Get a few glimpses of 1960s Paris—and New York—in A New Kind of Love, starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward playing, respectively, a ‘newspaper man’ and a career-gal fashion designer who meet not-so-cute on a plane headed toward France. Newman’s character, a boozing, womanizing charmer with an ironclad contract (did those ever really exist for writers?) is banished to Paris after he wooed, unknowingly, his boss’s wife. Woodward, unlucky in love, has focused on her career designing knockoffs and is headed with some colleagues to copy some upscale fashions in France. Everyone gets to stay in incredibly large hotel rooms and has expense accounts and plenty of downtime.
What I learned from this film: Back in 1963, in Paris, everyone smoked in restaurants and drank at lunch. Women dressed up all the time, giving meaning to the phrase ‘dolled up’. French people like saints and the can-can. This film makes a viewer wonder what they could possibly have thought of us.
Woodward, after celebrating the Feast of Saint Catherine (apparent patron saint of unwed women) with the fashion crowd, has a holy vision that suggests she get a makeover. Off to Elizabeth Arden she goes. Newman mistakes her for a prostitute when she’s done and promptly asks her out. Then he writes a few columns about her exotic life as a call girl and no one fact checks them, but the charade inevitably collapses. Although I’m more familiar with the Newman of racecars and salad dressing, here he’s like a ‘60s-era Matthew McConaughey. Woodward falls in love with this bad boy who spends his time with hookers but really wants an untouched woman. No one seems too concerned about the misled readers.
Photo credit: L. Tripoli
What I liked about this film: those glimpses of old New York and Paris, that Newman ultimately falls for the career chick with the sensible haircut, and, okay, those dresses! There is something luxurious in always having the matching coat, shoes, and hat. The movie is silly, many of the women it depicts are silly, but the fashions are sublime. And the models aren’t too skinny or toned, either.
—Lori Tripoli