Fade to Black - Paul Newman

I remember sitting around in a Yankee bar when a friend's friend said, "I love that movie...that hockey movie...Slap Stick."

The guy's Canadian buddy laughed at him and said, "Slap Shot."

"Oh," the guy said. "Slap Shot, right."

I like that memory because I always thought Oh-Guy was a classic know-it-all butthead, and watching him prove it was great. But the way he proved it was telling: Paul Newman was a quintessential American actor and movie star, but it was Canadians that latched onto one of Newman's own favorite films: Slap Shot. A movie that was unfairly trashed in its day, but is now heralded as one of the all-time great sports movies (except by more buttheads at AFI, who left it out of their top ten sports films, but included Jerry Maguire. Like I said: buttheads).

The movie stunned audiences because it was the first time they heard an A-list actor say the word "dyke," or heard a movie star make such observations as, "Your son looks like a fag to me. You better get re-married again, or he's gonna have someone's cock in his mouth before you can say Jack Robinson."

Gutter language! Locker room talk! From Paul Newman? Yes, and all the more shocking for having been scripted by a woman. Nancy Dowd penned the script and as David Mamet said years later vis a vis foul language, “Someone once asked Nancy Dowd that same question about Slap Shot. The person complained about there being so much locker-room language in the film. Nancy said, ‘You might have noticed that much of the film takes place in a locker room.’”

It would be years before Slap Shot was accepted as a great movie with a great cast and a wonderful director. It was a third effort for Newman and director George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy and The Sting were the others), and I think Slap Shot ranks up there with both of them. Why? Because the only thing that makes a comedy great is the laughter of an audience. Today, when people see Slap Shot for the first or tenth time, they laugh till they cry.

Newman died a couple of days ago and it hit me pretty hard because his films remind me a lot of my childhood. I remember when there was this stereo joint around the corner from our house. The guy who ran the place had all kinds of old movies, stuff that Blockbuster would never carry. I would pick an actor a week and I would rent tons of these old movies for under a buck. So I watched great Newman movies like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke, Harper, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, and Hud. Unfortunately, I also watched terrible Newman films like The Macintosh Man and Torn Curtain (quite possibly Hitchcock's worst film, too). But at 99 cents, even the bad movies were worth it.

Newman was the real deal. Good actor, good man, good husband, good laugh, good drama. My picks for a Newman weekend would have to be Slap Shot for the laughs, The Verdict and Cool Hand Luke for the drama, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the glory days. Though you should also watch Harper. And Hud. And The Hustler. And, well, all of them.