"For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble."

I remember once trying to figure out where one could place the cut-off between the generations of "classic" film actors and "modern" film actors. First off, you have the giants: Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda and Clark Gable. Close on their heels you have the era of Gregory Peck and Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum. Then the transition starts to happen: you get Chalton Heston, Jack Lemmon, Marlon Brando, Rock Hudson, Rod Steiger, George C. Scott – the generation that would bridge the divide into the era of television, the age of Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Robert Duvall, and Robert Redford.

With all these overlapping generations of great actors, where does one place the segue between, to co-opt comics terminology, the Golden and Silver ages? (In comics, that moment would be the emergence of the Flash in 1956.)

It's tempting to place this bridge at the appearance of Heston and Brando in the early 1950s, but somehow, they feel like they still belong to the older, classic generation more than the new.

No, the real moment of transition, I think, can be placed on the rise of two men: James Dean in 1955, and following his death, the man who stepped into the void – the great Paul Newman.

Newman didn't really "hit" until 1958, with three great films: The Long Hot Summer, The Left-Handed Gun, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It's not hard to see that early on (and even as late as Hud in 1963 and Cool Hand Luke in 1967) Newman was very much the continuation of Dean. But by the time of Butch & Sundance in 1969, it's clear that Newman had broken out of that angsty mold and was embracing broader and more joyful roles. And that's the Newman that I think most of us loved best.

In any case, if you want to talk about the greatest actors of all time, you have to look at two camps: pre-Newman and post-Newman. He was both the Last of the Classics and the First of the Modern Greats.

Tough news today. We lost our Flash.