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| Images courtesy of 20th Century Fox |
Years before seeing The Man Who Fell to Earth (also reviewed by Michelle Kisner here) adapted
to the silver screen, renowned American novelist Walter Tevis whose The
Queen’s Gambit was recently adapted into a Netflix series had his first
real commercial brush with the Hollywood studio system in Robert Rossen’s 1961 black-and-white
CinemaScope epic The Hustler starring Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper
Laurie and George C. Scott.
A multiple
Academy Award nominee and winner that eventually landed on the American Film
Institute’s numerous top 100 lists, it told the tale of a young Oakland,
California based pool table hustler named Edward ‘Fast Eddie’ Felson who with
his middle-aged business partner Charlie Fenniger rises to the challenge of
taking on the legendary pool playing master Minnesota Fats. As much about pool playing as it is about
alcoholism and the arts of winning and losing, it was a major work ripe with
silver screen possibilities. With a film
produced, directed and rewritten for the screen by Robert Rossen and his
screenwriter Sidney Carroll, The Hustler picture that followed would not
only revive interest in bar pool playing but in cementing actor Paul Newman as
a major screen talent spoken of the same breath as Marlon Brando.
‘Fast Eddie’ Felson (Paul Newman) and his crony Charlie
(Myron McCormick) roam small town bars and pool rooms looking for feeble minded
betters to deceive into thinking Eddie is a drunk only to win trick shots and
take their money. Ascending the ranks in
this game quickly, ending up in Ames, Iowa, Eddie sets his sights on the heavyset
but nevertheless gentlemanly and distinguished Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason)
as a prized challenge. Initially it
proves winning for Eddie, until it doesn’t after twenty-five hours of playing
and boozing a bottle of bourbon sets him back to where he started.
Defeated, he crosses paths with alcoholic
Sarah Packard (Piper Laurie fresh off of John Frankenheimer’s teleplay of Days
of Wine and Roses) who quickly forms a relationship with him while also reinvigorating
his desire to try playing Fats again. Ditching
Charlie for good before getting his thumbs broken trying to raise the sponsorship
to challenge Fats himself, he forges a new partnership with Bert Gordon (George
C. Scott) who mentors and sponsors him provided he gets seventy-five percent of
his winnings against Fats. Things seem
to be on the up again for Eddie but behind-the-scenes interpersonal dealings
between Bert and Eddie’s girl Sarah gradually prove otherwise.
Much like Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell to Earth
which also dealt in the grip alcoholism can have on the misdirection of a man’s
life, The Hustler is quietly devastating dramatic fare which took
several tries to get to the silver screen (including Frank Sinatra) before
landing on All the King’s Men director Robert Rossen in one of his final
films. Rossen himself had experiences in
pool hustling which lent itself to the authenticity of the table
sequences. Meanwhile Bobby Darin who was
initially offered the part was narrowly recast with Paul Newman who previously
turned it down until Cleopatra going overbudget and overschedule
redirected his commitments.
Shot within
six weeks at New York City pool halls in wide-angled 2.35:1 CinemaScope by Eugen
Schüfftan whose black-and-white camerawork earned him an Academy Award for Best
Cinematography and featuring a wonderfully jazzy score by 12 Angry Men and
The Fugitive Kind composer Kenyon Hopkins, the look and feel of the
world of pool playing is tense and claustrophobic if not a pressure
cooker. With wide-angled lenses
emphasizing the prowess of Minnesota Fats or the scale of the pool table
feeling from miniscule to vast depending on the shot or even the drabness of Eddie’s
home, the film is a highly visually controlled exercise in what the director
characterized as ‘neo-neo-realistic’, going so far in one instance as to hire
real street thugs for the scene in which Eddie gets jumped.
Casting wise, the film is a murderer’s row of spectacular
screen talent starting with Paul Newman in one of the rougher portraits of
urban masculinity since On the Waterfront which also saw its protagonist
engaged in a kind of David vs. Goliath existential battle. From the intensity of his eyes gazing down
the pool cue to his own strain under boozing and the boiling heat of the game,
Newman exudes a kind of youthful innocence being corrupted by the power of
money and the thrill of beating his opponent as hard as he can not knowing at
the time the damage he is causing to those close to him. Though Newman was young and initially turned
the film down, little did the actor or the filmmaker know this would become
integral in defining his career and status as a top billing performer.
The victim of this saga winds up being Piper Laurie who
carries over the neurotic intoxicated energies wielded on the alcoholic Days
of Wine and Roses, making her drunk but well meaning and easy prey for the
cruelties of Eddie’s new manager played with quietly sadistic gusto by George
C. Scott in one of his very best pre-Dr. Strangelove roles. Look carefully for Jaws mayor Murray
Hamilton as Findley, a sleazy wealthy socialite Eddie plays billiards
against. Let it be said from the way he
dresses to the way he carries himself to his focus on playing the game versus
trying to win another buck, Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats is positively
dripping in high fashion and style. A
distinguished gentleman who mostly wins but has the capacity to accept defeat,
something Eddie is struggling to learn, Gleason’s aura all but soaks every
frame of the film and he is electric every time he appears onscreen.
Budgeted at around $2.1 million, The Hustler opened
in 1961 via 20th Century Fox on the cusp of the Cleopatra fiasco
including a special midnight screening hosted by Richard Burton. Though the studio was lukewarm about
promoting the film, after positive word of mouth they changed direction and
boosted sales, amassing somewhere around $7.6 million in sales. Critics loved it though some took umbrage with
the more seen and alluded to transgressions including boozing and gambling as
well as the 135-minute running time.
Despite these complaints, it earned eight Academy Award nominations
including Best Picture, two of which it won for Art Direction and the
aforementioned Cinematographic award. In
the years since, it has earned the status as a modern classic and debatably
plays nicely alongside the Jack Klugman and Jonathan Winters starring The
Twilight Zone episode A Game of Pool also aired in 1961 in which
Winters plays a pool master nicknamed Fats.
In 1986, Newman reprised the role of Eddie in Martin Scorsese’s
1986 adaptation of Walter Tevis’ sequel novel The Color of Money and
though purists complained it deviated from the text it nevertheless earned the
actor his only Academy Award for Best Actor, further cementing The Hustler’s
legacy as perhaps the penultimate Paul Newman character. A post-Elia Kazan type of genre picture
focused on people inhabiting difficult if not darkly lived paths with emphasis
on performance underscored by film technique, The Hustler could be seen
as a proto-New Hollywood offering close to a decade before that movement kicked
off. Considered to be one of the best
sports movies in cinema history in terms of photographing the art of pool
playing at such a high level and terrific performances across the board driving
the human drama home, The Hustler is close to being a perfect film and still
the most successful artistically and commercially Walter Tevis adaptation yet.
--Andrew Kotwicki
