The first Paul Newman movie I ever saw was--please forgive me--1974’s The Towering Inferno. I was 11-years-old and saw it in a big movie theater in Southern Florida with my parents when we were down in Miami making our annual holiday pilgrimage to visit my grandparents. An excitable, eager lad, I thought that Newman, who portrayed incendiary skyscraper architect Doug Roberts, was pretty good. But I have to admit that it was the movie’s highly-stoked flame-and-rescue sequences that really held my attention.

A year or so later, my father bought me to a New York theater to catch a revival of 1969’s Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. And it was then that I really felt the fire that Newman was capable of.

Butch Cassidy, which was produced 15 years into Newman’s movie career, featured the star in what was essentially regarded as an “elder” role. Oh, he could wield a gun (even though he famously announced at one point to his partner that “Kid, I never shot anyone before.”), ride a horse confidently and drop one-liners like the best of them, but he wasn’t the hotshot in Butch Cassidy. No, it was The Sundance Kid, as essayed by rising star Robert Redford, that was the “sexy” role. I just knew that this Newman character was quite a man in the eyes of my mother, who made of a point of asking me after seeing the movie if I noticed just how liquidy blue his eyes were!

It was after the one-two punch of The Towering Inferno and Butch Cassidy and the rise of VCR (not to mention my gradual sneaking into the den after I was supposed to have gone to sleep to watch the late show) that I zeroed in on Newman’s impressive 60-plus film resume, which includes such greats as Hud (1963), Exodus (1960), The Long Hot Summer (1958), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), The Hustler (1961) and, later on, The Sting (1973), Absence of Malice (1981) and, an admitted guilty pleasure, The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) by the Coen Brothers.

Many years, videocassettes, revivals, late-show broadcasts and DVDs later, I can say that, yes, he was quite a magnetic and talented presence. And yeah, mom, those eyes are unbelievably blue. And hey, mom, I hope you remember how blue they looked against those raging, deadly flames in The Towering Inferno!

I know I do.