Word: newman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hasty Pudding awards "The Man of the Year" annually to "that performer who has made the most outstanding contribution to the performing arts." Recent recipients have included Paul Newman, Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, and Johnny Carson...
While wrestling with his moral crisis, Newman gets to act all kinds of things: tough, rebellious, weary, angry, loving, even, for a couple of fine moments, absolutely crazy. That is when he has to disarm a psycho who is threatening a crowd with a knife. Newman turns his hat around, pulls faces and starts mumbling wildly to himself, so startling the lunatic that he docilely hands over his weapon...
...Fort Apache, The Bronx must be gratefully received, because it provides Newman with his first opportunity in years for a full-scale star turn. "Fort Apache" is the headquarters of New York City's 41st precinct, which encompasses the toughest black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods of the South Bronx. Newman plays a patrolman who is stuck in grade largely because of an excess of street-bred compassion. When the hard-nosed new precinct commander, Edward Asner, decides to shape up the 41st by launching wholesale arrests to nab suspects in the murder of two policemen, the residents run riot...
...there are some good, quick comic bits among the gang in the station house, an interesting doomed romance between Newman and a Puerto Rican nurse (Rachel Ticotin), and some all right, brutal but brief action. Beyond that, the movie takes a liberal attitude toward its milieu, falling neither into despair nor into the tough-minded rightist posturing that marks most police epics, which tend to be cut along the Dirty Harry bias...
...mainly it is Newman, now 56, who gives Fort Apache its modest distinction. From Somebody Up There Likes Me onward, there has been a main line to his best performances, a certain inarticulate striving toward decency on the part of men who may not be the smartest guys in the world, but who have discovered their better natures through the play of instincts. This film marks a return to that line...