On television he was the loudest man on the screen, the blustering bus driver Ralph Kramden. In a cinema he barely moved, and Minnesota Fats in The Hustler (1961), a performance made of hands and posture, is the best thing he left behind.
Fi1m perspective
Minnesota Fats arrives at Ames in a good suit with a flower in his lapel, chalks his cue and says almost nothing. Paul Newman's Eddie Felson talks all night; Gleason lets him. Robert Rossen and his editor Dede Allen keep cutting back to Fats as the hours go by, and the film's turn is not a shot or a line but Fats going to the sink to wash his hands and coming back with his tie straight while Eddie's collar hangs open. We had been enjoying Newman's cheek, and then we saw Gleason's face and knew what was coming twenty minutes before Eddie did. It is a performance built from hands and posture, and it is the best thing he did in a cinema.
He did not come from cinema. Gleason left school and worked the nightclubs and vaudeville houses from the mid-1930s, made a few minor film appearances in the early 1940s, and found his medium in 1950 hosting Cavalcade of Stars for DuMont. CBS took him in 1952 for The Jackie Gleason Show, and out of it came a roster of characters drawn from Brooklyn life, chief among them Ralph Kramden, the blustering bus driver. The Honeymooners (1955) gave Kramden, Art Carney's Ed Norton and Audrey Meadows's Alice thirty-nine half hours that are still the measure for the form. Gleason understood the medium better than most of the people running it: "nobody could be on television week after week as themselves and exist for any length of time," he said, so he built characters instead.
The comedy was broad and physical, timing and gesture rather than jokes, and that is exactly what carried over to Fats. A man who can get a laugh by shifting his weight can also get a chill by declining to shift it. What did not carry over was discipline about repetition. The colour Honeymooners episodes of the 1960s and 1970s went back to the well, and the film roles that revived his career, Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and its two sequels as Sheriff Buford T. Justice opposite Burt Reynolds, then Nothing in Common (1986), ran on the same fuel. We have not reviewed them and will not judge them at length here, but the Gleason of those years is the television one, playing outward to a crowd.
So the recommendation is simple. Watch The Hustler for its first forty minutes, and in them watch Gleason, who for once has nothing to prove and nobody to win over. He spent thirty years being the loudest man on the set. His finest moment is a man straightening his tie.
Biography
Jackie Gleason (1916–1987) was an American actor and comedian. He began his career in vaudeville and nightclubs before appearing on Broadway in the 1940s and transitioning to film and television.
Gleason is best known for his role as bus driver Ralph Kramden in the television series The Honeymooners (1955–1956) and for playing Minnesota Fats in the film The Hustler (1961). His other notable film roles include Sheriff Buford T. Justice in the Smokey and the Bandit series (1977–1983) and Max Basner in Nothing in Common (1986). He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for The Hustler.
