Love It or Leave It: "WUSA" (1970)

One of the lesser-known Paul Newman films is the 1970 drama "WUSA", released by Paramount Pictures and co-starring Newman's wife Joanne Woodward, Anthony Perkins, and Laurence Harvey.  It pops up rather frequently on Showtime or The Movie Channel, probably because they can show this picture very cheaply since there's so little to recommend it.

Newman is Reinhardt, an alcoholic drifter, who winds up in New Orleans and finds work as an announcer for the super conservative radio station of the title.  He meets Woodward (as Geraldine) when she is trying to hustle a sailor for dinner in a dingy bar, while Perkins, who plays Rainey, is wandering around the city taking pictures and interviewing locals for a mysterious welfare survey project.

The plot is very convoluted, and the actors involved do seem to give a decent effort.  Woodward seems to come off best, playing a woman searching for something that life just doesn't seem ready for her to have.  Newman's hard-drinking radio man is all cynicism and attitude, and Perkins plays his role so tightly wound that we are not at all surprised when he snaps, only that it took so long for it to happen.  In fact, he plays his role here only slightly less intense than he appeared as Norman Bates in "Psycho", with the same little nervous ticks amplified so that the presumed ending of the film is telegraphed long before it actually happens.

There is, it seems, a connection between what we would today call the very right wing radio station and Perkins' welfare survey.  Woodward wanders her way through a rather casual affair with Newman, but eventually finds his cynicism to be too much for her.  There is a huge political rally, which seems almost directly lifted from the earlier, much better political paranoia film "The Manchurian Candidate", and as if you needed a hint to recall that earlier film, it's original star Laurence Harvey pops up here for a couple of scenes as a crooked preacher.  The picture works on the premise that our good ol' American values are all corrupt: politics, religion, entertainment, etc.  It's a fine idea for a film, and probably one that could be made today though it would need a more coherent script and better direction than that provided by Stuart Rosenberg.

I give props to Rosenberg  for one truly moving scene, near the film's end, as Newman wanders through a potter's field of graves, set to the forlorn Neil Diamond song "Glory Road" (a tune we've heard earlier in the film when Woodward selects it on a barroom jukebox).  It is the most touching scene in the movie, and, in fact, seems a bit out of place from all the heavy-handed drama that has gone on before it.

Not one of the great cinema achievements for any of the participants, "WUSA" might have more meaning to today's audience than it did in 1970, if only because we've had 40 additional years since then to see just how hand-in-hand politics, religion, and entertainment all are, and how the corruption portrayed in this picture has exploded in the decades since.  Not a great movie, despite the star power and intriguing idea behind it.