The Screengrab

Notable individuals die all the time, and we react with varying degrees of sadness or indifference when their names appear in the weekly obituary sections of magazines like, say, Entertainment Weekly or Time.

But every now and then, a celebrity death truly shocks us, because we really, truly thought the individual in question had already died sometime in the late ‘80s.

Occasionally, though, we react to celebrity death with the heartfelt regret usually reserved for people we actually knew. I moped around for days after heart failure claimed Glenn “Divine” Milstead in 1988, and the 2006 loss of Robert Altman felt like the passing of a beloved, crotchety grandfather.

Paul Newman outlived them both, surviving to the ripe old age of 83. In fact, by a strange coincidence, Wikipedia just informed me that Newman and Altman were both somehow born in 1925, which simply doesn’t compute in my perceptual reckoning of things. How could Newman be older than Robert Altman, or my father, or...or Robert Redford, ferchrissakes?  Intellectually, of course, I knew he was old: his film career started way back in 1954 with The Silver Chalice, though I always (erroneously) associated him more with the Baby Boomer class of Nicholson and Beatty, thanks to ‘60s and ‘70s classics like The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Yet, even as Newman aged before our eyes into one of cinema’s grumpy old men in films like Twilight and Road to Perdition, it somehow never registered that he was actually old old. I mean, the man drove freakin’ race cars! How can he be gone while Cheney continues relentlessly on?

Alas...and yet, my Screengrab colleague Phil Nugent has already written a fine memorial tribute to this impressive humanitarian, salad dressing mogul and celebrated paragon of “the Hollywood Elite,” and so we come not to bury Paul Newman but to praise him, and the Top Ten films we’ll always remember him by.

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The death of Paul Newman cuts our movie culture's last ties to a generation of 1950s leading men. Newman himself had long since transcended his film debut, The Silver Chalice (1954), a terrible performance in a terrible movie that he, typically, loved to make fun of. A paragon of classical handsomeness and unostentatiously fit-looking, with eyes that people wrote songs about, Newman arrived on the scene at the same time as Method firebrands such as Brando, James Dean, and Montgomery Clift, though at first he looked to have more in common with such male mannequins as Rock Hudson and Robert Wagner. He wound up casting a shadow as long as any of them, and better sustaining a career than any of them, by taking his work seriously and endeavoring make it mean something. As Richard Corliss writes, ""Instead of leading his talent in weird and wayward directions, like Brando, or smashing it to pieces on a California highway at 24, like Dean, he just kept getting better, more comfortable in his movie skin, more proficient at suggesting worlds of flinty pleasure or sour disillusion with a smile or a squint." At the same time, he never seemed to be in danger of letting a little thing like being the best-known movie star and sexiest man in the world go to his head.

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When we started Summerfest '08 a few weeks ago, our goals were simple:  identify a handful of movies with the word 'summer' in the title; figure out which ones were worth popping on to your DVD player while waiting for your watermelon to fully saturate with vodka; make a couple of snotty comments about them; and carry on with the knowledge that we have helped keep you cool for a few hours.  This week's picture, though, falls rather short of that final goal.  Whether you're watching it from a hammock in your backyard or a clean, sleek love seat in the basement, 1958's The Long Hot Summer won't cool you down.  It'll make you hot:  hot like a sweaty southern summer.  Hot like a repressed debutante.  Hot like Paul Newman in an undershirt before his face became synonymous with upscale salad dressings and organic Orio knockoffs.  Reading (and with good reason) like a bizarre mash-up of Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, The Long Hot Summer lives up to its name like no movie before or sense, and if you weren't sweating before you started watching it, you will be afterwards.  Hell, you don't even have to watch it -- although we don't know why anyone would deny themselves the pleasure of watching Joanne Woodward and Lee Remick looking like wilted hothouse flowers, all you have to do is listen to the overblown hotbox noir dialogue in this picture to positively swoon from the torridness of it all.

So mop your face with a handkerchief, push your hat back on your head, order up a tall mint julep, and get ready for The Long Hot Summer.

THE ACTION:  In what is, surprisingly, not the beginning of a porn movie, a young stud named Ben Quick hitches a ride into  a town called Frenchman's Bend, in rural Mississippi.  Ben has a reputation for barn-burning, which is the sort of thing people did for kicks back then while waitig for a new farmgirl to seduce.  Most people are none too happy to see Ben come to town -- most especially Clara and Eula Varner, played by Woodward and Remick, but town patriarch Will Varner sees a youthful reflection of himself in the sweaty hothead.  He also sees a number of qualities lacking in his son Jody (Tony Franciosa), who, this being the 1950s and all, the movie is not allowed to say is  a homosexual.  Gaudy, sexually charged patter ensues.  Eventually, everyone in town erupts in an explosion of damp clothing and meaningful looks, and the barns of Frenchman's Bend will never be the same again.

THE PLAYERS:  The Long Hot Summer is directed by Martin Ritt, a longtime Hollywood pro who directed dozens of pretty decent movies without ever having developed much of a reputation for anything other than reliability.  He does have to his credit the fact that, according to Hollywood legend, during filming of this movie, he became the only person to get the notoriously implacable Orson Welles to behave by driving the great man out to the middle of the Louisiana swamp and threatening to abandon him there if he didn't shape up and start making nice.  While the movie is based on three short stories by William Faulkner ("Spotted Horses", "The Hamlet", and "Barn Burning"), it's written in high noir style by the husband-and-wife team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, a duo mostly noted for their work in westerns, and plays like Tennessee Willliams if he liked girls as much as he liked decadence.  The entire cast, including a shockingly smokin' Angela Lansbury as Welles' mistress, absolutely swelters in the crushing heat.

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