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The Hustler (1961)
Paul Newman could never take off his good looks (and don’t we all feel sorry for him). But the American acting icon shaped his career with roles that complicated his beauty with booze, fury, and soul-curdling ambition.
The simultaneous launch and subversion of Newman’s stardom began with The Hustler. Here, he plays “Fast Eddie” Felson, a nomadic pool shark who knows all the angles, but lacks what his eventual underwriter and handler Bert (George C. Scott) calls “character.” When Eddie squanders a 25-hour, high-stakes pool marathon against Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason), he’s left to essentially rebuild his life out of a bus terminal locker with the help of an equally volatile stranger (Piper Laurie).
Lest all that seem like the stuff of an inspirational sports drama, Robert Rossen’s classic is a shadowy character study about the athlete as a commodity, the expiration of vagrant love, and the attritional battle between man and his impulses.
By the time Newman won his lone, long-sought Oscar in 1986 for reprising Felson in The Color of Money, he’d layered a cool, world-weary wisdom onto the aged character. But in The Hustler, Eddie is on fire, learning every last thing the hard way. Cinema 21, July 22.
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