The Verdict

I watched The Verdict late last night. Everyone had gone to bed in our house but I was up late. Starring Paul Newman the movie from 1982 was well received and earned five Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Best Actor for Newman, and Best Director for Sidney Lumet.

The movie was riveting. Newman plays Frank Galvin, an alcoholic lawyer who is the proverbial washout. Hired out of law school by a top firm Galvin had run into some trouble with a jury tampering charge ( a backstory we hear more about in the film), was fired from his firm, lost his wife and now is barely getting by. He has had four cases in three years and lost them all.

An old friend Mickey Morrisey played by Jack Warden sends him a case that he cannot screw up. A medical malpractice case against two well regarded Doctors and the Catholic Hospital they work at. It is widely expected that there will be a settlement and for perhaps just one meeting Galvin will receive a large pot of money.

On his way to a meeting to negotiate the anticipated settlement Galvin stops in to see his " client." Actually his client is the patients sister who is struggling to pay for her care. The patient is in a permanent care facility, in a coma, that she is not expected to come out of.

Feeling compelled to use this opportunity, perhaps his last one, to do something good he refuses to settle the case angering the appointed Judge in the case, and surprising his opposing council.

We do not just see Galvin in court. We see him at his local bar, where he is a revered figure, we see him pick up an attractive younger woman and start a relationship with her.

Shortly after his refusal to settle however things go wrong. His star witness disappears, his last minute replacement flies into town and is barely qualified and to make matters worse is black. This movie is set in Boston in 1976, a black medical expert will not sell well to any jury.

As the case proceeds it becomes apparent that Galvin has made a mistake.

I found this movie to be very good, almost unsettling to watch. I suppose that is the sign of a compelling movie when you are almost nauseous because you are so close to the character, so that his mistreatment is felt by you. Newman is immense in this movie, after seeing him in this role, it becomes even more apparent that this man was one of our great actors, and certainly underrated.

There are some things in the movie that do not add up and puzzled me. The Judge in the case is almost a caricature of everything bad in jurisprudence. Milo O' Shea gives a brilliant performance, you are ready to strangle him by the end of the movie. Still, short of being called a bagman for the big boys in chambers, we never really get a glimpse of his motivation for the choices he makes in the courtroom. It would have been helpful to understand that.

Still Lumet knows more about movies than I do and his efforts in this one work resoundingly well. A very good movie.

Hud

This movie from Netflix we received Hud. The 1963 movie describes itself as a movie about a heel. Said heel is played by Paul Newman and it might well be one of his best roles.

The movie centers on a cattle ranch in Texas in the nineteen fifties. Homer Bannon is the patriarch of the ranch living with his 34 year old son Hud and his grandson Lonnie. Lonnie's father Norman, died when the boy was young, a car accident that Hud in his carelessness was responsible for.

The movie opens with Lonnie going into town very early one morning. Sent in by his Granddad to find Hud he finds him at the home of a married woman whose husband is away. Hud played with a winning smile and devil may care attitude by Newman is a wild child. He is self centered, hard drinking and in a word my father might have used " shiftless" He wants as much happiness as he can get in the world for the least amount of work and responsibility.

Homer Bannon has a dislike of his son that he tries to contain. Everything Hud does grates on his father. Patricia Neal in an Oscar Winning role plays the family's live in maid and housekeeper. An attractive, saucy divorcee Neal is a mother figure for Lon and an object of lust for Hud.

The main plot point of the movie is the farm dealing with a bout of foot and mouth disease in it's cattle herd. If true the ranch will be devastated as all the cattle will have to be destroyed.

This movie is not so much about what happens as the characters it happens to. Newman's Hud is like someone we all have known in our life. Handsome or Beautiful, able to skate thru life on charm and and a smile, but a shell of a person inside. Melyvn Douglass won his first of two Best Supporting Actor Oscar's for his role as the patriarch Homer Bannon.

When Homer tells Hud that he is not " a principled man" it is the most cutting remark he can make. For Hud however it goes down his back, he considers all these old feelings of duty and responsibility as a sucker's game and is actually manipulating an attempt to take the ranch from his father.

Newman is brilliant and it seems surprising no Oscar went his way, his role is much more complicated than it appears, while Neal and Douglass shine.

