The Hustler (1961)

“Fast” Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) is a pool shark set on proving himself by beating one of the the best pool player in the world, Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason); he challenges Fats and loses not because of lack of talent but lack of character, so explains Bert Gordon (George C. Scott), who becomes his manager. That’s the plot to a lot of films, once you file the names off, and it’s the skeleton to basically every film ever made around anything that could be called a sport: guy wants to win, loses, learns about himself, wins. What separates The Hustler from other films are a couple of points. First, the atmosphere. This film is possibly the grimiest mainstream film I’ve ever seen, taking place in smoke-filled pool halls where you can count on finding an assortment of shady characters playing booze-fuelled all-night games while jazz plays in the background. Sarah (Piper Laurie), Eddie’s love interest and his first step on his road to turning himself around, describes a world filled with people who are “perverted, twisted, and crippled”, and she’s not wrong. The stakes the pool players put up look like money, but really they’re putting their character, their sense of being, their souls on the line in the games. “Shark” is a fairly apt for a pool hustler, then – the seedy underground world of pool halls are filled with predators whose goal seems to be to keep swimming on, lest they get eaten. This leads into the second point, that in such a gritty and dingy setting, Eddie’s low point in the story is a real rock bottom, making his climactic and victorious game against Fats something close to transcendent; it’s not that his fall allows him the self-realisation to win the pool game and by extension be a better person but that his fall allows him the self-realisation to be a better person, at which point winning the pool game is almost an irrelevant triviality. I’m not completely certain in my rating for this film – it was one of the first in a wave of films that started really confronting and challenging audiences that appeared around the time that cracks were beginning to show in the Hays’ Code, and in some respects I feel I’m as lost as some of the audiences of the time must have felt going outside the security of the boundaries film had established for itself. I might have to revisit The Hustler after a second viewing and some passed time.