THE HUSTLER

Roger Ebert:

 The pool shark played by Paul Newman in “The Hustler” (1961) is indelible–given weight because the film is not about his victory in the final pool game, but about his defeat by pool, by life, and by his lack of character. This is one of the few American movies in which the hero wins by surrendering, by accepting reality instead of his dreams.

Billiards is the arena for the movie’s contests, but there is no attempt to follow the game shot by shot, or even to explain the rules. The players are contesting each others’ inner strength. The film could be about any game depending on bluff, self-confidence, money management and psychology: [think "Wall Street" or "The Big Short."] You will eventually reveal what you are made of, and pool [or stock manipulation] is a game where skill can carry you only so far.The film provided Paul Newman’s breakthrough into the first rank of Hollywood actors, but it is instructive to see how important the other actors are; how “The Hustler” benefited by being made before the big-money star was required to appear in almost every shot. The test of Newman’s character comes not so much at a pool table as in his relationship with Sarah Packard (Piper Laurie), whose story is told as fully as Felson’s own; this is not one of the macho movies in which the filmmakers are unable to see a woman except in the simplest terms. The real contest in “The Hustler” is not between Fast Eddie and Minnesota Fats, but between Eddie’s love for Sarah and his self-destructive impulses.George C. Scott, as the cold, vicious gambler and manager Bert Gordon, was appearing in only his third movie. He has the absolute authority we would see again and again: the air of a man serenely himself. The way he plays against Sarah, with a cruel word here and a whispered suggestion there, is as hard and painful as his order to have Eddie’s thumbs broken. Bert is always calculating. When he tells Eddie he’s a “loser,” we know he says that to goad him to win or push him to lose; he’s never just supplying his opinion.Then there is Jackie Gleason, as the legendary pool champion Minnesota Fats–the man Eddie must beat to prove himself the best. Gleason (and Scott) won Oscar nominations for their supporting performances; what is interesting is that they make equally unforgettable impressions, ...With Gleason it is all presence, body language, the sad face, the concise, intent way he works the table, the lack of wasted moves. He gives the impression of a man purified by pool, who has moved through all the sad compromises and crooked bets and hustling moves and emerged as a man who simply, elegantly, plays the game. He has long ago given up hustling; unlike Eddie, he makes his living by dependably being the best, time after time, so that others can test themselves against him. He is the ruler of a shabby kingdom, and at the end of the film, as Eddie and Bert have their merciless confrontation, he sits passive in the middle of the floor, listening to what he has heard countless times before, knowing that to practice his gift he has to accept this world.

The movie was produced and directed by Robert Rossen, a writer from the 1940s who first refused to “name names” when called in the McCarthyite witchhunt, and then changed his mind, said he had been a communist, and named 57 others. That was the price he paid to be able to work, and there must be a shadow of that price in the compromises Fast Eddie is asked to make. The movie, based on a novel by Walter Tevis, was written by Rossen and Sydney Carroll, and filmed in black and white CinemaScope by Eugene Shuftan, who won an Oscar. To see why b&w is the right choice, contrast it with Martin Scorsese’s “The Color of Money” (1986), also starring Newman as Fast Eddie, but looking too bright and alive for the stygian gloom of the billiard parlor at midnight. (Newman won his only Oscar for “Color”–ironic, unless it was belated amends for “The Hustler”).

Rossen’s crucial decision is to allow full weight and screen time to all of his characters. Laurie’s Sarah is the greatest beneficiary, a lame alcoholic who sits in the bus station when she cannot sleep, who goes to college on Tuesdays and Thursdays and drinks on the other days, who turns her face away from Eddie’s first kiss and says “You’re too hungry,” and who wisely tells him: “Look, I’ve got troubles and I think maybe you’ve got troubles. Maybe it’d be better if we just leave each other alone.”

When Bert wants to take Eddie to Louisville for a big-money match with the millionaire Findley (Murray Hamilton), Eddie caves in to Sarah’s tears and takes her along. Bert sees her as a rival and expertly and mercilessly destroys her in a few days; learning that Eddie’s broken thumbs have healed, he says, “I’d hate to think I was puttin’ my money on a cripple”–a line aimed straight at Sarah. And when she is drunk and leaning against a wall at Findley’s party, he approaches her and says something into her ear, something we cannot hear, that causes her to throw her drink at him and then collapse, and sets in motion the process of her death.This was the fourth film edited by the great Dede Allen (her next would be “Bonnie and Clyde“), and she finds a rhythm in the pool games–the players circling, the cuesticks, the balls, the watching faces–that implies the trance-like rhythm of the players. Her editing “tells” the games so completely that if we don’t understand pool, we forget that we don’t.

The first meeting of Eddie and Fats was about pool. The second, as Bert correctly predicted, is about character. Bert’s secret is that by “character” he doesn’t mean goodness, honesty or other Boy Scout virtues. He means the snakelike ability to put winning above any other consideration, and to never tempt the odds.

MEPHISTO

There are times in “Mephisto” when the hero tries to explain himself by saying that he’s only an actor, and he has that almost right: All he is, is an actor. It’s not his fault that the Nazis have come to power, and that as a German-speaking actor he must choose between becoming a Nazi and being exiled into a foreign land without jobs or German actors. As long as he is acting, as long as he is not called upon to risk his real feelings, this man can act his way into the hearts of women, audiences, and the Nazi power structure. This is the story of a man who plays his life wearing masks, fearing that if the last mask is removed, he will have no face.

The actor is played by Klaus Maria Brandauer in one of the greatest movie performances I’ve ever seen. The character is not sympathetic, and yet we identify with him because he shares so many of our own weaknesses and fears. He is not a very good actor or a very good human being, but he is good enough to get by in ordinary times. As the movie opens, he’s a socialist, interested in all the most progressive new causes, and is even the proud lover of a black woman. By the end of the film, he has learned that his politics were a taste, not a conviction, and that he will do anything, flatter anybody, make any compromise.

“Mephisto” does an uncanny job of creating its period, of showing us Hamburg and Berlin from the 1920s to the 1940s. I’ve never seen a movie that does a better job of showing the seductive Nazi practice of providing party members with theatrical costumes, titles and pageantry. In this movie not being a Nazi is like being at a black-tie ball in a brown corduroy suit. Hendrik Hoefgen, the actor, is drawn to this world like a magnet. From his ambitious beginnings in the provincial German theater, he works his way up into more important roles and laterally into more important society.

All of his progress is based on lies. He marries a woman he does not love, because her father can do him some good. When the rise of the Nazis destroys his father-in-law’s power, he leaves his wife. He continues all this time to maintain his affair with his black mistress. He has a modest but undeniable talent as an actor, but prostitutes it by playing his favorite role, Mephistopheles in “Faust,” not as he could but as he calculates he should.

The obvious parallel here is between the hero of this film and the figure of tragedy who sold his soul to the devil. But “Mephisto” doesn’t depend upon easy parallels to make its point. This is a human story, and as the actor in this movie makes his way to the top of the Nazi propaganda structure and the bottom of his own soul, the movie is both merciless and understanding. This is a weak and shameful man, the film seems to say, but then it cautions us against throwing the first stone.

“Mephisto” is not a German but a Hungarian movie, directed by Istvan Szabo, the talented 44-year-old who has led his country’s cinema from relative obscurity to its present position as one of the best and most innovative film industries in Europe. Roger Ebert,1982