A scene in the movie where Lon takes his Grampa into town for dinner and a movie is a sweet moment in a somewhat mean movie. As the folks in the movie theatre sing along with the bouncing dot to My Darling Clementine Lon looks over at his Grandad with Love as the old man sings with gusto. Later as they eat at the diner in town Lon is preparing the a giant cheeseburger, and when Homer chuckles and asks him if he can get his mouth around that for me personally I missed my Dad.

It is a mystery how such a good man can raise such as poor excuse for a man as Hud. It is a question many parents have asked. Sometimes being a good example is clearly not enough.

Shot in black and white in a stunningly beautiful way this movie is a joy to watch even were the plot terrible. The cinematography is perfect. The conclusion of the movie is ambivalent and can leave you feeling so as well. Hud is not redeemable and as he closes the door at the end of the movie any hope you had for some kind of epiphany are dashed. The movie works more when you think about the ending and understand why to redeem Hud would falsify what happens in the whole movie.

A great movie. Great performances.

The Sting

This 1973 movie joined Paul Newman and Robert Redford for the first time since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid. Set in the depression it is the story of a couple of con men that are trying to engineer the big sting, the one worth doing, the one that will be talked about for years to come.

Redford is at his handsome and dashing best. Newman is as perfect an actor as you can get. As a down and out con men convinced to go for one last big score he plays the part perfectly.

Underrated in the movie is Robert Shaw as Doyle Lannegan. He is the mob boss who in a fit of pique over a scam, inadvertently run by Redford's character Hooker, on one of his money runners, kills Hooker's current scam partner. As he dies he sends him to Chicago meet with Henry Shaw Gondorff his former partner. Gondorff, as stated, is played by Newman in a way that surprisingly did not win an Oscar.

The plot is twisted and it is not easy to see. At the completion of the attempted scam only then did I see the whole picture, perhaps about 30 seconds before it was revealed in the movie. It was complicated but it was not so complicated as to preclude enjoyment of the picture.

The movie won the Best Picture and it's tone, period piece, approach made it a popular movie for a wide range of the population.

Great actors. Great movie. Fantastic Movie

The Carpenter by The Avett Brothers

A week from tomorrow The Avett Brothers next album will be released. Thanks to the good folks at NPR we are able to stream the entire album and get a preview. As the Avett's have , for the last year or so, and currently continue to do so, sit at the top of our favorite current artists this album has been much anticipated in our house.

We discovered the Avett's early in the year 2011 when the Palladia network aired the DVD of their recent concert album Live Volume III. The performance was so spellbinding that it was almost impossible to not recognize that this was a rarity, a band that wrote beautiful, insightful lyrics, and yet was as much fun to see in person as any band that you will see.

In listening to the new album, which is very good, what becomes apparent quickly is that living up to Live Volume III might well be impossible. For those fans of the Avett's who had discovered them long ago, the live album was a recording of songs they already knew, just in live format. For latecomers like myself the album was just an album that was fantastic beginning to end. It was, however, a greatest hits package.

Still the new album as I am on the third listen is certainly to be on heavy rotation on our house station this fall. Some of the initial buzz said that this album is a little more rock oriented but in listening to it I do not find that to be the case. There are a couple of songs that do so, including the album highlight " Paul Newman vs the Demons which surely does not sound like anything I have ever heard from the Avett's before.

Paul Newman vs The Demons harkens back to REM, and early nineties rock. Certainly it's background Yeah chorus sounds like a song far from 2012. Truly a fantastic song.

The first single Live and Die is easily likable and certainly could fit on any previous Avett album. Another soon to be classic song entitled " Down with the Shine" shows off the lyrical ability of the brothers as well as their harmonies. It is easy to forecast the popularity of these three songs in concert.

Where the album might suffer a bit is in the uniformity of many of the remaining songs. They are all strong, all offer their own special features but they are quite similar. Songs such as The Once and Future Carpenter, Winter in Our Heart and Through My Prayers are all beautiful songs. If an album had any one of these songs it would be blessed, the effect of having all three however shows the ever so slight danger of The Avett's losing some of the fun dance folk music and not being perhaps just a little too much singalong with lighters ( or if you prefer cell phones) in hand.

The album is an embarrassment of riches most bands would welcome. Still in order to make sure each new fan hears the Avett sound I fell in love with they do need to be careful not to become too one dimensional.

