Word: newman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Enter Paul Newman, a no-account artist who builds his bank balance up to seven figures by inventing a masterpiece machine. One day the machine turns on its master and beats him into an abstract blob. Husband No. 3 is Robert Mitchum. Already wealthy, he liquidates his assets and goes native down on the farm, only to meet disaster trying to milk a bull. Next comes Gene Kelly ("Our life was like a gay 1930s musical") who hoofs his way to fame, fortune and a grim finale...
What Baby really wants is to give success a satirical kiss of death. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward play the pampered, corrupted children of commercialized glamour, tinkling symbols of beauty, wealth, sex and fame. A matched pair of Hollywood divinities, they spend most of their time polishing their halos. Unconsciously, they are cynics who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. They pay a visit to a kind of hermit of integrity, a bachelor, writer and onetime friend unseen for 15 years. A bearded pixy, nicely played by Costigan, the writer likes to surround himself with pygmy...
...purposes of the play, the drink is presumably truth serum, but it is too often weak and cloudy. The trio act out charades of appearance and reality, dreams and desires. The stars, who actually loathe each other, make passes at the writer, and Woodward and Newman show a sly comic flair for kidding the erotic and the perverse. But, taken seriously, the dream sequences are too obscure for an analyst, but an editor might have helped...
Baby is better at cracking wise than being wise. When Woodward announces that she has preserved her beauty as a sacred obligation to her public, Newman reveals that she has had a dozen face-lifts and is so full of wax that she doesn't dare get close to a fireplace. Newman's funniest conceit, in every sense, is an idea to package frozen "Celebrity Seed" so that every woman in America can have a baby by her favorite actor, singer, TV panelist, "or in certain isolated instances, dress designer." That's what Baby needs -a playwright...
...final, and equally inevitable, point about him as an actor is that he is so overpoweringly good looking that he quite literally pales the white actors beside him, even including Paul Newman in Paris Blues and Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones...