Innocence is not tolerated in a winner

Rating: 10/10 (8 August 2010)

This film is absolutely frightening. Pools or billiards seem to be civilized games. But to play them you have to go to special pool rooms and there if you want to play for money you better have your manager. Then you become a hustler and the manager is the pimp. Unprotected you will get your thumbs or your fingers, or your arms, as for that, broken. If protected you better bring in the profit that is expected. But then how can everyone be protected? There must be a loser somewhere to pay for the winners, and then the loser's manager is going to lose money and he will not like that. So they have little arrangements and the loss is shared or the loss is never too much or the loss is that of the stray amateurs of one evening. But when a real good player appears and he wants to win big, he has to have his manager and he has to pay his percentage. But if he is very good he will never understand he must lose from time to time and he will jeopardize the local winner who is the famous chap in these here pool rooms and who knows exactly what to do and who to make lose or win. The young good one who wants to win at any cost and alone will be a danger to the balance of the trade, if not the racket. So he will have to be eliminated. Morally by calling him a loser or by having his own girl friend destroyed in a way or another, it will never succeed. He will even become more aggressive in his winning. Then you have to rig some game to bring him in a corner. He has to be authorized to win much one night in order to bring him either to accepting the authority of his manager and pay his share, or be brutalized into not being able to play again. There are two more solutions but that's the end of the film. Let him go or just plain kill him? In a world that this one a dead body can always be camouflaged. Have a good film. But I find it typical of his time, very early 1960s and it sounds like a sound stage and it is quite slow in rhythm in many ways. But the story is good and the acting is promising especially for Paul Newman. Jackie Gleason on the other side is by far too static to be impressive.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID