The Hustler

Paul Newman is Fast Eddie Felson, the new pool prodigy and challenger out of Oakland; Jackie Gleason is Minnesota Fats, pool legend and reigning best at the game; George C. Scott is Bert Gordon, gambler at large; Piper Laurie is Sarah Packhard, lost soul and boozer.

Robert Rossen adapted Walter Tevis’s novel, a telling drama by an obscure novelist. Not surprisingly, in doing the film adaptation of this drama about someone with greatness, that drama evidently seemed unsaleable to the movie makers in its novelistic form. Tevis dramatized the almost all-consuming lure of the game, here pool but broadly any game or many another endeavor, which the most talented performers experience intensely and well nigh unflaggingly. There is something mystical, a purity of a kind, about how they give themselves over to the quest for the perfect performance. It’s irresistible. (Of course, usually they must do so at great cost to those around them.) The quest of the great for greatness in the act is the true drama of this film, and here the film is estimable and universal.

This drama, however, is only the shortest of the three stories it has always seemed to me are dramatized in the film, the last two being conventions of Hollywood screenplays overly played in the movie version of Tevis’s story.

The first convention: The rise and fall and then climactic rise again of the hero. The second convention: the bittersweet love story. The way Rossen stages these conventions is a morality play in which Fast Eddie Felson fails the Character Test only to Redeem Himself with a Pyrrhic Victory over Minnesota Fats near the end of the movie.

Such is what’s done in too many Hollywood films. These two conventional dramas are superbly acted and staged–The Hustler is a most memorable Hollywood film–but there isn’t really much reason for playing up the love story between Felson and Sarah Packhard; and the diabolical Bert Gordon has too much on-camera time. He isn’t a suitable obstacle, just a run-of-the-mill villain.

The two interludes distract and limit what rings true in the film, the scenes when Newman doesn’t seem to be method acting but seems authentic.

The black-and-white filming is excellent, especially in mythologizing unforgettably the cathedral-like supreme pool hall in the nation–Ames Billiards, the Madison Square Garden of pool then; the atmospherics in the lesser pool palaces and dives, and the score by Kenyon Hopkins, are likewise wonderful.

But the central drama is Fast Eddie Felson triumphantly reaching magical levels of excellence. It’s enacted in his epic dethroning of Minnesota Fats. The dream of greatness, of perfection, is poeticized in a truly wonderful and colloquially soaring passage made all the more wonderful by Newman as he muses it aloud in a reverie during a picnic lunch in the park with Sarah. Small doubt Tevis labored over this passage to preserve forever one take on that rare drama of the greats, and thereby doing his readers and luckily, for Rossen highlights it in the film, his movie audiences the great favor of making sure they take in his vision:

“When I’m goin’, when I’m really goin’, I feel like a…like a jockey must feel when he’s sittin’ on his horse, he’s got all that speed and power underneath him, he’s coming into the stretch, the pressure’s on him–and he knows. He just feels, when to let it go and how much. ‘Cause he’s got everything working for him–timing, touch. It’s a great feeling, boy–it’s a real great feeling–when you’re right and you know you’re right. Like all of a sudden, I got oil in my arm. Pool cue’s part of me. You know, it’s a pool cue, it’s got nerves in it. You can feel the roll of those balls…. You don’t have to look. You just know. You make shots nobody’s ever made before, and you play that game the way nobody’s ever played it before….”

That’s what Felson’s after. All the rest, formally well done as it is, doesn’t ring anywhere near this true.

Here is the scene from the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUxLZWWRKUI&t=6s

 

The Queen’s Gambit

Fast Eddie Felson, as we saw above, is a prodigious pool shark and the hero of Walter Tevis’s novel, The Hustler; and, of course,memorably played by Paul Newman in the 1961 movie version. The late Tevis also wrote The Queen’s Gambit, that novel about big-time chess forming the basis for the much praised and awarded 2020 TV miniseries of the same name. Fast Eddie’s wonderful characterization of what it feels like when you are at the top of your game and why, given that rapturous state, you keep seeking that experience, applies perfectly to chess prodigy Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit,that title signifying a particular strategic opening in a chess match.

The Queen’s Gambit, set in the mid-Fifties to the Sixties, is a superb film owing to Tevis’s understanding of prodigies–how their minds work and what their marvelous talents not only reward but impose, the latter in some cases (as with Beth Harmon) addiction to tranquilizers and liquor as a boost to both the preparatory and game-time imagined sequences of chess moves–“fringe consciousness”– which could lead to the defeat of a supremely formidable opponent and hence to the craved ecstatic victories.

Tevis himself learned pool and chess in his younger years and suffered addictions he believed enhanced his play. His stories are highly reflective biographically though such does not explain the born talent itself. Beth Harmon is prodigious almost from the beginning and remains so: her mysterious and rare talent is not ravaged by the pills and the Gibsons. Nor is Beth a lush who misses matches; she works hard on her chess and shows up for the matches. The world chess hierarchy respect and like her.

Tevis in his novel and the superb filmmakers, notably Director/Writer Scott Frank, in the TV miniseries create an irresistible story. One of the great recent acting perfrmances is turned in by Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon: she won a Golden Globe award as best actress in a miniseries or TV film. And The Queen’s Gambit itself won eleven Primetime Emmys.

Beth is a classic American hero of the New World, striking out on her lonely own for the New. Like Huck Finn, for example, she is effectively an orphan; her parents are gone early and in her girlhood she ends up in an orphanage, the likes of which are entirely realistic as I can tell you after stints at a couple of boardng schools: if for no other reason, the compelling realism of Beth’s orphanage is worth the viewing of the miniseries: it’s that good.

She learns to play chess by skipping classes and playing the orphanage janitor, William Shaibel, enacted perfectly by actor Bill Camp in a touching segment you won’t soon forget. Immediately Beth shows prodigious talent, soon overwhelming the appreciative Shaibel.

From there she eventually departs the orphanage when she is problematically adopted (here resembling her de facto cousin Huck Finn and the Open Road quest of the New World, for like Huck in Twain’s masterpiece she is beset with a vicious largely absent father and a well-meaning but abandoned and somewhat hapless housewife for mother), wins the Kentucky State Chess Tournament, and moves triumphantly upward through several increasingly prestigious chess tourneys to an international match for the World Championship in Moscow against the reigning Grand Master and World Champ from the Soviet Union.

I’ll not be a spoiler.

Along the way her personal adventure–her life somewhat outside her chess (“somewhat” is mandatory accuracy in reporting on this superior storyline) concerning boys, money, fashion etc.–is chronicled but not at the expense of the arc of her chess drama which remains preeminent in her drama and unifies this compelling, brief, economical and gripping miniseries.

A lot could be said further, but then, the film itself needs little commentary.

Aside from the sublime performnce of Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth, look for Thomas Brodie-Sangster’s portrayal of Benny Watts, U.S. Chess Champion.

Don’t miss this one.