Word: newman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...feet away outside is a gleaming white tractor-trailer labeled BOB SHARP RACING. This is the team's machine shop and car van. Sharp is a Connecticut Datsun dealer and former racing champion who prepares the cars that Newman races. He says that Newman is faster around the track than last year; his reflexes have not slowed. It took him a couple of years, but he learned how to be a winning driver. The other drivers quickly got over the fact that his eyes are blue. He has great concentration, almost a woman's delicacy, guts enough...
...Newman appears, flashing his 1,000-watter at a kid who yells "Good luck!" and heads off to the starting line. He qualified his red, white and blue No. 33 in the second row, and should be among the leaders after the first lap. But the spark plugs foul as the car starts, and two plugs are changed. By that time, it is too late to rejoin the other cars at the front of the starting grid. This competition is a sprint, only 18 laps, and he seems to have no chance...
...after eleven of the 18 laps, second after 13. He has, we learn later, broken the course record three times in succession. But he runs out of race, and although he is gaining fast, at the end he is still 2.5 sec. behind Winner Doug Bethke's Corvette. Newman jokes with Bethke on the victory stand, puts his arm around Joanne, smiles for the photographers, and then goes back to the trailer to rage. Later, very seriously, he apologizes for losing. He does not really cheer up until the awards dinner that night, when, looking as impish as Butch...
...takes Newman longer-seven years, he figures-to know whether his movies are winners or not. His acting in The Verdict is brilliant and solid and, what is more, brilliant in the right direction. He plays a boozy Irish-Catholic lawyer, who is on-screen for nearly all of the film's 125 min., accurately enough to be utterly convincing, with enough restraint so that the audience does not get a hangover, and sympathetically enough so that he reaches out, shakily, and touches heroism. Frank Galvin is a formerly bright and formerly young Boston attorney who was railroaded...
...absurdly whenever he cooks up one of his nasty stratagems. What we are left to admire is fine, dark photography of the brown, guilt-stained marble in the gut of a Boston courthouse, and of Boston slush turning blue in whiter twilight; Warden's humane old counselor; and Newman. His voice has the breathy rasp of a drinker, his walk the uncertainty of a strong man going down. We see him playing pinball in a darkened bar, his shirt clean and his tie carefully knotted; we see him tenderly embracing a drinking lady, played wanly and sadly by Charlotte...