In the third episode of The Last Movie Stars, Ethan Hawke’s enthusiastically crafted docuseries about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, there is a lengthy segment devoted to Rachel, Rachel. The 1968 drama, directed by Newman and starring Woodward, tells the story of a lonely schoolteacher disenchanted with life, aching for her world to transform. In the arc of Newman’s career, the quiet indie was an oddity; he had just starred in Cool Hand Luke, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was around the corner. It was also a surprising turn for Woodward, whose career had cooled as she focused on raising their six children. But, as The Last Movie Stars points out, the film is a potent symbol of Woodward and Newman’s dynamic, not only serving as a forgotten predecessor to the kind of run-and-gun indies made by director-actor couples like John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, but also as an emblem of the beauty and difficulty of their marriage. Among the 16 films that Newman and Woodward worked on together, Rachel, Rachel is, arguably, the most essential one of all.
Woodward had wanted to make the film for years. Based on the Margaret Laurence novel A Jest of God, the script was written by screenwriter Stewart Stern, who was friendly with the couple. The story was simple, but emotionally rich, following Rachel, a 35-year-old woman living with her mother at home. She’s a shy spinster with no romantic prospects, and no hopes of her life ever changing. “I’m exactly in the middle of my life,” Rachel laments. “This is my last ascending summer. Everything else from now on is just rolling downhill into my grave.”
As The Last Movie Stars makes clear, the decade leading up this film was an era of major transformation for Newman and Woodward, who got married in Las Vegas in 1958. Woodward was originally the bigger, more acclaimed star, winning an Oscar for starring in The Three Faces of Eve just months before their wedding. For the next few years, the duo starred alongside each other in well-received films like The Long, Hot Summer and Paris Blues, burnishing their reputation as Hollywood’s golden couple. During that time, Woodward and Newman had three children in quick succession. Woodward also became the stepmother to Newman’s three children from his previous relationship with Jackie Witte, making an extraordinary effort to blend the families; The Last Movie Stars takes great pains to highlight this, including interviews with Woodward’s stepchildren, all of whom praise her dynamic parenting.
During that time, Woodward’s career slowed down—and Newman’s exploded. In just a few years, he went from playing second fiddle to James Dean and Marlon Brando to becoming one of the defining leading men of his generation; a 10-time Oscar nominee, including for performances in films like Hud and Cool Hand Luke and a best-picture nod for Rachel, Rachel; and a potent sex symbol known the world over for his icy gaze. Woodward took this in stride, poking fun at her husband when asked about his success in interviews. (“He’s got a pretty face so maybe he’ll make it,” she once quipped.) The great equalizer in their relationship was the fact that Newman, in spite of his outsized success, thought Woodward was the superior actor, according to daughter Lissy Newman.
“[Woodward] knew that her husband, who was really famous, deeply believed that she was a way better actor than she was,” Lissy says in the docuseries. “And he did a lot to prove it. He worshipped her as an artist.”
Around the time of making Cool Hand Luke, Newman had become interested in shepherding good scripts to the screen, even if there wasn’t a role for him. Enter Rachel, Rachel. He and Woodward teamed up to produce it, but found it difficult to secure industry support, though Newman had just come off one of the most iconic films of his career. Even with all that power, a sensitive drama about a woman’s midlife crisis was—and still is—a tough sell in Hollywood. So Newman and Woodward put their own money into the budget, and Newman decided to direct it himself, to “service his love of his favorite actor,” Hawke told TCM.
The resulting film is poignant and quietly devastating, a portrait of a woman struggling to find joy. Rachel goes to school, teaches her students, then comes home to care for her mother. She’s weighed down by small-town malaise, often crying alone in her room, or staring up at the ceiling as her punishing inner voice reminds her how worthless she is. There are flashes of potential for change: a flirtatious reunion with an old high school classmate, a jaunt to an experimental church. And throughout it all, there are wild fantasies and revealing flashbacks, showing how Rachel’s strict upbringing shaped her worldview.
Woodward is, simply put, astounding in it. She plays Rachel to devastating effect, keyed in to the character’s bone-deep sadness. From the moment she appears onscreen, practically murmuring Rachel’s depressing narration, the film’s simple plot develops serious gravity. But she doesn’t spend all her screen time just wandering and moping. The film has demanding scenes, including one in which Rachel has an enormous meltdown during a church service, crying and screaming among the congregants. But it’s a testament to Woodward’s talent that some of the most compelling moments in the film are the quieter ones, in which Rachel contemplates what her life has become.
Nearly six decades on, Rachel, Rachel feels surprisingly contemporary and raw, worthy of being in conversation with films like Wanda and A Woman Under the Influence. Rachel, Rachel, it should also be noted, came out before both of those films, serving as a predecessor to two works that would come to represent daring indies of the era that focused on stories about complicated women. As Hawke and Martin Scorsese, who directed Newman in The Color of Money, point out in the docuseries, Rachel, Rachel should be credited as a pivotal turning point in American independent cinema.