By James Hughes
One place to start might be the script. There’s a lot more to The Hustler than dialogue, but the dialogue is extraordinary. It gives us one of cinema’s potent declarations of love. It also gives us withering home-truths and blistering put-downs. Terse, philosophical, fluently entertaining, thrillingly revealing, jazzy, unhurried, even its unsung moments sing:
Stranger (addressing Fast Eddie): “Want some free advice?”
Charlie: “How much will it cost?”
Stranger: “Who are you his manager, his friend . . . his stooge?”
Eddie: “He’s my partner.”
Stranger: “Well-heeled partner?”
Charlie: “We got enough.”
Stranger: “Go home. Take the boy and go home. Fats don’t need your money, there’s no way you can beat him, nobody’s beat him in fifteen years, he’s the best in the country.”
Eddie: “You got that wrong Mister. I am.”
Pool shark Eddie Felson is twenty-six in the novel that inspired The Hustler. Played by Paul Newman, he’s partnered by a small, harmless, weary-looking man, Charlie. (“You’re nothing but a small-time Charlie!”) But it’s Eddie’s second, heavier manager, the overbearing Bert (George C Scott) who gives the movie its jagged edge, its shadowy pull.
For Eddie, their meeting in a bar is life changing. Bert makes him a crooked offer he’s free to refuse, but not for long – not if he wants to develop his talent. There’s so much spark and mystique and finely-tuned skill in this scene.
When I first watched it, late one night at twenty-three, I had to stop the VCR and press REPLAY half a dozen times. It seemed to articulate things I hadn’t known I really needed to know.
The modulated, duelling, contrasting voices remain a thing of wonder. Newman’s unique grainy timbre becomes a rolling dramatic sweet spot. “How do you know that much? Huh? I mean nobody knows that much.” And Scott delivers his adversarial lines with such lived-in conviction and snappy diction that it’s a pleasure to be seduced, all over again.
Visually, the scene is utterly unadorned. It may be that Robert Rossen deemed the dialogue so strong, nothing could be gained distracting from it. It may only be that most bars were indeed this bare, in that time and place. But it seems to me that the set deliberately recalls a courtroom, a hard-edged place where accusation, self-defence, cross-examination and the language of persuasion meet. The clunk of Eddie’s whiskey glass – brought down in synch with Bert’s “born loser” verdict – smacks of a gavel.
Every moment counts in this scene, but two jumped out at me this time. In the first, Bert rattles off thirty-three words – all crystalline – in five seconds, with room to rest. “How much do you think you’re worth these days?” Pause. “I’m putting up the time, I’m putting up the money, for that I get seventy-five per cent return on my money. If you win.”
The other moment is Eddie’s. Bert informs him how much money he made betting against him – enough to pay for his Lincoln, twice over. On receipt of this information, the sustained look Eddie gives him is hard to define: one part resentment, one part surprise, two parts sneaking admiration. Don’t even try to mimic it.
It takes Newman all of two seconds to make us side with Eddie in The Hustler. Two minutes later we’re in his pocket. Fifteen minutes in, we’re wishing we were him. For the film’s remainder, we delude ourselves that we’re just like him.
Part of its appeal is that we’re all a bit like Eddie. We all know what it’s like, at least, to want to be very good at something.
Pinpointing all of Newman’s brilliant moments in the story would be like trying to point to each individual star on a clear night in the outback. At times, the camera barely keeps up with the swiftest of his micro-expressions. Other times, he conveys a thing big and raw – when he comes to Sarah’s door, damaged, the pain in his face is all the way up through his soul.
The film is not always pretty, but it is always hard to look away. In a way, the game of pool befits the screen. Images of play can still include onlookers, and whatever else the director wishes to include. Robert Rossen gets plenty of those desperate, dubious, calculating, enterprising faces into his lens. (“You better not miss, friend.”) Even the signs on the walls have a kind of lost world charm.
The Hustler is spare but never stingy, shadowy but never dim, gritty but never grubby. When Sarah (Piper Laurie) is in the picture, anything but a unicorn bounding through your lounge is unlikely to avert your eyes. And Rossen moves his camera inventively and intuitively. See it give a drunken dip, a kind of woozy bob, when Eddie’s faking being sloshed, in the opening. See the way, in the film’s heart, when thugs drag him to the bathroom, the camera just abandons him. It just drifts away, as if nobody’s operating it, ghosting left, stopping at the leftover balls, worthless on the table. And then we hear those bellows of agony. A person is being broken, and somehow our being left to imagine it, is more brutal than if it had been shown.
From there, the movie runs deep. When Eddie turns to Sarah, there’s no turning back. We see her nurse him, see his frustration. It’s so credible, we tend to imagine more, for ourselves. The film has this way of inducing us to picture more than is presented. Partly, this has to do with nobody involved in its making hitting us over the head with anything. Partly, it has to do with deft story-editing.
The film moves without haste, and without lull. Nothing important is neglected. Nothing pointless is left in. No instant goes to waste. Whilst sturdily structured, words like plot mean nothing here. Each piece and part is interesting in and of itself – the downtime as absorbing as the ‘action.’ One of the story’s most unassuming moments, in fact, is Eddie and Sarah meeting in an unpeopled café, at a small hour. Eddie breaks the ice. She appreciates his attention, or at least appreciates his guts, but doesn’t let it show.
“Long wait for a bus?”
“Yes.”
“How long have you been waiting?”
“Since four.”
And a few words later:
“What times does the bus leave?”
“Which bus?”
“Yours.”
“Eight o’clock. That wouldn’t give us much time, would it?”
“Well, you’re right. I guess it wouldn’t.”
Unexceptional on paper, but in the flesh, it’s all suppressed hunger and glimpsed hope. Piper Laurie’s voice is one of those euphonious instruments an actor either is or isn’t blessed with. Listen to its strange quality when she answers Eddie’s question about what sort of day it is outside. And later again, in his arms, when she answers his hint that she get some treatment for her drinking. (“Oh I’m getting treatment right here.”)
In a story about the way men milk and manipulate and deceive (and admittedly sometimes elevate) each other, it’s a woman, as so often in life, who brings sanity and meaning and growth. Without Sarah, the movie is nowhere. On their picnic (on the fringe of a cemetery?), when she expresses that she loves him, the words are so earnest, so intelligently delivered, so poignant. Note the little sound, as the scene dissolves.
In his best-selling Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, author Robert Pirsig spent a good portion defining and redefining and re-redefining the word ‘quality’. Without wishing to sound cute, much as I adore that book, Pirsig could’ve saved some toil – the definition of quality is in The Hustler’s every frame.
Each line helps us see into the characters, and nudges the story along its way. Each quirk and gesture and sound (and silence) nurtures the ambience. Each mood meets its opposite number. A priceless point pulses in its heart: protect the person that you believe you may be put here to love; be careful of your words in anger. Not everyone shakes off debasement like a bad day at the office.
If you love film and haven’t seen The Hustler, now’s the time. But Jesus, just be ready.
