Director/writer/actor Ethan Hawke, whose recent documentary series project The Last Movie Stars (HBO) follows the life and work of actors and married couple Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, takes us on a weekend tour through Newman’s Westerns. Hawke will introduce each screening, and post-screening audience discussions are offered for the screenings of HOMBRE and THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN.
In the 20th Century, America’s cultural imagination was shaped by the ever popular Western, a genre constructed from colonial fantasies and the myth of the heroic individualism of the American male. Hollywood Westerns often traded on tropes that further marginalized and erased Native Americans and the crimes against them for the drama and redemption of white heroes. In Paul Newman’s “new” Hollywood, Westerns offered a chance to create and perform anti-archetypal characters, and an opportunity to critique the hypocrisy — and the absurdity — of white America’s concepts of the Western Frontier. In some ways, these films are “ahead of their time,” in others, their cultural perspectives are dubious. What Newman accomplished was to push traditional boundaries of genre and representation to offer something new, all the while stretching himself as a performer and leading man.
