Shoot Pool, Fast Eddie.

Rating: 9/10 (11 July 2009)

When Paul Newman got his teeth into a role he could really deliver. Nobody else could have handled roles like the leads in "Cool Hand Luke," "Hud," "The Verdict," or this, his first major effort, "The Hustler." Not to say that Newman's performance makes the movie because ALL of the major performances are superb, as is the direction by Robert Rossen, the script by Rossen and Sidney Caroll, and the jazzy blues score by Kenyon Hopkins. Even the set dressing couldn't be much improved. This one is a winner.
Newman is "Fast Eddie" Felson from Oakland, California, who comes to New York to play the reigning king of the game of pool, "Minnesota Fats", done to a turn by Jackie Gleason in a dramatic part. The initial contest drags on for twenty-five hours. Newman, a small-time hustler, is as talented as Gleason but he drinks recklessly and becomes over confident, fatigued, and careless. He loses everything he'd won when the game began.
Cutting a long story short, Newman ditches his sensible old partner, Myron McCormick, meets a lame alcoholic, Piper Laurie, and moves in with her. Laurie falls very convincingly in love with Newman but his attitude towards her is casual, sometimes callous. Failing at local hustling and getting his thumbs broken in the process, Newman comes under the tutelage of gambler George C. Scott. Scott had made a good deal of money off Newman's losing the bout with Gleason, which Scott attributes to a lack of character. There is an immediate antipathy between Laurie and Scott. She sees Scott as a materialist with no soul, and he sees her as structurally weak, which she is. Scott wins the contest but Newman acquires "character" in addition to talent, and in the final match up, he beats Gleason flat, then leaves town alone.
It's a tragic story. Newman may "win" in the end but Laurie loses everything in order to make that victory possible. Newman's character arc is clear. He begins as a cold-blooded hustler, using everyone to advance his standing in the game's hierarchy. He dumps his old friend and partner, McCormick, and chooses to play a game of billiards with the effete Murray Hamilton over leaving with Piper Laurie. By the end of the film he is almost destroyed and willingly gives up big-time pool, which is not a bad idea since his achievement, in beating Gleason, was stunning. What could he do for an encore?
I kept waiting for some trap door to open and have the whole enterprise collapse but it never happened. (The deck sagged only once, during the final shoot out between Newman and Gleason, when Newman spells everything out for an audience that, in its infinite maturity, must already understand.)
It's hard to believe that Piper Laurie once played third fiddle to Francis the Talking Mule or Elvis Presley the Singing King. She's not the cloyingly sweet cutie from the early 1950s. She's worn -- just enough. She doesn't play the character of the drunken slut flatly either. She brings nuance to the part. Her voice is a mellow contralto and has peculiar and unpredictable ups and down, and often she turns her face from the person she's speaking to and looks at him from the sides of her eyes. It doesn't come across as an acting trick. It seems more like the kind of habit we might find in someone we know. When she tells Newman in an firm declarative statement that she loves him, and Newman looks away embarrassed, we find that scene familiar too.
Murray Hamilton's ultra-wealthy gentleman gambler is likewise outstanding. The photography has given us some angles of Scott that lend him a Satanic cast. Hamilton gives Scott some curious regard then turns to look at a statuette of a satyr, or perhaps its Bacchus or Pan, and remarks that Scott could have modeled for the sculptor. (Scott stares at it for a few seconds then says, "It's possible.") And when Hamilton loses a bundle of money to Newman and Scott during a game of billiards, he gives new meaning to the descriptive adjective "shaken."
But there isn't space enough to give this movie the attention it deserves. It was, in its time, a breakthrough film for Newman, Scott, and Gleason, and it led inevitably to one or two pallid imitations like "The Cincinnati Kid." Fats and Fast Eddie became icons of vernacular culture, enduring enough that Eddie was resurrected by Martin Scorcese for "The Color of Money." Scott repeatedly refers to Newman as a "loser" while Piper Laurie tells Newman he's a "winner." Well, in the end, Newman is a tragic winner. The film itself is a winner.