The Hustler

THE HUSTLER           A                     
USA  (134 mi)  1961  ‘Scope  d:  Robert Rossen

No bar, no pinball machines, no bowling alleys, just pool... nothing else. This is Ames, mister.        —cashier (Gordon B. Clarke)    

One of the outstanding films of the 60’s, the kind of American classic they just don’t make any more, perhaps modeled after Marlon Brando as Terry Mallow, a guy with mixed emotions and a tormented soul, with dreams of becoming a championship boxer in Elia Kazan’s ON THE WATERFRONT (1954), but the seedy side of the sport gets in the way.  While the general consensus for the greatest sports movies ever made tend to thrive on schmaltz and sentimentality, where the names Hoosiers (1986) or MIRACLE (2004) spring to mind, but nothing comes close to the searing realism of this film where winning at all costs is the name of the game, no matter the price, one of the bleaker psychological expressions of an athlete’s interior struggles.  Few films depict the dark side of sports as blisteringly truthful as this one, where faded hopes and broken dreams must be crushed in order to overcome the pain of having lost everything.  It’s a gritty and bittersweet journey expressed through magnificent black-and-white cinematography shot by Eugen Schüfftan, a master class in lighting and ‘Scope framing, where winning is not redemptive and cannot replace the value of what’s lost, actually making winning a losing proposition.  Told with a downbeat tone and a jazzy score from Kenyon Hopkins, much of the film takes place in the smoky confines of a pool hall where with the technical help of 14-time world billiards champion Willie Mosconi, the action literally pops off the screen and the room comes alive, especially the opening 40-minutes of the film which are simply enthralling.  Paul Newman is “Fast Eddie” Felson in a performance that arguably represents the peak of his career, showing an intensity that can't be found anywhere else in the actor’s lifetime, working the small-time pool rooms as he makes his way across the country from Oakland to New York, where when he finally reaches the pool palace that is the renown Ames Billiard Academy in Manhattan, home of the best player in the world, the resplendent Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats, also known as the Fat Man, a term affectionately used in the presence of royalty.  To Eddie, the room is quiet as a church, a sacred mecca to men in his trade, but to his partner Charlie Burns (Myron McCormick) who’s accompanied him on his cross-country trek, “Looks more like a morgue to me. Those tables are the slabs they lay the stiffs on.”

Rossen and William Carroll co-wrote the brilliant screenplay, adapted from the Walter Tevis novel, where three of his six novels have been turned into movies, including THE HUSTLER (1962), the follow-up THE COLOR OF MONEY (1986), and the sci-fi movie The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).  Rossen was charged by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a former member of the Communist Party and after refusing to testify he was initially blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, but when he was called back he named 57 people as current or former Communists in order to revive his career.  Had he not cooperated, one seriously doubts whether this film would ever have been made. Certainly the pervasive tone of cynicism and bitterness running throughout the film may have originated with his disillusionment from those McCarthy hearings.  Rossen’s films reflect his sympathies for the working man, where ambition and a drive for success are common themes, where the hero is undone by flaws in his character and an often exploitive work environment, occasionally basing his screenplays on real subjects.  While Minnesota Fats is a fictional character from the book, real life professional pool player Rudolf Wanderone Jr., known as “New York Fats,” always claimed the character was based on himself, turning his momentary fame into book deals and television appearances, including a series of highly publicized matches with Willie Mosconi, who plays the character Willie in the film, also seen is professional boxer Jake LaMotta, the subject of Martin Scorsese’s RAGING BULL (1980), playing a bartender, while an uncredited Blue Washington, a black actor from the early Hollywood Silent era, plays the limping pool attendant at Ames.  Of noted significance, both Newman, who trained intently for the performance, and Gleason, already an accomplished player, perform their own pool shots, while several Mosconi-aided specialty shots were added for effect.  But the dingy atmosphere, the grime and stench of the poolroom, with 24 hour marathon games going all day and night, are perfectly captured by Rossen, especially the raw emotion of the moment where players are in their element.  Newman portrays Felson as a complicated character who thrives on the adrenaline rush, riding the tide where he runs the table with ease, cocky and confident, seemingly unbeatable, but then something happens, or a remark gets under his skin and starts to gnaw at him, literally eating him alive where he dies a little bit with each lost game.  He’s a compulsive gambler who doesn’t know when to quit, riding huge winning streaks to giant cash holdings, but then is just as apt to lose it all in a downward tailspin.  While the poolroom is the apparent setting, the film is more about the internal trappings of obsession, what you have to sacrifice in your life to win, and what defines a man who is searching just as hard to discover his own long lost character as he is for victories.  This moral interior struggle, which is the same for anyone, is the real heart and soul of the film.  Newman's iconic performance paved the way for the rebel anti-heroes of the 60’s and even the 70’s, flawed and tormented characters that would lead to the likes of Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Jack Nicholson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970), Al Pacino’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Robert De Niro’s Taxi Driver (1976).    

