The Hustler (1961)

Gordan Gekko. Tony Montana. We have seen it time and time again, men destroyed by their ambitions turned obsessions. They are stirring up at the stars and heavens, but only from the vantage point of their deepest most inner hells. They will defend themselves by saying, “First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the woman”, but really you they never really seek solace in greatness, because the truth is they will never find what they really want no matter how hard they try, water to douse the flames of emptiness raging within. Such complex characters make for powerful and compelling cinema, well that was until you meet Paul Newman in The Hustler, where he flounders around more than Leonardo DiCaprio on Oscar night. “No trouble losing when you got a good excuse. Winning... that can be heavy on your back, too, like a monkey. Roaming the back streets of America, for every doggy pool hall amoral enough to allow a two-bit hustler like fast Eddie Felson (Newman) to come crawling through its doors. Eddie’s sole existence rotates and intertwines itself around every pool table he encounters, as if it were the grim reaper slowly taking his soul. But he can’t break the spell because he’s really good at it, besides drinking it’s the only thing he is any good at – probably the best in the country, maybe even the world if he can beat the legendary Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). However even when he finds himself on the lane to a better more tranquil life, with a beautiful woman on his right arm (Piper Laurie) and a couple of bucks in his back pocket. Eddie is a born loser and will always find ways to raise the stakes far too high and thus swerve into a grave of his own making. Ironically with a film all about raising the stakes, not at one point did you find that the stakes were raised high enough for Newman’s character. His love interest Sarah never seemed to make enough of an effort to get him to quit, instead preferring to wonder about aimlessly in a drunken hews. Then you have Minnesota Fats who is supposed to be the big bad wolf, yet instead he was as menacing as Clifford the big red dog. As for Paul Newman, of course the guy has a natural charisma, magnetism and star quality, but none of that came across in The Hustler. Throughout the whole film Paul Newman mopped around on screen like a teenager going through puberty.