Right on Cue

Rating: 7/10 (4 December 2019)

I recently bought a house where the previous owner left amongst a whole bunch of other old furniture a dilapidated pool table. It was the only item we kept and after upgrading it, it now gets used a lot. Along with it he left a battered old slim paperback book called "Minnesota Fats Plays Pool" and even as I appreciate now that the real Fats appropriated the name of Jackie Gleason's character for his own ends, I feel a connection to this movie.
I've also been listening lately to podcasts on the fall-out from the Hollywood Blacklist of the late 1940's and 50's and am aware of co-writer and director Robert Rossen's less than stellar role in that particular shark-pool. It might be too easy a read-across to contemporary Hollywood but here he posits Paul Newman's fast-cuing Eddie Felson as an ordinary guy with a particular talent in a sink or swim scenario in the seamy world of high-stakes pool. However for Eddie to survive and thrive, he has to decide the price on his soul and whether it's worth hanging onto. Rossen made his own choice when he named names to the H.U.A.C. and I couldn't help wondering whether this was his shot at personal redemption. The film was successful and was recognised by the Academy but still begs the question if it was worth it for the man behind the camera.
Putting the politics on one side, it's undeniably a good movie. Fuelled by a cool, atmospheric jazz soundtrack and fittingly shot in monochrome, Newman is the cue ball on the table trying to call the shots not realising until too late that the real shot-maker is George C Scott's heartless, money-grabbing professional gambler who ends up managing him. Piper Laurie is the eight-ball Eddie finds himself behind. A pretty but lonely lush, living off her estranged daddy's pay-checks, her and Eddie somehow connect through the alcoholic haze as two out-of-control self-haters seeking solace in one another but their stormy relationship (he actually hits her at one point) is doomed from the start and when Scott seeks to exercise a 75% share of her too, the outcome is inevitable.
At least by the movie's close Fast Eddie has revenged himself against the Fat man and purged himself of Scott's pernicious control, but in the end what sort of future has he bought himself and is he any better off at the end of the film than at the start?
Newman, in one of his favourite roles, occasionally too obviously shows us the Method, but mostly convinces as the self-possessed hustler who learns too late that winners don't always win. Laurie is very good as the shopworn Sara battling her alcoholism and self-esteem in her fight to save Eddie from Scott and indeed himself. Scott also shines as the biggest shark in the pool, the conniving high-roller who wants to control everything and everyone in his orbit. However, you can't always tell which way the balls will fall as he finally learns in the elegiac final scenes.
As a pretend pool-player I enjoyed the trick-shot set-ups and both Newman and Jackie Gleason as the inscrutable Fats seem natural and able behind their sticks, while as a film-buff I equally appreciated the gritty depiction of this unglamorous profession and its two-bit players.