Paul Newman @ 100: "The Hustler"

by Nathaniel R

Paul Newman's second Oscar nomination came for THE HUSTLER (1961). All screenshots sourced from FilmGrab.

A smiling illustration on salad dressing bottles, a serious visage on movie posters, a guest on television talk shows? I can't recall when I first became aware of Paul Newman. He was always there, an unmoving fixture of popular culture. When I was a kid he'd already been in the movie business for 30 years. For most stars, two back-to-back lead Oscar nominations in your late 50s (Absence of Malice and The Verdict) would be a winding down or a swan song but Paul Newman was the definition of "enduring". When I started hitting movie theaters on the regular he was just 30 years into a career but there was still tank in the gas. He'd be back to the Oscars as a nominee thrice more, four if you count the Honorary statue.

For today's celebration, we're travelling way back to his second Oscar nomination to meet "Fast Eddie" Felson in The Hustler (1961)...

It's Paul Newman vs Jackie Gleason (both Oscar nominated) in the film's opening act

The prodigiously gifted pool shark would become Newman's Oscar role (albeit twenty-five years after the fact but let's not jump ahead of ourselves). So powder your sticks, grab a bottle of whiskey, and a cough up a few Benjamins. We're pulling two all-nighters at Ames Pool Hall. (You can also consider this an official episode of 'How Had I Never Seen' in which Team Experience members finally get around to something they're a little embarrassed to admit they hadn't yet seen)

The Hustler begins simply enough, introducing us to Fast Eddie and his mentor, friend, pimp, and "partner" Charlie (Myron McCormick) working the small time. They're making easy money on the road with Eddie's killer aim; even when he's drunk (often) he sinks the balls exactly as he calls them. It's unclear at this juncture just how drunk Eddie is when he plays but he's a natural performer so he's probably "performing" drunkness well before he starts to wobble. Just as soon as we've gleaned their game -- pre 21st century movies waste so little time with exposition! -- Eddie is eager to land a bigger fish and the two arrive in New York City where the nations best player, Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason, Oscar nominated) reigns every night at 8:00 pm. The first act of The Hustler goes hard; it's every bit as nail-biting and tense as the final act of lesser movies. Bless director Robert Rossen and team for that great cut/shot when both Fats and Eddie remove their jackets simultaneously, eager to throw down. The visual as a loud as a gunshot fired at a car race.  The whiskey flows, the clock spins and eventually this hustler loses for reasons that are achingly clear to everyone but the "loser" in question. 

Newman and Laurie were nominated together in 1961. In 1986, they'd both be up for Oscars again on the same night.

In the slower-burning somehow even boozier second act, Eddie licks his wound in the arms of "Sarah" (a then 29 year old Piper Laurie, unrecognizable if not for that voice) who he picks up at a bus depot diner. She shares with Eddie a frightening self-destructive streak, a loose relationship with honesty, an alarming lack of self-control, an older benefactor, and unmistakable alcoholism. In the final act, Eddie hits the road again with different management for a redemption tour with just two stops, the last of course being a rematch with Minnesota Fats; Charlie has been jettisoned for Sarah and wealthy gambler Bert Gordon (George C Scott, Oscar-nominated though he refused the honor as was his predilection) who are in a power struggle over Fast Eddie.

I've burned through the plot because it's only the "break" in this particular game. The true excitement and drama of the Hustler isn't the narrative (though the screenplay based on a Walter Tevis novel is beautifully structured) but the character arcs, themes, and the performances. It's a character study essentially but the most remarkable thing about it is how clearly it sees everyone in Eddy's orbit. Everyone's core issues are delineated, not with dull exposition but behavior and context clues and embedded in the across-the-board stellar performances and overarching themes. It's a pity SAG wasn't around back then to hand The Hustler the Outstanding Cast performance. It's also a pity that The Hustler lost the Adapted Screenplay Oscar to the clunkier but more "important" Judgment at Nuremberg. 

There's a lot of talk about "losers" and "winners" in The Hustler, and the vibrating tear through the movie's center is how people are often both, and sometimes not at all clear on the binary. Take Sarah, beautifully played by Piper Laurie. Apart from her limp -- she calls herself "lame" and Eddie lashes out when Bert calls her "crippled" -- she has almost every advantage, freedom, a city apartment, money to spare, beauty, an extremely hot boyfriend (that'd be Newman), and natural talent.

Piper Laurie received the first of her three Oscar nominations for "The Hustler"

Regarding the latter, the movie is not clear on this but I'd argue that Laurie most definitely is. Sarah is a writer at heart, there's just one aside to it, when Eddie discovers that she's writing about their relationship and is angry that she's described it as a 'contract of depravity'. Talent and beauty and leisure time but she's wasting her life at the bottom of a bottle filled with self-loathing. Her tragedy is compounded by the fact that she's brighter than Eddie and more aware of their mutual tailspin. 

As The Hustler was ending, I recalled a passage from the dishy memoir "Dropped Names" by Frank Langella. Most of the book is delicious but Langella's take on Paul Newman is truly bizarre. He gives Newman props as a movie star but believed he was never a great actor because there was no 'sense of danger' in his work. It's an assessment so deranged that one can only conclude that Langella had a chip on his shoulder Newman was as charming as movie stars come and could have coasted on charisma alone but in performance after performance he never did. There's a hole at the center of Eddie that feels like a vacuum. Winning will never be enough so losing is intoxicating, too. In some ways, Newman's performance feels like a large improvement on the depth of characterization he was attempting in the censor compromised Cat on a Hot Time Roof (1958) and a warm-up to his greatest performance in Hud (1963) which was just two years away. The difference in terms of Newman's wielding of his own starpower is where he directs the psychological violence. Eddie's cruelty is largely accidental, born of cockiness and transactional habit.

Myron McCormick (playing Eddie's partner Charlie) died just three months after the Oscars.

In one smartly written scene, he is brutally callow in his dismissal of Charlie (who the movie suggests he never would have climbed remotely as far without) but it's only Sarah that really understands the damage and what it means about Eddie's character. Hud, by contrast, is a smarter man and also lethally aware of his own capacity for irreversible collateral damage.

But Hud is a topic for another time.

It remains fascinating and cosmically right, somehow, that The Hustler's Fast Eddie would take so goddamn long to become a winner; Martin Scorsese's sequel The Color of Money (1986) would finally give Newman the competitive Oscar he had long deserved for reprising Fast Eddie. In the sequel Eddie is slower and long sober and karmically punished with taking on the "Charlie" role to his own "Fast-Eddie"-like upstart in the form of Tom Cruise's "Vincent Lauria". It would be inaccurate to claim that Fast Eddie was Newman's "defining" role -- not with a filmography that chalk full of iconic roles --  but is was certainly one of them. "Legacy sequels" weren't yet a commonplace thing so the 1986 resurrection probably felt like a miracle to moviegoers and industry voters who had grown up with the young Newman and the dramatic gut punch of The Hustler. 

The Hustler was nominated for 9 Oscars, including Best Picture, and won two (Cinematography and Art Direction, in the years when those categories were doubled to separate black and white pictures from color films in the 'eye candy' categories).