The Hustler

“Pool is a very boring game if you can’t play it,” director Robert Rossen told his editor, Dede Allen. “But our movie is about character.” And so it is. Which doesn’t mean The Hustler isn’t one of the best sports movies ever made – maybe sport is about character too.

Fast Eddie Felson is indelible Paul Newman, the cocky grin flashing up bullish self-belief but zero class. He’s matched (and more?) by Jackie Gleason’s gliding, decorous Minnesota Fats – both look like real shooters – and by George C Scott’s superbly-contained, watchful presence as the man with the bankroll in his pocket – and that’s the pocket which really counts. Around the pool table, Rossen seems to know all the angles: it’s terrifically exacting and unsentimental. The alcoholic love story with Piper Laurie was bold for the time, but it’s not what you remember afterwards. Novelist Walter Tevis also wrote The Queen’s Gambit and The Man Who Fell to Earth. And Jake LaMotta, Raging Bull himself, has a cameo as a bartender.

Provocative and powerful… Newman gives a restrained, modulated performance, an unusual one in that character development is sought and achieved with utilization only of voice, gesture, intensity.

James Powers, Hollywood Reporter