Robert Rossen’s pool-hall drama is nearly as good as its reputation: Paul Newman has rarely been this alive, George C. Scott is quietly poisonous, and Eugen Schüfftan’s black-and-white halls look like real rooms. It says the word loser out loud a little too often.
Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) and his manager Charlie Burns (Myron McCormick) make their living in roadside bars. Eddie pretends to be a salesman who has had a few, bets too much on a trick shot, and takes the money. What he wants is Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason), the best straight-pool player in the country, who plays at Ames in New York, and Robert Rossen’s opening stretch is the night Eddie finds him. The Hustler is superb, and we recommend it with one caveat: it does not always trust its own pictures.
The game against Fats is the film’s great sequence. Fats arrives in a good suit with a flower in his lapel, chalks his cue and says almost nothing. Eddie talks. Eddie drinks. Eddie wins, and the more he wins the more he needs Fats to admit it. Dede Allen cuts the hours down to their turning points: a clock, a ball dropping, Fats going to the sink to wash his hands and coming back with his tie straight while Eddie’s collar is open. That was the moment that got us: we had been enjoying Newman’s cheek, then saw Gleason’s face and knew what was coming twenty minutes before Eddie did. Bert Gordon (George C. Scott) sits at the side in dark glasses and offers one word on Eddie, and it is not a kind one.
Eddie, alone and nearly broke, meets Sarah Packard (Piper Laurie) in a bus station at dawn. She walks with a limp, drinks before breakfast, and is writing something she will not show him. Laurie plays her without asking for pity. The scenes in her flat, two people who have each decided not to want anything and are failing at it, are the quietest in the film and moved us more than the pool did. Rossen and Sidney Carroll, adapting Walter Tevis’s novel, give her the hardest lines in the script, and Laurie makes most of them sound like things a person would say.
Eugen Schüfftan shoots it in black and white on a wide frame, and the halls look like halls: high windows, dust in the light, tables lit from above so the men bending over them are mostly hat and shoulders. Harry Horner’s production design keeps everything worn without making it picturesque. Ruth Morley puts Eddie in a suit that spends the marathon coming apart, jacket off, tie gone, and puts Bert in a coat he never seems to take off. Kenyon Hopkins’s score is thin jazz and stays out of the game itself; the click of the balls does that work.
Bert is the part everyone remembers and Scott plays him small. He explains to Eddie what Eddie is and what it would cost to be otherwise, and the offer is so reasonable it takes a moment to see the leash in it. Murray Hamilton arrives later as Findley, a rich man who can afford to lose, and the second half follows the money out of the halls. We will not say where it goes.
The trouble is the talking. Characters keep saying loser, winner and character out loud, as if Rossen were afraid we would miss the point, and Sarah is handed speeches that stop her scenes dead. Variety found it sordid and long; the sordidness is the point and the length mostly earned, but there are ten minutes we would give up. The ending is fast; we see why Rossen wanted it that way and still wished for one more scene.
Rossen had made Body and Soul, about a boxer, and All the King’s Men, about a politician, and this is the best of them because the arena is smallest. The stakes are a few thousand dollars and a man’s opinion of himself. Jake LaMotta, who knew something about that, is behind the bar in one scene. At 134 minutes it is a film for a late night. Do not expect to like Eddie, and watch Gleason’s hands.
