The Hustler

I've never responded to The Hustler (1961) with burgeoning enthusiasm, although I do think it's well-made and quite a good movie. It's also probably the film that solidified Paul Newman's place as a serious leading man, even though he'd already demonstrated his charisma, charm, and ability to keep an audience glued to the screen in movies like Somebody Up There Likes Me, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Long Hot Summer. I love the excesses of Cat and the sizzling Southern sex appeal of Summer. The Hustler is a more restrained movie in some ways (or maybe less over-the-top is the right way to put it), but it explores a number of grown-up issues fairly openly and in a nuanced way, so it's easy to see why it appealed to audiences and critics in 1961: it's a thoughtful if somewhat dated movie directed with taste and style and economy by Robert Rossen about a low-class heel named Eddie Felson, a pool hustler who, like any good addict, doesn't know when to quit. He longs to play against the allegedly unbeatable Minnesota Fats (played with his own brand of relaxed cool by Jackie Gleason). But when the two of them do play each other, Fats beats the pants of Eddie, only whetting his appetite for another shot at him.

What is admittedly fascinating about The Hustler is its exploration of damaged, addicted, pathetic people. Eddie--despite all his skill as a pool player and his boyish good looks and his happy-go-lucky charm--is a loser. (He's told as much by any number of the other characters in the film). And what's more, he's in complete denial about it. This makes him a perfect match for Piper Laurie's character, a drunk named Sarah whom he meets at a bus station one morning. They eventually go back to her place, and the world they forge together is one of excesses, a perfect breeding ground for unhappiness that's just drunk enough to pass off as contentment, until it's too late.

The Hustler represents the change Hollywood was undergoing in the 1960s: there's a kind of unmitigated darkness explored in this movie that you wouldn't have likely found--outside of a film noir, maybe--ten or fifteen years earlier. (And in the film noirs, that darkness was always stylized so that it felt fun and thrilling.) Here the darkness is real and pathetic and alarming, and this might explain why I've generally felt a bit detached from the movie. It's a sad film about sad people, yet this makes it quite believable, quite realistic, and what's more, it doesn't attempt to explain its characters or redeem them. We're not supposed to walk out of the movie feeling some kind of happy, chipper last-minute message about humankind being broken but fixable.

Piper Laurie really makes an impression in The Hustler: the minute she speaks--with that husky, deep, billowing yet soft voice--she's a presence, a kind of elixir that not even the charm of Paul Newman can temper. And Newman, who always exuded a kind of laid-back, indomitable likability, keeps up his end of the bargain here: he makes Eddie somehow acceptable, despite his flaws and the beautifully tragic imbalance of his life: he has such masterful control when he's hot, such absolute nothingness when he's not. It's a striking quality, and it's what makes Paul Newman such a noteworthy actor of his or any era.

The film is based on a novel by Walter Tevis, and it was adapted by Sidney Carroll and the director. The lovely jazz score was composed by Kenyon Hopkins. With George C. Scott as a rich businessman who becomes Eddie's manager, Myron McCormick as Eddie's former manager/partner, and Murray Hamilton. Followed by The Color of Money in 1986, which finally afforded Newman a long overdue Academy Award for Best Actor. (I think he should have gotten it for Hud.)

The Graduate

The ending of The Graduate (1967) is worth sitting through the whole rest of the movie, which is alternately amusing and unpleasant.

Dustin Hoffman plays the main character, Ben Braddock, a recent college graduate who is propositioned by the wife of his dad's business partner. Her name is Mrs. Robinson, and she wears fur coats and leopard printed dresses and has a streak of white in her brown hair: it's not exactly a subtle comparison that the scriptwriters--Calder Willingham and Buck Henry--are making: she's a tiger stalking her prey. Thankfully, Anne Bancroft plays her with delicious cunning and restraint. She utters every word as though she'd just as well not speak at all, and she exercises almost pathological patience with Ben as she leads him into bed without letting him realize it. He's an awkward, oblivious young man who's worried about his future, and by the time the trap has been laid he's too caught up in it to get himself out.

I first saw The Graduate when I was about thirteen, and I was too young to really grasp the impact that this film had: it was part of the counter-culture, simultaneously inscribed by it and inscribing it, and a member of a small club of popular films from the 1960s that represented a sort of cinematic and cultural revolution. Others include Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, and Midnight Cowboy. The Graduate, with its Simon and Garfunkel music throughout and its self-aware hipness, is a kind of a comic critique of American values: Ben, the privileged upper-middle-class college boy has had everything handed to him, and now at 21 he feels completely at a loss about what to do with the rest of his life. Mrs. Robinson, who years ago was forced into an unhappy marriage because she was pregnant, is an alcoholic and obviously isn't getting any satisfaction from her husband. (They have separate rooms and live amongst each other rather than together.)

In one scene, Ben is forced to show off the scuba diving suit his father bought him, and once he's submerged in the swimming pool, he just lays at the bottom, weightless but feeling smothered by the expectations of his parents and their friends. For most of the movie, the message is: ignore the established values. They are lies and they lead to unhappiness. Break the rules.

