Dirty Pool

Rating: 7/10 (2 August 2001)

Incredibly strained and ambitious, every scene feels either like a fight is about to erupt or a fight does erupt. The acting is hammy, and aside from Jackie Gleason's engagingly laid back Minnesota Fats, most of the performances are strident and strenuous, and don't stand the test of time.
There are too many parallels with On the Waterfront, A Face In the Crowd, and probably even Somebody up There Likes Me, for comfort, or at least my comfort, as I continually had a feeling of deja vu while watching this film, which at times feels like a pastiche of better, earlier movies.
For all this, the film has its virtues. Eugene Schuftan's photography is one. There are scenes in bus stations, on city streets, and cheap apartments that capture a certain neglected aspect of the urban sixties that wasn't to show up again on screen for many years, till Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy, by which time things had changed a good deal. Marginal lives, much less places, are seldom shown honestly in movies, with the bark off, so to speak, and no sentimentality. Here director Robert Rossen shows himself to be once more the brilliant and compassionate New Dealer he was in earlier days, and as sharp an observer of human life as ever there was.