With victory so close he could taste it, Eddie revels in the illusory moment of invincibility, all liquored up and preening like a peacock instead of staying in the moment, where Eddie’s descent into defeat is monumental, losing it all, literally collapsing from exhaustion when he realizes it’s over.  In this dazed stupor of letting it all get away, he spends the night in a bus station where he meets another ship drifting in the night at a coffee shop, Piper Laurie as Sarah Packard, another bleary-eyed, disillusioned soul who spends too much of her time drinking, mostly to avoid facing the truth about her own pathetic existence.  Both from the school of hard knocks who have to learn the hard way, the two play house for a bit, while he recovers what’s left of his wounded pride, but eventually he feels the itch to get back into the game, letting his pent-up pride and vanity get the better of him by wiping a guy off the table and letting him know it, which only gets his thumbs broke in a decrepit warehouse district that doesn’t take kindly to pool hustlers.  Sarah nurses him back to health and falls in love with him in the process, where there’s a beautiful scene of the two of them having a picnic overlooking a river where Eddie explains the feeling he gets when everything is going right and he knows he can’t lose, where he can make shots nobody’s ever made before, which is a zone athletes can all relate to, as they’ve been there before, where everything just falls into place, as if by fate.  The beauty of this moment is the audience has already seen this with their own eyes in the earlier poolhall sequences, bookended later in the film with this dazzling poolhall montage The Hustler Final Pool Game HD - YouTube (1:28).  Despite her declarations of love, this barely registers with Eddie, as all he wants to do is get back into the game, swallowing his pride and turning instead to one of the most vile and ferocious portraits of power and blind ambition, George C. Scott as high stakes gambler and manager Bert Gordon, one of the more thoroughly despicable characters he’s ever played, not that far removed from Lee J. Cobb’s ruthlessly corrupt union boss in ON THE WATERFRONT.  Gordon is all about the money, where he’ll step over anybody who stands in his way, showcasing Eddie like he would a prize-winning racehorse.  Scott was so upset he didn’t win an Oscar for this performance that he denounced the Academy and refused to accept his Best Actor award in PATTON (1970).  But it’s Rossen who finds the cinema magic, beautifully blending all the swirling tragic and heartbreaking elements, perfectly edited by a young Dede Allen, ending not with resounding victory or glory, as everyone dreams of, but with intense grief and a quiet, bewildering dismay.  Is this what winning looks like?  Described by Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]) as “one of those films where scenes have such psychic weight that they grow in our memories,” this is one of the great character studies where the secondary performers are as memorable as the leads, offering depths of emotion rarely seen anywhere, among the most unforgettable performances ever captured in American film.  

The Man Who Fell to Earth

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH              A                    

Great Britain  (139 mi)  1976  ‘Scope  d:  Nicolas Roeg

Adapted from a sci-fi novel by Walter Tevis, who just a few years earlier enjoyed success with his 1959 book The Hustler, which featured the iconic movie performances of Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason, which at its core embraces ultra realism, identifying with the alienation of a character who feels continually out of place, as if his life has been one wrong turn after another, while this 1964 novel exhibits a similar theme of perpetual alienation yet with a substantially different style, one that may refer to but does not accentuate the imaginings of space ships or life in outer space or other typical science fiction devices, choosing instead to examine the world as it existed at the time the story was written, but visualized more clearly through the eyes of a space visitor.  This is one of Nicolas Roeg’s most ambitious and more notable films as it perhaps best represents his working style and imagination, free from commercial interference, as there were fewer economic restrictions and more artistic freedom exhibited in films during the 70’s than exist today, especially sexual freedom, most likely due to the influx of foreign films of the late 60’s that featured nudity on American movie screens.  Perhaps most unusual is the highly complex sound design, a distinguished feature of WALKABOUT (1971), which becomes beautifully connected to the alien’s inner thoughts, where the carefully chosen music or use of film clips are brilliantly interwoven into the themes of the film.  The film is not overtly political, yet raises pertinent questions about the trappings of capitalism, which allows one nation to hoard the world’s resources while indulging in unabated and excessive consumption.  The depiction of government is excessively bleak, as it is portrayed as a secret underground operation, an unseen force that does its dirty work outside the parameters of public viewing, obsessed with protecting itself, even at the expense of public interest, as it can’t take the chance that things might turn out differently than what has been planned for and anticipated.  There’s an interesting parallel to the mafia, suggesting they are not like the mafia, as they are depicted as ordinary human beings who strive to raise their children like everyone else, supposedly a universal ideal, yet they carry out their enforcement business in much the same way, as they don’t allow for competing or alternative views, and take whatever action is necessary to guarantee their way prevails.