But when Ben meets Mrs. Robinson's charming daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross), who's on break from Berkeley, he falls for her, which knocks the jealous, conniving mother out of the loop. Apparently love trumps lust, and suddenly The Graduate turns into a more traditional kind of love story. When Mrs. Robinson threatens to tell her daughter about the affair with Ben, Ben beats her to the punch, hoping that his directness will prevent a breakup. But Elaine is furious and heartbroken, and she heads back to college in disgust with Ben. Now he must win her back, and that's when we get to the finale. [SPOILERS] It's such a famous scene: Ben pounding on the glass of the window overlooking the sanctuary, all the wedding guests staring at this raving madman in stunned silence, Elaine looking conflicted but flattered that someone would come for her in such a grandiose style: She's trying to decide whether to stay with the man she's just married or run off with Ben. When she finally does run off with him, the movie once again takes up its counter-culture cross, almost literally: Ben brandishes a big gold cross, fending off the angry wedding party, and then shoves it into the door handles to lock everyone inside the church.

As Ben and Elaine flea the church and hail a bus, we're left with the looks on their faces: It's almost an "I've made a big mistake" moment (ala Arrested Development), except their expressions are more vacant than that: the elation of breaking the rules is already wearing off, and suddenly they're left with real life and all its questions and monotonies. Whether you follow the rules of society or not, sooner or later, the familiar will get you: the dangerous routine will impinge the happy couple.

The Graduate holds up fairly well, but it always leaves me feeling depressed, perhaps because one of the aching truths it wrestles with is that horrible feeling of sinking into a routine, which is so frightening for some and so comforting for others. Or perhaps it's just my puritan upbringing rearing its ugly head. Directed by Mike Nichols. With William Daniels, Murray Hamilton, and Elizabeth Wilson. ★★★

Jaws

In Jaws (1975), a Northeastern beachfront town called Amity Island is threatened by a massive, aggressive Great White Shark. Despite three horrendous attacks on swimmers, the mayor and the small business owners put up a fight when the police chief (Roy Scheider) decides to close down the beaches. It's good old capitalism at work. Some critics have lamented that Jaws is some kind of left-wing attack on the free market, but are they in favor of sending droves of swimmers into the beaches to be eaten alive? The police chief has his hands full between the pressure from the public to catch the shark and the pressure from the local government to keep the beaches open (and thus, to keep the town's economy thriving.) He enlists the help of an egghead oceanographer (Richard Dreyfuss) and a crusty old sailor (Robert Shaw) to catch the mammoth shark.

Jaws is a casebook example of the old monster-movie rule: show as little of the monster as possible for as long as possible. That way, the audience members have built up a picture of the beast in their minds that's far more terrifying than the actual thing, the eventual revelation of which then amplifies the terror. Apparently, director Steven Spielberg and his crew began referring to their movie as "Flaws" during the shoot, because they believed it wasn't going to work. The public thought differently, and Jaws was an enormous hit. The film's financial success--unexpected as it was--had far-reaching consequences, creating the "summer blockbuster movie." Between Jaws and Star Wars, a lot of damage was done to filmmakers who wanted to get funding for smaller movies. If studios could get a crowd-pleasing product like Jaws out, and make a bundle on it (not to mention all the money made via the connected merchandise), then taking risks on so-called "little" movies became even more dangerous and unappealing. Jaws is an efficient, expert thriller, bolstered by a leavening sense of humor and three strong leads, but it's hard not to feel somewhat frustrated by the consequences of its success.

The fun thing about Jaws is in watching how the filmmakers tried to get around actually showing us their beast. The editor, Verna Fields (who won an Oscar for her work), keeps the scare sequences moving, never letting us rest too long on one given image. But she also spends enough time with each shot to let us take in what's happening. That balance gives Jaws a certain charm when compared to today's thrillers, which cut so fast we're often completely in the dark about what's going on. Nothing turns the audience off like being kept out of the loop, and yet it seems to have become a popular movie-making trend, perhaps a cheap way to conceal mistakes from observant movie-goers. With Jaws, we're completely invested, and that ramps up the suspense even more.

I think the biggest problem I have with Jaws is how much it's been built up over the years as a classic. It's better when you don't have such grandiose expectations for it. Then you can sit back and let it entertain you. There are slow spots: the last thirty minutes get to be quite repetitive and you wish they'd just hurry up and kill the damn thing. But the big crowd scenes are well-thought-out for the most part, and there's enough energy and excitement in them to sustain you through the periodic lulls in the movie. And Scheider has great chemistry with Dreyfuss, and with Lorraine Gary, who plays his wife.

With Murray Hamilton as the mayor of Amity Island and Jeffrey Kramer as Scheider's deputy. Adapted by Carl Gottlieb and Peter Benchley from Benchley's novel. John Williams composed the now famous music score.