“What do you do when you’re not playing pool?”
“I dream of playing pool.”
This morning I began wondering if Paul Newman’s reputation rests only partly on his ability as an actor, and the balance on the scripts that he worked with. Look at today’s selection, The Hustler (1961). In case you aren’t aware of the jargon, a hustler is someone who plays pool for a living, who may sandbag in early games in order to take the later, more profitable games. Put two or more hustlers in a game and it becomes a complex question of who is hustling whom.
But this story isn’t about a game and who is hustling whom, but about the dregs of society, about the new blood on the block and his challenge to the old champion, and the emptiness that is behind all those hours spent learning how to hit the pool balls, how to deceive your opponents, how to drink and drink and drink, and how to hate yourself.
“Fast” Eddie Felson finds the old champion, Minnesota Fats, in Ames, IA, and is taken by Fats in a series of games of pool that lasts more than a day. Leaving his mentor/partner, with whom he quarreled during the marathon with Fats, he heads for the bus station, but there he meets a woman working a puzzle. Her name is Sarah. He falls asleep after his pass at her fails, but later encounters her at the station’s bar, where she admits she’s not taking the bus, she’s just here to drink, and now she agrees to take him home, betraying a limp.
She has no one; she goes to college on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and drinks the rest of the time. Eddie moves in with her, but his demons of action and self-destruction, diagnosed by successful gambler and sometime manager Bert, hinder their relationship. Is he just there for the sex? Is her limp, supposedly from a car accident, but later revealed to be the result of polio, the reason she’s going nowhere, every man she hooks up with her leaves her? Even her own father sends her a monthly check, excusing himself from her life.
But Eddie is special, and when Bert decides to use Eddie, and his growing consciousness that his worst enemy is himself, to make money in Louisville, Sarah forces her way into the trip. But it’s a trip of doom, for Bert, concerned that she may distract Eddie in his transformation from born loser to a winner, tries to manipulate her into leaving Eddie. He is a hustler in his own way.
He succeeds, in the worst possible way: she drinks herself to death, dying in a puddle of liquor and self-hatred in a hotel room on the very night Bert makes his move. When Eddie returns and finds the police, Bert, and dead Sarah, Bert is fortunate the police are there to protect him.
Eddie is not one to give up, and he finally challenges Fats again, destroying the old fat man with empty eyes and an emptier life (for he spends all his time at the pool hall), and then facing down the grasping gambler Bert in his own den of iniquity, knowing him for what he is – a man who worships money, and therefore has a dead zone around himself.
It’s an awakening for Eddie, to the pain of losing one’s love for such minor things.
Such is the story.
And it’s executed so well. My Arts Editor commented on the ongoing ambiguity, how so much of the movie could be a hustler’s move, or it could be straight, and not knowing how to tell the difference. The black and white cinematography is used to excellent effect, and the pacing is measured, not hurried as one might expect. The dialog was unexpected and organic, and if occasionally infected with pool jargon, it merely adds spice without destroying the flavor of the story.
It’s not a happy story. Indeed, it might be considered part of the film noir genre. But it’s a story that examines the underside of the society of the time, and finds society wanting. And this is what Paul Newman did so well, the morally ambiguous character, living on the outskirts of life, and the agony he goes through as his base drives take him places no man wants to visit.
Strongly Recommended.