Cool Hand Luke

This Paul Newman movie in 1967 is one of his most iconic. Playing a man put in jail, on a hard labor chain gang, for vandalizing parking meters Newman's Lucas Jackson is a born loser.

As he arrives at the prison it is revealed that he was a decorated war hero from the Korean War but that he was a private when discharged. Clearly Luke has a problem with authority.

Arriving at the prison Luke soon runs afoul of the de facto prison leader known as Dragline. He is played by George Kennedy who actually won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. An award very well deserved. Kennedy as the big, burly, sweaty, illiterate, leader who eventually comes to see Luke as the best of everything. Actually Dragline's being illiterate is never spelled out, one observes it by whenever any mail comes he asks someone to tell him what them words say. This is an excellent choice to let us learn his illiteracy by observation much as his fellow prisoners might.

A boxing match to settle their differences is arranged and Luke is destroyed by the much larger Dragline. He earns Dragline's respect, however, by refusing to stay dowm, in fact he keeps getting up so long that eventually Dragline walks away and will hit him no more.

A pivotal scene in the movie occurs when Luke's Mother comes to visit him. Dieing, laid out on a bed in the back of a truck, yet still smoking she talks to Luke about how he was always her favorite and wonders what will become of him.

When she dies the Prison Warden worries Luke will try to escape so puts him in the box, which is a dark, small, one person wooden shack for isolation.

Emerging from the cell Luke is changed. Escape is his only motivation and he becomes bigger than life for some of his fellow prisoners when he does so.

There are many legendary scenes in this movie. The egg scene, the Warden's diatribe about Luke upon his return from his first escape " What we've got here is failure to communicate " is perhaps more famous than the movie. As the intro to the song " Civil War" by Guns and Roses it is famous for a whole generation of people who might not have seen the movie.

Perhaps however most affecting is when Dragline returned from his escape attempt with Luke talks about how Luke was flashing that Luke smile the last time he saw him. This is as a collage of pictures of Luke smiling throughout the movie.

A prison gang movie is a rare place to find a character you like, one could argue how anyone with an honorable war record could be placed on a chain gang for a drunken night of mischief, but of course it is a movie after all.

Newman, if possible, is an underrated actor. This is one of the movie's that make that true.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

This is another of the movies that I have often heard references to but somehow have never seen this movie. The combined star power of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in itself make this movie something special.

In 1969 when this movie was made Newman was one of the greats and Redford sporting a bushy mustache and long hair was as handsome in a sixties kind of way as could be.

Based on real events, and as stated on the screen at the beginning of the movie, the events are mostly true. Paul Newman plays Butch Cassidy, described as an affable bank robber. He never has shot anybody, he does not want to and he tries not to hurt anybody. He says that he has been robbing banks for years but never has any money. He is reminded by Etta Place, the schoolteacher involved with The Sundance Kid, played by Katherine Ross that it is most likely because he likes to eat well, drink well and carouse too much. He admits that much is true.

The Sundance Kid is a wry, slow moving , crack shot ( when he is moving) who tells Butch to do the thinking as that is what he is good at.

In another life these two would be good old boys, racing cars, hanging out at the tracks. In the late eighteen hundreds they were as they said destined to be bank robbers. Sundance said he does not know how to farm and when discussing any other way to make a living Newman mentions in a very twentieth century way that the hours are terrible. In short they are lazy.

In the movie, tired of their consistent robbing the President of The Union Pacific hires a crack lawman and an Indian Scout to catch them. Faced with potential capture, or worse being shot they along with Etta flee to Bolivia.

As they begin robbing banks again we see their humorous attempts to be understood in their broken Spanish. In Bolivia the Yanquees Bandito's become well known. In the end spotted in a town they pass through they are surrounded. After both being shot but not in a fatal way they are preparing to make a getaway and head to Australia. Australia being a wonderful place for bank robbing as Butch tells him, much as he had promised Bolivia as a similar land of milk and honey, they head out the door and shot ends.

We know what happens to them.

Paul Newman has the definition of charm in this movie. Wry with a dry sense of humor his character is a great hit. Redford too shines.

This is a period piece. The sepia tones fade out as the movie begins and then freeze on our heroes as the movie ends. In between we see a time and place and a way of life fading away. This is not a great movie, I think the star power brought it more acclaim that it deserved. It is however a very good movie.