The Hustler (1961)

Fast vs. Fats

Hey there it’s Ellen and Tyler Fast Ellie and Pennsylvania Slims back at it with another ILTBTA post. Perhaps subconsciously influenced by our time at the pool this year whilst fighting off the truly oppressive heat, we watched The Hustler, the 1961 Best Picture nominee starring Ellen’s new crush Paul Newman as the titular pool hustler. So chalk up your cue and rack ‘em up, we’ve got a movie to watch!

Weird blurb but OK (Source)

Previews

What, if anything, did we know about this coming attraction before we watched it?

Ellen: I am properly terrible at pool, y’all. When I was a kid, my older cousin told us that if we dropped a ball off the table and onto the floor in my grandparents’ basement, it would disappear. He used very basic sleight of hand to trick my five-year-old self into believing it! Suffice to say, I know nothing of pool or The Hustler.

Tyler: I was vaguely familiar with The Hustler when it came across my desk as a Pick Three option (sorry Butch Cassidy and original Doctor Dolittle fans, maybe next time), but no more than a fleeting thought of “The one about pool, right?” My family got a pool table when I was in middle or high school and I quickly got very into it and would spend hours in the basement playing against myself. I’d also play against my parents and we’d occasionally have family round-robins (which I must admit my dad usually won), so in a way I usually associate pool with quality family time in the basement in Newtown. Well, that and many a New Year’s at Sharkies, one of State College’s diviest bars. Anyway, I’m eager to see how a sport like billiards will translate to the big screen.

Plots & Feelings

This one’s pretty self-explanatory.

Short Version (courtesy of IMDb): An up-and-coming pool player plays a long-time champion in a single high-stakes match.

Long Version (modified from Wikipedia and formatted to fit your screen):

• Let the comforting tones of the 20th Century Fox theme wash over you as pool hustlers Charlie and Fast Eddie Felson stroll into the Homestead Bar & Grill and stage a loud conversation about sales and drink copious amounts of JTS Brown Bourbon. One thing leads to another, and their little performance results in Eddie hustling the daylights out of the bartender with a trick shot. (Pool) Cue the credits! The duo arrives at a quiet, nice-looking pool hall that Eddie dubs “Church of the Good Hustler,”¹ and he declares he’ll be winning $10,000 that night (despite the No Gambling signs posted). A man sees Eddie practicing and saunters up to the young kid from Oakland, requesting not to be hustled, but telling him that the legendary Minnesota Fats will be there at 8 o’clock tonight. Oh, and he hasn’t been beaten in 15 years. Good luck, buddy!

  

  “Am I seeing double, or am I screwed?” (Source)

  • Ellen: There’s a bit in the opening scene when Eddie does this exaggerated, slow blink to convey “drunkenness” that really made me laugh. Unfortunately, I never laughed again in this movie.

  • Tyler: That reminded me of a point we made in our inaugural ILTBTA post on Raiders of the Lost Ark about how Marion should’ve been wasted in her Tibetan bar when we first meet her. Unless he’s been secretly pouring out his drinks, or is just a high-functioning drunk, Fast Eddie drank a lot before taking everyone’s money, which I guess is part of the con. But still!

• Eight PM rolls around, and in walks a portly man dressed in a sharp suit with a carnation for flavor: it’s Minnesota Fats². They agree to shoot for $200 a game, and a ravenous crowd takes their seats. Eddie breaks, and Minnesota calls his shot and makes it effortlessly, and we’re off! While Minnesota is initially kicking Eddie’s butt, the younger man seems almost too entranced by the artistry to care. Eddie surges back, however, and they raise the stakes to $1,000 per game. Enter: professional gambler Bert Gordon, who silently takes a seat. Hours and hours pass, and Eddie is now well ahead, but insists he hasn’t really won until Minnesota says they’re done, despite Charlie’s urging to stop. Bert labels Eddie a “loser,” and on that advice, Minnesota continues. Eddie is up by $18,000³ at one point, but continues to drink brown liquor, whereas his opponent freshens up and collects himself. Over 25 hours⁴ since the start of the game, Eddie is down to $200, and it’s finally over. At the hotel, Charlie goes to sleep, but Eddie lies awake. He leaves half the remaining money on the table and leaves.

  

  Let the pains begin (Source)

  • Tyler: I had assumed that the first time we’d see them face off would be in the movie’s climax, so I was caught a little off guard (in a good way!) seeing them go at it so early in the movie.

