In 1969’s Winning, Paul Newman plays a race car driver.

That’s certainly not a surprise.  Newman was very much a fan of racing and owned a few race cars himself.  In Winning, he looks totally comfortable and believable behind the wheel.  There’s not a moment that you look at Paul Newman and think to yourself that he couldn’t be exactly who he’s playing, a very successful and very ambitious race car driver.  At its best, the film is a visual love letter to the sport of racing and the thrill of driving fast.  When Newman is on that track, Winning is an exciting film.

Unfortunately, Winning doesn’t spend nearly enough time on the track.  Instead, we spend way too much time examining the bad marriage of Frank (Paul Newman) and Elora Capua (Joanne Woodward).  Frank meets Eulora at a car rental place, where she’s working behind the counter.  After a whirlwind romance, they get married and Frank becomes a stepfather to Elora’s annoyingly sensitive son, Charley (Richard Thomas).  (The film doesn’t necessarily mean for Charley to be annoying but he most definitely is.)  Still, Frank remains obsessed with winning.  He remains so obsessed with winning that Elora has an affair with Lou Erding (Robert Wagner), another race car driver.  With his marriage in shambles, Frank throws himself into preparing for the Indianapolis 500.

Winning is very much a film of the late 60s.  There’s really not much of a story so the film tries to get by on frequent jump cuts, intentionally skewed camera angles, and frequent montages.  It’s one of those American films that desperately wants to be mistaken for the type of movies that were coming out of Europe at the time.  I tried to count all of the jump cuts during the first few minutes of the film and I quickly gave up.  While there’s nothing wrong with a good jump cut, the frequent cuts in Winning feel more like an affectation than anything else.  Basically, someone in production said, “The kids like jump cuts so toss them in whether they’re necessary or not.”  The film’s attempt to be arty only further serve to remind us that there’s very little actually going on.

Paul Newman had charisma to burn and, in Winning, he looks like he’s enjoying himself whenever he’s behind the wheel.  The marriage of Newman and Woodward was one of Hollywood’s great love stories but that doesn’t come across in the marriage for Frank and Elora.  A lot of that is because there’s really not much that can be said about who Elora.  She’s a blank.  Paul Newman had the screen presence and the cool confidence to get away with playing an underwritten character.  Woodward, however, can’t overcome the shallow script.  (Though Robert Wagner was nowhere near as good an actor as either Newman or Woodward, he has the right look for the role and his stiff line delivery actually works well for the character.  For whatever reason, Wagner often seemed to do his best work in Paul Newman films.)

Really, I shouldn’t be surprised that Winning turned out to be stylish but empty.  The film was directed by James Goldstone, who also directed the painfully portentous Sidney Poitier-as-Jesus film, Brother John.  Eventually, Goldstone straightened up and gave us enjoyably bad films like Rollercoaster and When Time Ran Out.  Newman is in When Time Ran Out as well.  Just as with Winning, he’s the best thing in the movie.  That’s one of the benefits of being one of the great actors.  Even when they’re appearing in a less-than-impressive film, you just can’t stop watching them.