden sheen behind it a little bit.
Even though everyone can claim to have ups and downs throughout their career, anyone who has had the opportunity to look like the single coolest person in show business across multiple generations isn’t going to be hurting for roles throughout their career or anything. But when looking at Newman’s back catalogue, even he could admit that there were moments that didn’t pan out as they should have.
But it turns out that there’s a lot more wisdom that comes with being in the Hollywood scene for so long. Newman never wanted to be the star-studded actor that everyone else wanted to be whenever he came onscreen. He was simply a guy with a job that happened to be watched by millions upon millions of people, and he never needed to flaunt himself all that much in order to get what he needed out of life.
Because that’s the way that a lot of his iconic roles panned out as well. He seemed to have the same kind of laid-back demeanour that was usually reserved for the biggest actors in the world, but that kind of attitude isn’t something that happens overnight. You only get there over time, and the Newman that everyone knows wasn’t going to be found when he was first starting to give his award-winning performances.
There were a lot of roles where he was doing a bunch of trial and error, trying to figure out what worked, and if his debut was any indication, it wasn’t like he knocked it out of the park all of the time. The Silver Chalice was never supposed to be one of the greatest cinematic portrayals of all time, having been a television movie, but even looking back on the movie years after the fact, Newman would rather have erased the entire film from history than have to go through the entire process again.
Which makes a lot of sense when you think about it. The idea of looking back on old movies can be like looking at old baby pictures a lot of the time, and way before he grew into his acting shoes later down the line, Newman felt that his debut was bad enough to be completely wiped from the 1950s and not be spoken of ever again.
Even when trying to look back on his entire filmography, Newman felt that the world would be a better place if he had never made the movie, calling it “the worst motion picture produced during the 1950s. [I was worried] that acting career had begun and ended in the same picture.” Given how his career panned out, though, it’s not like he was going to be defined by one film that he wasn’t proud of, either.
It was just a matter of putting his nose to the grindstone, and after a decade of making films, the fact that he could have made movies like Cool Hand Luke afterwards was a testament to his abilities. He didn’t want to spend his life defined by one of his performances, so the best he could hope for was to make something that would leave every other role he ever played in the dust whenever the director called ‘ACTION’.
The world was still his oyster after The Silver Chalice, but it’s not like this was ever going to be his favourite performance or anything. If anything, Newman probably had to do his fair share of learning from a movie like this to eventually know what not to do in every other role that he took on.