  • Ellen: The image of an exhausted Eddie stumbling up to Minnesota with crumpled money in his hand, begging to keep playing, has been added to my mental rolodex of Upsetting Scenes I’ll Remember At 2 AM.

• At the bus station that looks so nice I thought it was a train station, Eddie locks up his suitcase and spots a pretty gal in the dining area. They sit together for a little bit, and when Eddie falls asleep in his chair, she pays for his coffee and departs. Later, the drained pool shark walks into a bar and sees that same lady again! They chat, exchange names, and both admit that they weren’t waiting for buses, but rather both know that there’s not many other places to go at that hour of the morning. Sarah used to be an actress, but now she goes to school part time and drinks for the rest of it. They go to her apartment, and she asks “Why me?” He kisses her as an answer, and she sends him off, saying he’s too hungry. Eddie finds that word of his battle with Minnesota Fats spread to other pool halls, and he can’t hustle just anywhere. Late one night, he’s moping at the bus station again when Sarah walks up. They silently leave together.

  • Tyler: Sarah’s repeated insistence that she’s basically an alcoholic got tiring very quickly. Also, she looks like Carey Mulligan and I can’t unsee it.

• Eddie has essentially moved in with Sarah now, and she’s pretty excited to have a fella, even though he wants to know how she has money for anything and she wants to know what’s in that leather case of his. Good old Charlie shows up and wants to restart their partnership! Eddie eventually weasels out of him that he held back his cut of Eddie’s winnings from the game with Minnesota Fats, and Charlie insists he’s trying to help and that Eddie is like a son to him. Eddie tells Charlie to “lay down and die” with his small Oakland pool hall dream and leave him out of it. Sarah listens from the kitchen, and a single tear rolls down her face. Later, she’s drunkenly clacking away on her typewriter, and a shirtless (!) Eddie spots the phrase “contract of depravity.” He’s hurt and furious, but Sarah makes the good point that all they do is stay in the room and drink and make love. He slaps her and walks out.

  • Ellen: To this point in my life, I’ve only known Silver Fox Paul Newman. It’s a whole new world to be introduced to young Paul! But you should not slap people, no matter how hot you are.

  • Tyler: It was around this point that I realized the opening credits foreshadowed different points in the movie, which is always a fun touch but I wish I paid attention to them a little more closely.

I got too depressed: here’s Hustlers! (Source)

• At a backroom poker game, Eddie and Bert meet again. The professional says Eddie didn’t lose the match for lack of talent, but rather lack of character. Bert claims a knack for knowing who’s a born loser and who’s a winner. When he was down, Minnesota Fats gathered himself up for a fight. Eddie continued drinking and gave himself an excuse to lose, according to Bert. He offers to partner up for a 75% stake. Eddie refuses. Cut to a seedy bar by the docks, where Eddie starts hustling their local pool shark. He wins, but at the cost of the loitering goons breaking his thumbs! He returns to Sarah’s, battered and bruised. She helps restore him to health and is even drinking less. On a picnic, Eddie gives a speech about how when you’re on it, anything can be truly great, even bricklaying, and that’s how he’s always been with playing pool. Sarah professes her love, knowing he won’t return it but hoping for it anyway.

  • Ellen: When Eddie and the other pool shark are laying out the terms of their bet, it exemplified for me that few things make me feel dumber than gambling jargon. It could not be less my scene if it tried!

Us to the TV screen during this movie (Source)

• Eddie decides to take Bert’s offer, because “a 25% slice of something big is better than a 100% slice of nothing". He tries to leave Sarah behind on his first hustling venture with Bert, but she convinces him otherwise with a three-pronged confession: she had polio as a child, she was never an actress, and she’s supported by a monthly check from her father, who wants nothing else to do with her. That’s the foundation for a solid throuple trip to Louisville if ever I’ve heard it! The train ride is punctuated with Bert making all sorts of snide remarks intended to make Sarah feel like trash. At the Louisville racetrack, they meet up with the mark: a wealthy socialite named Findley, who invites them to a swanky post-race party at his mansion. Sarah wanders the party listlessly, clutching a champagne coupe, until something Bert says to her makes her throw the drink in his face and smash the glass. She goes upstairs to the coat bed to sleep it off while Eddie and Bert descend to the basement to discover WHOOPS: Findley plays billiards, not pool. 

