Spotty

Rating: Null/10 (24 June 2012)

No need to recap the plot.
Despite the hype of the time and Newman in a tailor-made role, the movie is spotty at best. Altogther, there may be 90-minutes of usable material, but stretched to over 2-hours, the pacing drags, particularly in the middle part. Writer-director Rossen inserts too many unnecessary pauses long after we've gotten the idea. For example, Sarah's (Laurie) alcoholic stagger down a city street goes on for a minute when 10-seconds would suffice. Then there are the many dialog pauses in the Eddie-Sarah conflabs. These may imitate life, but here they simply drag out the scenes pointlessly. Maybe if Sarah had more than a single drearily predictable personality, there might be more interest to the scenes and what she says. However, as things stand, her one-note character blows a hole right through the movie's middle.
The film's strength lies in a raft of colorful supporting players, including the underrated Murray Hamilton who injects just the right amount of oily decadence into his Southern gentleman. Newman at the time was one of Hollywood's hottest properties. His rebellious role here was a near perfect fit for what would become his definitive screen image, though I agree that his Fast Eddie is not very likable and without the compensatory charm of a Hud or Cool Hand Luke.
If my little review seems weighted with negatives, it's because I think the movie's overrated, and needs some deflation. Reputations can sometimes be misleading, especially now that the initial hype has worn off. At the same time, the hype was somewhat understandable since Hollywood was promoting more adult features like this one to escape the deadening hand of 1950's conformity.
At its best, The Hustler's a good series of colorful character studies; at its least, however, it's slow and repetitive and far short of a classic.
(In passing— for a sports movie, the action here is an oddity. Most sports films mine the moment-to-moment suspense of a crucial play. But there's none of that here. That is, we get no close-ups of crucial moments when winning or losing is in the balance. Rather, the detail in the games between Fast Eddie and Fats is skipped over in cursory fashion. The narrative's only interested in the overall outcome without playing up the suspense. I suspect that's because the rules of pool are not widely known, plus the action itself is too visually chaotic for an audience to easily follow. Anyway, I found the absence unusual for a sports movie.)