bkoganbing For a kid from the posh suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio Paul Newman has a remarkable affinity for playing blue collar men. This is a guy who knows the value of hard work and it's his greatest disappointment in life is that he hasn't passed on that value to his children, Katherine Borowitz and Robby Benson.It's Benson who Newman worries the most about. He wants to be a writer, but that just doesn't happen over night. One has to get out into the world and acquire a little life experience to learn what one wants to write about. The only one that didn't apply to was Emily Dickinson. Benson cites Hemingway as getting rejected 300 times before getting some money for his thoughts. But there certainly was a man who had himself a lot of life experience and earned a few dollars to pay his own way.I could understand Newman very well since I came from a family of uncles just like Newman on my mother's side. I could understand Benson less so since all he wants is surf and sex. He tries working at some dead end jobs, his scenes with Morgan Freeman at a cardboard box factory and trying to repossess Ossie Davis's car are his best in the film. In fact Newman's tragedy is that health issues cause him to stop working and he won't acknowledge them. But it's Newman and Benson that's the heart of Harry&Son. Father and son Keach come to a kind of understanding toward the end. The film is not the best from either Newman or Benson, but nothing to be ashamed of here.

moonspinner55 Harry was once an ace crane operator for a construction company, but failing health in his older years has weakened his eyesight and, after a near-miss on the job, he's unceremoniously canned. Harry's son, Howard, in his early 20s and still living with "Pa," has a goof-off job detailing and washing cars, which leaves him most of the day to surf at the beach or type his short stories. Unable to hold a steady job with regular hours, the kid eventually gets the boot by Harry; meanwhile, the best friend of Harry's deceased wife--who works in a bird store and talks to her parrots--has a pregnant daughter with eyes for Howard (she doesn't seem to notice or care that he's unemployed, so naturally the kid wants to marry her). Co-written, co-produced, directed and starring Paul Newman, "Harry & Son" can't help but be a disappointment. Where has Newman's artistry gone? It's as absent here as his talent handling actors. This is a one-dimensional family drama with unconvincing characters and arguments and situations. Harry pecks at his son like a jealous lover, which is rendered even more unpleasant by Robby Benson's penchant for acting without his shirt on. Benson gives a wet, mildewy performance, the kind of plastic acting that cancels out all interest in a performer. Directing himself, Newman doesn't fare much better. Joanne Woodward, Ellen Barkin, Ossie Davis and Judith Ivey should be a strong supporting ensemble but the baleful writing doesn't help them. Playing a warehouse supervisor producing cardboard boxes, Morgan Freeman (shouting over the machines) has the most ridiculous sequence--who wouldn't walk away after a nightmare like this? There's another scene involving cardboard boxes (that's two too many), wherein vindictive Newman tries making his daughter and her husband look foolish by packing dishes in a wet container. There are no conclusions to these episodes; Newman is only interested in setting up the circumstances and then bulldozing his way to the next chapter. It's a depressingly pedestrian piece of work. *1/2 from ****

JohnHowardReid Films directed by popular actors are often (though by no means always) the pits. Alas, "Harry & Son" is no exception. Paul Newman directed six movies, of which this is the fifth. Actors tend to concentrate on their own performances (number one), on the playing of other members of the cast (number two), on the script itself (a distant three), but on the camera-work and visual aspects, not at all! This approach often makes for dull and self-centered viewing -- great for their rabid fans, but dull for everyone else. "Harry & Son" consists of little more than a dreary succession of close-ups. The story is slack and uninteresting. The pace is dead slow. Technical qualities are minor. Music, photography and art direction are totally undistinguished.Admittedly, director Newman does occasionally try hard to speed things up, but he's defeated by the hammy, camera-hogging antics of the rest of the cast. The hazily developed and totally uninteresting story- line doesn't help either. Mind you, things do look promising on two ore three occasions, but Newman manages to muff these up too. Generally, the pace is slow and boring. Some say this is realistic, but I thought the characters and situations were straight out of fantasy land. For instance, at one stage, the hero, who claims to be a writer, receives a check from a magazine for an unsolicited contribution. Come off it! Who's kidding who? I've worked on dozens of magazines in my time and I can assure you that unsolicited contributions are not read by anyone. They go straight into the garbage bin, unless signed by a well-known name or presented personally to the editor. Anyway, the film just meanders on and on and on, with no conclusion in sight, until Newman presumably ran out of money.

Brian W. Fairbanks "Harry and Son" must have meant a lot to Paul Newman because he not only played Harry, but co-wrote the story and screenplay, as well as co-produced and directed the film. His wife, Joanne Woodward, also got dragged into this mess in a small supporting role.Before Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty, and Newman's buddy Robert Redford stepped behind the camera and won Oscars for directing, Newman won a lot of praise and some awards for his 1968 directorial debut, "Rachel, Rachel," for which Woodward received an Oscar nomination. The film was also nominated for best picture, but Newman was passed over by the director's branch who nominated Stanley Kubrick for "2001: A Space Odyssey" instead (although it might be more accurate to say the Academy gave the best picture nomination that "2001" deserved to the Newman-Woodward film). Whatever promise Newman showed behind the camera wasn't fulfilled, however, and Newman directed only a handful of other films, the best of which, in my opinion, was 1971's "Sometimes a Great Notion" from Ken Kesey's novel about a logging family in Oregon that featured a remarkable scene involving a drowning. "Harry and Son" suggests that, as a director, Newman was spent. His first mistake was in casting himself as a construction worker, an ornery guy who would have been more suitable for George C. Scott, but made his biggest misstep by casting Robby Benson as his son. Robby Benson!? There was a time in the '70s before the Brat Pack era of the next decade when the soft-voiced, overly pretty, and annoyingly coy Benson seemed to get all the major male roles between the ages of 16 and 25. Fortunately, until the Brat Pack era of which he was not a part, there weren't too many major roles in movies for males aged 16 to 25. Movie audiences, even the 18-25 year olds said to represent the demographic Hollywood covets most, preferred stories with adult characters played by middle-aged actors, whether it was Sean Connery (or Roger Moore) as James Bond, Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry, or any of the roles played by Newman, Steve McQueen, Jack Nicholson, Burt Reynolds, and the other box-office draws of that era.Benson was awful in just about everything he did, and always too goody-goody and sensitive to be believed. He's not convincing as Newman's son, nor does he believably portray a writer which the construction worker's son aspires to be. He sits grimacing at his typewriter, aggressively pounding the keys, and when his father asks why the stories he writes are always being rejected, he calmly says, "It's part of the ritual." That sounds like a remark that a neophyte writer would write for a character who is a writer. It's not what a writer would likely utter while watching the rejection slips piling up, suffering a crisis of confidence on one hand, and feeling defensively superior on the other.Newman isn't much better. I guess he couldn't help it if he looks too handsome and physically fit for a 58-year-old laborer, but that's because he wasn't a laborer. He was a 58-year-old movie star who kept himself in tip-top shape and resembles a male model more than a construction worker even in his snug jeans and flannel shirt. Newman would convincingly play a blue collar guy a decade later in the excellent "Nobody's Fool," but he didn't write the script for that and left the directing to Robert Benton. As for Benson, he went on to voice the beast in Disney's animated "Beauty and the Beast," and has mercifully remained behind-the-camera ever since. Sorry, Robby, but as an actor, you stank.Brian W. Fairbanks