  • Tyler: My main takeaway from this movie might be that billiards and pool are not synonymous.

• Here’s the thing: Eddie has never played billiards. The night continues on, and his confidence wanes while his frustration grows, and Bert refuses to put up more money. Eddie decides to continue with his own cash, which Sarah is holding. She eventually gives it to him, but not before begging him to stop all of this and saying the circles he’s in are "perverted, twisted, and crippled". By the end of the night, however, he’s up $12,000. Eddie takes his 25% share and decides to walk back to the hotel, whereas Bert takes a cab. Bert attempts to kiss Sarah back at the hotel, and she is totally limp, but eventually she enters his room and they hook up⁵. Disgusted, she goes into the bathroom and writes PERVERTED, TWISTED, and CRIPPLED in lipstick on the mirror. Eddie finally arrives back at the hotel and requests the key to his room from the front desk. The concierge looks concerned, that’s because the room is a crime scene: Sarah has died by suicide.

  

  The Bachelor cast yelling at producers, we assume (Source)

  • Ellen: It makes NO SENSE for Sarah to sleep with Bert. Literally none. That’s not even her established brand of self-destruction. This made it extra clear that she existed as a character to provide growth for Eddie and nothing else. It’s infuriating.

• Eddie walks back into the Ames Pool Hall in silence. Bert looks absolutely stricken to see him, but he has eyes only for Minnesota Fats and challenges him with his last $3,000 on a single game. Eddie wins game after game, saying he’s got the character for it now, which he picked up in a hotel room in Louisville. Fats eventually quits, unable to win. And then Bert has the absolute gall to demand his share of Eddie’s winnings. Eddie rightly turns him down and threatens to kill him. Bert counters with allowing him to leave, but promising he’ll never play in a big-time pool hall again. Eddie and Minnesota Fats respectfully tell each other good game, and Eddie walks out.

  • Ellen: I like to think that Eddie gets a bus straight to Oakland to help out Charlie with his decidedly small-time pool hall dream. Take that, Bert!

  

  Go up against West Side Story for Best Picture, apparently (Source)

Intermission

Even though ILTBTA is free, please indulge us further and enjoy this quick “advertisement.”

This installment of ILTBTA is brought to you by … Ames Pool Hall.

No bar. No gambling. Just pool.

Use code “ILTBTA” next time you reserve a table. Or don’t. This is Ames, mister.

Wiki-Wiki-Whaaat?

Love a good Wikipedia rabbit hole in search of some fun facts? Us too.

The Hustler’s Wikipedia page has some interesting facts and anecdotes that we recommend you read through, but here are a few of our favorites:

• The Hustler is based on the 1959 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis. In addition to writing a sequel to The Hustler called The Color of Money (which was adapted into a movie by Martin Scorsese and also starred Paul Newman), Tevis wrote The Queen’s Gambit, which was the source material for the popular and well-received Netflix miniseries of the same name.

  • Ellen: Highly-skilled, substance-abusing practitioners of games appear to be a bit of a niche for this guy!

• Aside from finding fame on The Jackie Gleason Show and The Honeymooners, Jackie Gleason (Minnesota Fats) was a successful producer of mood music albums. In fact, his 1952 debut album, Music for Lovers Only, still holds the record for longest stay on the Billboard Top Ten Charts, where it stayed for almost three years. Gleason had no formal music education or knowledge of musical terminology, and would often present his ideas in the form of poetic metaphors, which frustrated the professional musicians he worked with who presumably knew what they were talking about.

• Gleason also had an acute interest in the paranormal and a fear of flying. His aviophobia resulted from an incident early in his career where his plane had to make an emergency landing after two of the engines failed mid-flight. After subsequently refusing to go on the replacement plane, he amusingly convinced a local hardware store owner to lend him $200 for a train ticket for the rest of the journey.

• Real-life pool champion Willie Mosconi served as a technical adviser and close-up pool stunt double of sorts for the film.  He taught Paul Newman how to act like a pool hustler, a tall task considering Newman had never played pool before filming. Mosconi also made a cameo appearance as the stakes holder named Willie during the first matchup between Fast Eddie and Minnesota Fats.

  

  Good for Paul: he did this one! (Source)

• Despite growing up above a Philadelphia pool hall that his father owned, Mosconi was not allowed to play the game as a child. He skirted this rule by using a broom handle and potatoes to practice the game, which apparently worked because he quickly became a child prodigy and one of the most successful pool players of the 20th century.

