The Hustler (1961)

The Hustler arrives from 1961, which is to say from a moment when a film could be about a man's soul and still get made. Robert Rossen's study of Fast Eddie Felson, a pool hustler with talent and no character, moves through Ames Billiards and bus terminals and a Kentucky Derby weekend with the patience of a director who trusts his audience to keep up. Paul Newman plays the ambition. George C. Scott plays the price. Piper Laurie's Sarah exists to be destroyed, and the film does not pretend otherwise.

Where the picture carries any social charge, it is economic. Rossen, who named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee and plainly never forgave himself, treats money as a contaminant. Eddie, Bert, and Findley are all twisted by the pursuit of it. Only Minnesota Fats, who never touches the cash, escapes intact, a thesis stated through staging instead of speeches. The whiskey orders, Bert's blended against Eddie's bottled in bond with no ice and no glass, carry the class argument in a single exchange. This is mid-century humanism with a grudge, not a modern sermon.

That is the film's saving grace: it shows. The moral sits in camera placement, in who stands above whom, in a man kneeling over a body and then rising to his feet. Nothing gets explained twice. For a story about winning and losing, it refuses to lecture about either. The result is a cold, exact, unforgiving piece of work, and it has aged better than most of what followed it.