Man power; Joan Juliet Buck follows the legends of alpha men Helmut Newton and Marlon Brando and is spooked by a supernatural cop series.

June Newton's intimate video portrait of her late husband, Helmut (Helmut by June, Cinemax), documents some of the 56 years they shared, much of it spent in white bathrobes in hotel rooms between shoots. Newton on the phone to editors: "No more Hollywood bimbos!" "I'll tell you what I'm really hot on-murderers, criminals, politicians." Newton invented his own genre of erotic storytelling; much of it was seen in this magazine. He was the master of the charged situation, which most often involved a tall woman, a pair of stilettos, a car, a fur, sometimes a chauffeur or a baby. The more restful pictures were often of bejeweled women in swimming pools at night. Newton is seen setting up and rapidly shooting all kinds of assignments: a Saint Laurent ad, a long nude crawling through a wasteland, scenes of sexy danger that are sleek versions of Detective magazine-tall but helpless blonde in white dress tries to repel creepy intruder in stopped time. He claims genially to the camera that "I have no feverish imagination; it's all real, and it happens every day. Every scene is plucked from the harshness of everyday life among the rich!" Helmut and June moved from Australia to Paris in the fifties, and by 1983 were settled in the no-man's-land of the rich, Monte Carlo, where he proudly said that he could find every setting he needed within a few hundred yards of his apartment, from palace to train tracks, to quarry, to the beach club, where he napped every afternoon in his cabana. The film ends with him photographing a nude Gianni Versace on a couch at his Como house, while his sister, Donatella, applies the body makeup. Helmut by June opens with a model taking a pink rose into her mouth as Helmut shouts, "Lick! Lick!" It goes on to Helmut's confession that "shrinking-violet women really give me the creeps" and June's admission that "the only time I ever got a bit worried was when he started photographing flowers." People wondered what depths of depravity and conscious intent lurked behind Newton's images. "There was no formula," says June. "He galloped through life pleasing himself, his clients, and me." In America, we consider the highest achievement of acting to be the kind of searing self-revelation that Marlon Brando pioneered, and which probably burned him out. His massive charge of truthfulness, sensuality, and surrender changed acting forever. Three years after his death, his hoarse, lisping mumble as the Godfather is better remembered than the suffering rebels he played when he was young (see box, page 276). His younger image-a tough on a motorcycle in jeans, T-shirt, and leather jacket-still affects men's self-presentation, whereas his retreat to Tahiti, tragic family complications, and activist passions have faded from general consciousness, except when someone recalls that in 1973 he sent one Sacheen Littlefeather onto the stage in full Apache regalia to decline his second Oscar. His talent was mysterious to him and ...