The hustler review

There are some who wrongfully assume that The Hustler is about pool. It is a natural assumption: much of the action takes place in billiards rooms and pool halls, but this movie is no more about pool than Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull is about boxing. Lead character Fast Eddie Felson Paul Newman is a pool shark, but change him into a poker player or a golfer, and The Hustler would play out pretty much the same. Robert Rossen's film is far less about Fast Eddie's confrontations with other players than it is about his war with his own demons and his struggle to define the intangible meaning of "character. When the film opens, Fast Eddie is making a living as a pool hustler, traveling around the country with his mentor and partner, Charlie Myron McCormick , winning small amounts of cash in bars and other establishments. But Eddie yearns for something more — not only to make a big score, but to play the best.

There are only a handful of movie characters so real that the audience refers to them as touchstones. Fast Eddie Felson is one of them. The pool shark played by Paul Newman in "The Hustler" 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.

T he Hustler begins with a great hustle. Eddie Felson, brilliantly played by a young and gorgeous Paul Newman, leans low over a barroom pool table, inspecting the cue ball and another ball pinned together on the side rail less than a foot from the end pockets. Good thing no one told him; stumbling over to the facing side, he lines up and drains the ball. His partner in this con game is a pudgy fellow named Charlie Myron McCormick , who has the perfect look of a man so well-acquainted with losing he can see it coming a mile down the pipe and who lays a bet against his boy repeating the magic shot. Eddie tries and misses.

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