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Saturday, March 28, 2009

Winning (1969) [M] ***/****


A film review by Roger Ebert on May 20, 1969.

Well of course he wins the race and gets the girl. You know that to begin with when you go to a movie named Winning that stars Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and is about the Indy 500. The only questions are how does he win the race, how does he get the girl and what difficulties does he have? The rest is familiar territory.

To be sure, there has been a brave attempt to make Winning something superior to, say, Elvis Presley's Speedway. The production values are lush. The photography is the most expensive money can buy. The love affair is more complicated than boy-meets-girl: In this one, Woodward is divorced, there's a 15-year-old son (played by Richard Thomas) whom Newman adopts, there's adultery, there's crisis, there's some sensitive dialog. At times you almost believe Winning begins where Rachel, Rachel left off, with Miss Woodward catching that bus west out of New England and meeting who else but Paul Newman?

All of this, I've said, falls into the category of a brave attempt. It fails. You know, you just absolutely know, how drearily predictable the basic Winning plot is. It was possibly the very first plot Hollywood ever developed into a genre. Winning has been made a thousand time before.

The sophomore halfback wins the Rose Bowl. Dizzy Dean makes a comeback. The stubborn little singer cracks the Palace. The airmail goes through. The comedian, the race driver, the All-American basketball player, the drummer, hundreds of others: They all overcome adversity to win the Big Game, Race, Booking, etc., all the while fueled by reaction shots of the Girl sitting in the stands, audience, backstage, etc., smiling proudly because he has Won the Race and soon, we suspect, will Get the Girl.

You can even predict the psychological twists in this basic plot; by now they're clichés, too, in the 1950s, Hollywood loved to make this plot the story of somebody, and we got the Benny Goodman Story, the Gene Krupa Story, the Glenn Miller Story, the Eddy Duchin Story, Jim Thorpe - All American, and so on.

These days Hollywood is a little cannier and realizes you can make the same movie about a prototype and save on royalties. So Winning isn't the Bobby Unser (who actually won the 1968 Indy 500) Story, or the Al Unser Story or the Mario Andretti Story. Essentially, it's the Paul Newman Story. Newman by now has transcended the stature of the roles he plays. He seems to exist beyond his characters. We actually wonder if Paul Newman, himself, as Paul Newman, will win the race and get the girl.

All of this isn't to say that Winning shouldn't have been made, only that talent like Newman's and Miss Woodward's shouldn't have been wasted on it. Winning would have done very nicely with Robert Wagner promoted to the lead role, Suzanne Pleshette in the Woodward role, and maybe Frankie Avalon as the spoiler. The star names of Newman and Woodward artificially enlarge the audience for a movie of this sort; people come specifically to see them. For these people, a better movie should have been made; for the rest, a worse movie would have done. [Ebert’s rating: **½ out of 4 stars]

Blogger’s comment: I absolutely agree with Roger Ebert that casting Newman and Woodward was a waste of talent. But besides that, when Winning was filmed in 1968, Paul Newman (b.1925 - d.2008) was 43 and Joanne Woodward (b.1930) was 38, but her face seems five years older. She actually looks like today’s fifty-year-olds. Auto racing drivers who face death every day and only really feel alive when they’re racing and winning do not pick forty-year-old women with teenage sons to marry. They pick sexy, twenty-something race queens or race groupies. Watch James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) in Rush (2013) to see what I’m talking about. For that reason alone, if for no other reason, from today’s perspective Winning is just not believable.

Labels: action, auto-racing, drama, Sixties, sport



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