  

  Excuse me while I watch this on loop forever (Source)

• Director/Producer Robert Rossen shot The Hustler over a six-week period in New York City with an impressive amount of realism. The dining area in the Manhattan Greyhound bus station that Eddie and Sarah eat at was so realistic that actual bus passengers sat down to place their orders. Also, Rossen hired actual street thugs and, after enrolling them in the Screen Actors Guild, hired them as extras in order to achieve what he called a “neo-neo-realistic” look.

  • Ellen: I supposed we’re lucky that Paul Newman’s thumbs weren’t broken in a neo-neo-realistic kind of way!

Oscar NomNomNomz

Since we all know a movie is nothing without the food and drink it incorporates.

It’s now time to award the Oscar for Best Snacktor in a Supporting Role⁶. And the nomnomnominees are:

• JTS Brown Bourbon

• Black coffee from the bus station diner

• A glass of milk

And the Oscar goes to … the black coffee from the bus station diner! Unfortunately, one of the station passengers drank the coffee thinking it was a real diner, so we will accept this award on its behalf.

Nothing to it but to brew it! (Source)

Fill In The Blank

How did we really feel about The Academy nominating this?

Ellen: I’d like to fall asleep at a bus station diner and have the Academy pay for my cup of coffee. What does that mean? I don’t know. How did I feel about this movie? I still don’t really know!! I was thoroughly bummed out by the end of it; I can tell you that much. No one could accuse this movie of glamorizing the lifestyle, yeesh. I liked a lot of the structure of this movie and how it twisted in directions I did not expect. Minnesota Fats not being the ultimate villain, but rather just another talented guy caught up with a toxic backer was really interesting to me. I had said during the first match between Eddie and Minnesota that I thought this movie may end with Eddie dead in a ditch, and honestly I don’t think I was that far off. Every last person in this movie needs a therapist.

Tyler: I’d like to scratch on the 8-ball but ultimately tell the Academy “good game.” From a movie-watching perspective, I didn’t really like it: I didn’t care much for any of the characters (does pity for Sarah count?), it seemed much longer than it needed to be, and there wasn’t enough actual pool in it, though I understand that there needs to be a balance between the action and the actual story development. There was also a sense of foreboding that something bad was going to happen, and as it became increasingly obvious that Sarah would be used as nothing more than a catalyst for Eddie to actually grow as a person, I kind of just sat and waited for her to die.⁷ 

From a macro level, though, I applaud the exploration of the male ego and learning when to quit, and I appreciate it indirectly popularizing a game I enjoy. I agree with you in that I expected Minnesota Fats to be the main antagonist, so the fact that it was essentially Fast Eddie battling against himself was a nice subversion of expectations.
In the end, though, I almost feel reverse-hustled by this movie, in that it was supposed to be really good but I ended up not enjoying it. Maybe we need to stop watching these movies on weeknights?

Let The Credits Roll

Thanks for reading! Some quick housekeeping as you exit the theatre:

• If you have plots and feelings of your own (on the movie or ILTBTA in general), feel free to comment on the post or simply reply to the email. If you liked reading this: tell your friends! If you hated reading this: tell your friends how much you hated it by forwarding it to them!

• If you’re a weirdo like Tyler and use Twitter, feel free to follow us there @BlankTheAcademy for ILTBTA updates, rejected jokes, and other random movie-related musings. Once we reach a million followers, we’ll offer to purchase the @ILTBTA handle from the butthead who snagged it before us.

• If you’d like to start a wild Best Picture journey of your own, feel free to download a copy of The Spreadsheet. Bonus: checking off the boxes is oddly satisfying.

Post-Credits Scene

Get a sneak peek at the next ILTBTA installment.

Make sure your seatbelts are fastened and you’ve read the safety information in the seatback pocket, because our next ILTBTA post will be on 2004’s The Aviator. Directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the infamous Howard Hughes, The Aviator is available to watch for free with an HBO Max subscription.

Until then, steer clear of pool players with nicknames.

1. Sounds like my ex-wife!

2. Tyler: This nickname has way too many syllables.

3. That’s over $178,000 in today’s dollars!

4. That’s over 3 days in today’s hours!

5. Ellen: Why? Why? Whyyyyyyyyyyy?

6. Results tabulated and certified by the accountants at Ernst & Yum™.

7. Tyler: Possibly the saddest sentence I’ve ever written.