 The androgynous David Bowie plays the space visitor Thomas Newton who mysteriously lands on earth during the opening credits, carrying with him a collection of gold rings which he uses for start up money before contacting Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry), a patent lawyer, offering him highly advanced scientific ideas that don’t exist on earth yet, such as self developing film, eventually building a corporate empire together that makes him one of the richest men on earth.  His initial contact with the human race is a befuddling experience, as he haggles with a woman who could easily be one of the oldest humans on earth, where throughout the film his impressions of the world around him and the people in it keep changing, initially brimming with optimism and hope, beaming with youthful idealizations, eventually becoming more cynical and cryptic, as the world is not what it seems.  From a distance, earth is viewed as the water planet, as Newton’s own planet has nearly depleted its water supply, so Newton has left his wife and two children in search of bringing water back to his planet.   This isn’t known initially and is seen in an extremely eloquent dreamlike sequence to the haunting music from The Fantastiks, “Try to Remember.”  The incomparable Candy Clark, Toad’s (Charles Martin Smith’s) girlfriend in AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973), who at the time was the director’s girlfriend, plays earthling Mary Lou (also Newton’s wife in his recurring planet reveries), the first to befriend Newton, using a motherly approach as he seems weak and fragile after his ordeal, keeping an eye on him, nursing him back to health, offering herself, her rambling conversation and her love of gin as his evening’s amusement, but he’s more obsessed with drinking water.  When she realizes he has corporate idealizations, she’s literally swept off her feet, as she’s a small town girl from New Mexico who’s seen the good side of life pass her by, so she latches onto him, continually keeping him company, even as she discovers he already has a family living elsewhere.  His continual longing for this faraway family adds a streak of pathos and sadness, where drinking alcohol seems to accentuate these visions of home, but Mary Lou is always seen at his side, building a home on the side of a lake which has a sense of peace and tranquility.

Newton also hires none other than Rip Torn as scientist Nathan Bryce, initially seen as the exact opposite kind of man as Newton, a wild, animalistic and lustful man with a taste for young teenage students when he was a professor at college.  When he hires Bryce to secretly begin work building a space ship, Bryce grows suspicious and wonders what lurks behind the mask of his strange new employer.  Bryce’s suspicions alert Newton to the kinds of human scrutiny he will eventually be subjected to, yet the full force of it is beyond even his highly evolved imagination.  The actual moment that Newton plans to exit the planet in his newly built space ship is seen in newsreel television style, filled with all the pandemonium an event like that would attract, with the entire world watching, where his identity has been kept as secret as possible, but begins to unravel at the moment of truth when after being betrayed by his own friends the government prevents him from taking off, literally kidnapping him, whisking him away in secret seclusion and plying him with plenty of alcohol to wile his troubles away, where at this point time seems to stop.  Everyone else ages and seems to forget Newton and his brazen ambitions, which have all been forgotten as if it was some kind of hoax perpetuated on the public, like some kind of stunt.  Newton however looks the same, never aging, but becomes consumed in alcoholism and despair, keeping his millions, yet having nowhere on earth, or outer space, where he can go, literally imprisoned for what appears to be decades.  In a nod to Kubrick’s deplorable corrective, criminal deprogramming therapy from A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971), or the malicious totalitarian control exhibited in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST (1975) where individualism or free will is literally lobotomized in the interest of the State, scientists, in the name of advancing the public good, stick him and prod him like some kind of guinea pig, supposedly trying to get at the origin or source of just who and what he is, while actually performing some of the more dastardly and dehumanizing tests imaginable, showing little regard for the patient’s well being, continually probing him, all in the name of science.  In the book, they accidentally cause him to go blind, though the movie version is not quite as bleak, as instead it is his spirit and his will to live that is broken, where he is eventually released silently without a word, no longer of interest to the State, the public welfare, or even himself, just another broken heap tossed aside and left on the side of the road where he will no longer constitute a threat to society, a humbled man forever exiled from his world.