The Church of the Good Hustle

Rating: Null/10 (20 May 2010)

"The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell." - Confucius
"The Hustler" begins with a cold opening. Here we're introduced to Fast Eddie (Paul Newman), a pool hustler who has just scammed a guy out of some easy money. From the onset we realise that Eddie's world is one of scheming vultures; back room predators all looking to tear the flesh off weakened animals.
Director Robert Rossen then launches into a thirty-minute segment in which Fast Eddie wages war with a talented pool player called Minnesota Fats. They lock horns and do battle, after which Eddie eventually emerges defeated. "You're a loser," loan shark Bert Gordon (George C. Scott) growls, an insult which sears Eddie to the core.
From here on, Eddie is shown living in the transitory noir spaces of bus stations, bars and seedy hotels. He views himself as a loser, beaten and subjugated, and so begins to live as such. Whatever beauty the game of pool once had, has now been lost to Eddie. Whilst once he waxed poetic about the artistry of the game, the possibilities of the table, he now sees the sport as an ugly form of ego-affirmation. Pool has become a game of one-upmanship in which the goal is to castrate and dominate, victorious warriors wielding cue sticks like phallic symbols.
As such, the rest of Rossen's film is filled with cripples, limping women and games of dominance and subservience. We watch as Eddie forges a relationship with a Polio victim (Piper Laurie), a limping woman who escapes the world by making up fantastical stories and drugging herself with alcohol. The world sees her as a loser, and so she engages in games of self-destruction.
Eddie won't be dragged down with her, though. He's a beautiful player, an artist, but he wants more. "You've got to have character," the sharks explain to him, "the killer instinct!" The real world implications of this are sinister. If a person is talented, one expects them to be a winner. But no. One must also have "character", where "character" is a euphemism for a kind of phallic dominance; prosperity at another's expense.
The film thus gets to the heart of sports and competition and its relationship with masculinity, hierarchy and capitalism. The drive to win, assert one's "manhood", and profit are, or can be, corrupting of human relationships and corrupting of whatever aesthetic or spectatorial value sports may have. Eddie learns this at the end of the film, and then gives a speech that has now become a cliché in sporting movies: its not about winning, its about playing the game right. It's about community, self-respect and the artistry of the sport. Whilst Freud once saw "civilisation" as an repressive force that thwarts base animal urges, transmuting them into psychopathologies, "The Hustler" (like modern evolutionary psychology) suggests that a larger threat may be the way civilisation thwarts civility and instead champions "character". There is a kinder, gentler side of human nature, and it seems increasingly to be a victim of repression.
But while Eddie elevates cynicism to philosophy, berating the film's cast for selling their souls, it is ultimately they who school him. Flexing their muscle they ban him from all future pool halls, a threat which Eddie has no choice but to accept. What he learns is that his wisdom provides him with no moral choice but to give up the game altogether. There are no other options.
A line can thus be traced from the "running away" heroes of 1950s-70s cinema ("Cool Hand Luke", "Rebel Without a Cause", "Hud", "They Might be Giants", "Some Came Running", "A Thousand Clowns", "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", "The Devil Probably", "The Passenger", "Five Easy Pieces", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "Goodbye Columbus" etc) all the way up to "Searching For Bobby Fischer's" young chess prodigy, Joshua Waitzkin. These are all characters who refuse to abide, conform and who question the values ascribed to post war capitalism. Symbols of cinema's disenchanted adolescence, they also all ultimately reject the games being offered.
Ultimately, what "The Hustler's" bleak ending does is steal the beauty away from mankind's phallic strutting. Much human activity revolves around games of domination, even outright sanitised sadism. Sublimated cruelty then becomes a virtue, a Darwinian-Nietzscean struggle for existence; win or lose, cripple or be crippled. The question a film like "Bobby Fischer", the spiritual successor of "The Hustler", asks, is how can one play, how can one enjoy the beauty of personal mastery, whilst not compromising the ethical compass.
Perhaps it's fitting that behind the scenes of "The Hustler" we have a similar struggle. A communist, director Robert Rossen had always been preoccupied with the themes found in "The Hustler". See, for example, 1947's "Body and Soul". In 1953 he was also called before "The House Committee on Un-American Activities" and blackmailed into "naming names". Betrayed and forced to sell his soul to the HUAC (and to film studios), Rossen spent the 1950s making largely forgettable films before hitting us with "The Hustler" the moment the Hollywood blacklist was cleared. The film was his own form of redemption.
Beyond this, "The Hustler" is interesting for another reason. In 1961, the old studio system was collapsing and production codes were weakening. "The Hustler" thus posses a rare cocktail: a frankness, a sense of "adultness", mixed with the restraints of classical film-making. It's at once as gritty as 1970s neorealism, but in possession of a subtlety and classiness which those films often lacked. Powerfully acted across the board - George C. Scott in particular is excellent - the film also boasts exquisite photography by Eugen Schufftan.
9/10 – Masterpiece. Martin Scorsese would make a sequel which mostly misses the point of Rossen's film.