Monthly Archives: May 2025

Robert Rossen (1961)

With the best sports movies, an audience’s interest in or knowledge of the sport in question matters little if they’re compelled by what it means to people on the screen, and who those people are.  For this viewer, Bennett Miller’s Moneyball (2011) is a prime example.  As I watched, I was absorbed by the purpose and personality of coach Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and therefore in how his team performed – never mind that, citing the film now, I needed to check if it was a baseball or an American football story.  That kind of transcendence doesn’t quite happen in Robert Rossen’s celebrated drama The Hustler.  Although it’s a good film in lots of ways, it spends too much screen time away from the sporting arena.  Paul Newman gives a fine performance as the title character, pool player ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson, but Rossen is overly focused on the game of pool as a metaphor for the game of life, its winners and losers.

There are four key pool-table episodes and each one is strong per se.  The opener introduces Eddie and his partner, Charlie (Myron McCormick), who turn up at a pool hall in a small Midwestern town.  They pretend to be salesmen en route to a sales convention and fool onlookers into believing Eddie’s a drunken blowhard and betting he’ll flunk a trick shot:  cut to Eddie and Charlie back on the road, counting their winnings.  The next stop is Ames, Iowa for a far bigger and longer assignment.  Eddie challenges legendary pool champion Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason) to a contest, $200 per game; as Eddie gradually gets the upper hand, he suggests raising the stakes to $1000 a game, which his rival agrees; at one point Eddie is thousands of dollars ahead but he won’t, despite Charlie’s protests, quit the game until Fats calls time on it.  More than twenty-four hours after the duel began, Eddie has lost everything, including his original $200 stake.  He and Charlie part company.  Determined to play Minnesota Fats again, Eddie stays in Ames, where he starts a relationship with Sarah Packard (Piper Laurie), a lonely alcoholic.  In need of funds to get a rematch with Fats, Eddie hustles a much inferior player at another local hall and wins plenty but gets his thumbs broken by his opponent’s pals in punishment; Sarah, now in love with Eddie, helps him recover.  A lot then happens in plot terms before the climactic rematch with Fats, which Eddie wins conclusively.  This is a relatively brief pool-table sequence – and a means to the end of a big speech from the protagonist.  Eddie makes clear that he has developed as a human being, through adversity – and through what happened to Sarah, thanks to his own selfish ambition.  He exits the pool hall, never to return.  (Or so it seemed at the time.  Twenty-five years later, Paul Newman’s Eddie Felson would return to the cinema screen and the pool table in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money.)

A crucial character not so far mentioned is the professional gambler Bert Gordon (George C Scott).  When he learns what’s happening in the first Eddie-Fats encounter, Gordon joins the audience.  With Fats losing and Eddie insisting they play on, the old master looks in the direction of Gordon, who fires back the advice ‘Stay with this kid, he’s a loser’.  It’s nowhere near as simple as that but Robert Rossen is dead set on accentuating the negative.  While it might be argued that Eddie’s setbacks make for more powerful drama than his successes, that’s true only up to a point.  Newman’s portrait would have been enriched by more opportunities to show the highs that Eddie gets from winning at pool.  Besides, Rossen’s emphasis on what goes wrong for Eddie becomes predictable.  In contrast to that swift cut at the end of the first episode and the abbreviated rematch, the aftermath to the Fats marathon that Eddie loses, is prolonged.  Whenever he wins, there’s a sting in the tail – his broken thumbs, his closing monologue and, especially, what happens when he and Bert Gordon make a trip to Louisville, Kentucky, with Sarah unhappily in tow.

It’s in this episode that Rossen ratchets up the melodrama.  Though sticking to his view that Eddie’s ‘a born loser’, Gordon also recognises his talent and his money-making potential:  he offers to stake Eddie in return for the lion’s share of his winnings, an offer that Eddie isn’t well placed to refuse.  In Kentucky, during Derby week, Gordon sets up a match between Eddie and wealthy socialite James Findley (Murray Hamilton), which takes place at Findley’s home, on the margins of one of his famous parties.  The match turns out to be not pool but billiards, in which Eddie has no experience, and Gordon isn’t prepared to stake him.  Sarah, after getting drunk, has turned on Gordon and made a spectacle of herself at the party; she’s out cold in a bedroom – or Eddie thinks she’s out cold – when, desperate for stake money, he steals from her purse.  Sarah gets up, says she’s returning to Iowa and begs Eddie to come with her rather than sell his soul to Gordon and his ‘perverted, twisted, crippled’ world.  When Eddie stays put, Gordon changes his mind about staking him against Findley.  Fast Eddie is a fast learner at billiards and trounces his host to the tune of $12000 (of which Gordon takes a 75% cut).  Back at their hotel, as Sarah is preparing to leave, Gordon somehow seduces her.  Disgusted with herself and by Gordon, she leaves his bedroom, goes to the bathroom, scrawls ‘perverted, twisted, crippled’ in lipstick on the mirror, and commits suicide.

Despite tenacious acting from the main players, the events in Louisville jolt The Hustler out of its essentially realistic frame.  Sarah, in fact, has had a symbolic weight to carry throughout – from the moment she gets up to leave the bus station café where she first meets Eddie and her walk reveals a gammy leg.  It’s not enough for her to have a drink problem – she must be visibly ‘crippled’, too:  the last word of her message on the bathroom mirror is a description of herself as well as Gordon.  Although killing herself just about makes sense – she has lost Eddie to Gordon so life is no longer worth living – it’s hard to credit the act that triggers the suicide:  why would Sarah sleep with Gordon or he with her?  The answer can only be (and then only to the second part of the question) that Bert Gordon’s vicious mission in life is to screw everybody.

Even in the pool-hall sequences, you feel Robert Rossen itching to give the story metaphysical meaning.  The black-and-white cinematography (by Eugen Schüfftan) and the art direction (by Harry Horner and Gene Callahan) are excellent yet Rossen tends to linger on images that give the unglamorous settings an elevated, poetic flavour – like the elderly Black janitor in the Ames pool hall, slowly sweeping the floor or opening the Venetian blinds to let light flood the place.  When Eddie is concentrating on the game in hand, he’s understandably laconic.  Away from the pool table, he, like nearly every other character, has too much to say.  (The Hustler’s screenplay, by Sydney Carroll and Rossen, is based on a 1959 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis, also author of the source material for Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).)   In the opening sequence, someone at the bar wants to know who Charlie is to Eddie – ‘Are you his manager?  His friend?  His stooge?’  On first entering the Ames pool hall, Eddie describes it, humorously, as ‘Like a church – Church of the Good Hustler’; Charlie solemnly replies, ‘Looks more like a morgue to me.  Those pool tables are the slabs they lay the stiffs on’.  Lamenting Sarah and excoriating Bert Gordon in his closing speech, Eddie tells the latter:

‘Course, maybe that doesn’t stick in your throat because you spit it out just like you spit out everything else.  But it sticks in mine.  I loved her, Bert.  I traded her in on a pool game.  But that wouldn’t mean anything to you.  Because who did you ever care about?  Just win, win, you said, win, that’s the important thing.  You don’t know what winning is, Bert.  You’re a loser.  Because you’re dead inside, and you can’t live unless you make everything else dead around you …’

That’s only a small part of Eddie’s peroration.

Gordon’s succinct ‘Stay with this kid, he’s a loser’ is more resonant, though – within and beyond the narrative.  It was one of Paul Newman’s particular gifts that, despite his abundant charm and exceptional looks, he had no difficulty playing ‘losers’ and underdogs – he was very naturally on their emotional wavelength.  The Eddie-Sarah relationship is too tortured to allow many opportunities for Newman to show humour but he’s funny when they go for dinner at a fancy French restaurant, he asks what Sarah would like to drink, she says sherry and Eddie repeats the word incredulously.  (It’s a shame this whole sequence is exposed as phony when Eddie breaks Sarah’s heart by telling her he’s leaving for Kentucky next morning.  There’s also, incidentally, a bad continuity error when they return to Sarah’s apartment.  She’d had her hair done for the romantic outing; a heavy rain shower on the way back has ruined the coiffure; in the space of a single shot, it’s back to how it was in the restaurant.)  Although Paul Newman occasionally doesn’t seem impulsive enough in Eddie’s angry vocal reactions, his movement and gestures express very well why he’s ‘Fast’ Eddie.  All in all, it’s one of Newman’s most impressive portraits.

Ill-fated Sarah and villainous Bert Gordon might seem diametrically opposed characters yet neither is appealing – and the playing of Piper Laurie and George C Scott remarkably uncompromising because both actors are unafraid to be dislikeable.  Laurie is an unusual presence, fragile yet oppressive.  Her performance is especially effective in the early stages of the affair with Eddie because Laurie shows Sarah as not simply a tragic figure but as a woman who sees herself as a tragic figure.  Something is lost when Sarah is hopelessly in love with Eddie and inevitably doomed.  The combination of George C Scott’s bird-of-prey profile and businesslike quality makes Gordon chilling long before Rossen has Eddie inform us why he’s chilling.  Jackie Gleason’s role is smaller but he’s memorably good.  Eagle-eyed viewers will spot an interesting assortment of cameo appearances – Vincent Gardenia (as a bartender), Charles Dierkop (just a week or two after I’d seen him in The Pawnbroker:  he’s a hood again here), William Duell (best known for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as a Louisville hustler) and Jake Raging Bull LaMotta (another bartender).   Kenyon Hopkins’ jazzy score consistently supports Robert Rossen’s storytelling.

24 May 2025