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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