Cinema: Chalk Opera

The Hustler (20th Century-Fox), commercially speaking, is a long-shot money ball that will probably hit the public’s pocket like a rocket and rack up an impressive score. Artistically speaking, it is an amusingly mangled myth, an epos in a pool hall, a ceremony of chivalric valor on the Field of the Cloth of Green.

The hero (Paul Newman) is a raucous young crown prince of the cue who challenges the king (Jackie Gleason) to do battle for his throne. For 36 hours without intermission, they have at each other: now hacking fiercely at the glistening balls, now waving their cues exquisitely, like pallid wands, as the balls disappear, and always drinking, drinking, drinking as they play. Hour by hour, rack by rack, the young challenger draws steadily ahead, grows steadily more arrogant. After 25 hours, playing for $1,000 a game, he is $18,000 in the green. “It’s my table!” he crows. “I own it. I’m the best!” On the sidelines a shrewd gambler (George C. Scott) smiles thinly and murmurs to the dazed old king: “Stay with this kid. He’s a loser.”

And so he is. Awash in drink and glory, Newman finds his fingers filling up with whisky, and lets Gleason clean him out. Then, like all the fallen heroes in the legends, he goes down into the underworld. At an all-night coffee counter in a Greyhound bus depot he meets a puffy-pretty alcoholic (Piper Laurie), huts up with her and, whenever he needs money, hustles suckers in low poolrooms where he is not known. One night he takes the wrong chump. Four wharf rats gang him and break his thumbs—a mythological emasculation if ever there was one. Soon after that—in part because the hero, in his pool-fool cuepidity, has neglected her —the girl lets her life out of her wrists. The hero’s heart at last is touched. Redeemed by love and suffering, he rises from spiritual death, challenges the old king once more and this time defeats him.

The picture is much too long (2 hr. 15 min.), but it has strength as well as length. Cameraman Gene Shufton has artfully preserved what Actor Gleason calls “the dirty antiseptic look of poolrooms—spots on the floor, toilets stuffed up, but the tables brushed immaculately, like green jewels lying in the mud.” The pool-shooting scenes are magnificently staged —the principals were coached by Willie Mosconi, top-ranking pool player in the U.S.—and tellingly edited by Director Robert Rossen (They Came to Cordura). The suspense in the first big game will surely bring sweat to any palm that has ever touched a cuestick. Then, too, Newman is better than usual; Gleason, as the slit-mouthed, beady-eyed Minnesota Fats, darts among the shabby little pool sharks like an improbably agile and natty whale; and Gambler Scott looks as though he could sell hot-air heat to the devil.

In the minds of many customers there may arise a certain doubt that playing pool is as lofty a theme as Director Rossen seems to think, but he doggedly insists on the point, and in the middle of the picture he carries it with a clutch of phrases (“I got oil in my arm”) that breathe the smoky poetry of poolrooms and ring true as a struck spittoon.