Smoke hangs in the cone of light over the green baize, and a young man in shirtsleeves is running the table as if the rest of the room did not exist. He is loose, gifted, a little too pleased with himself — you can read the talent in his wrist and the trouble in his grin. Before the long night at Ames pool hall is over he will play one game too many, and the film will quietly stop being about pool.

The Hustler is Robert Rossen’s argument that a man’s real opponent is never on the other side of the table. Fast Eddie Felson can beat almost anyone with a cue in his hand; what he cannot beat is himself. Adapted from Walter Tevis’s novel, the picture uses one marathon match as the way into something older and harder — the gap between talent and character, between winning and being worth the win.

The room and the game

It opens on one of the great duels in American cinema: Eddie against Minnesota Fats, an all-night session that bleeds into a second day as the stakes climb and the smoke thickens. Jackie Gleason plays Fats as a study in stillness — pressed, immaculate, economical — and the contrast says everything. Eddie has the gift; Fats has the discipline. Eugen Schüfftan shoots it in deep-focus black and white, the felt and the chalk and the tired faces lit like a prizefight, until the room itself becomes a character: airless, ritual, merciless.

Four performances that never blink

Newman gives Eddie all his charm and then peels it away layer by layer, in what remains one of the defining turns of his career. The film is stacked around him: Piper Laurie as Sarah, the bruised, clear-eyed woman who loves him and sees straight through him; George C. Scott as Bert Gordon, the gambler-manager whose notion of “character” is the coldest thing in the movie. All four leads earned Academy Award nominations, and you understand why — nobody is acting at you here, everybody is listening.

The film all but invented the modern pool-hall drama and handed the language a permanent figure in “Fast Eddie.” Newman came back to the role a quarter-century later in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money and finally took home the Oscar this performance had earned. Schüfftan’s photography won in its year, and so did the art direction — but the deeper legacy is tonal. Almost every film since about a gifted loser learning what victory costs is, somewhere in its bloodstream, paying off a debt to this one.

Paul Newman as Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler (1961) — Paul Newman in The Hustler (1961), directed by Robert Rossen.

Why it still earns the score

The romance carries a little of its era’s melodrama, and the moral bookkeeping is now and then underlined more than it needs to be — those are the limits, and they are real. But the craft is total and the four performances are flawless, and the central idea cuts as clean as ever: you can win everything and lose, and lose everything and finally win. It is a film about failure that is itself a near-perfect piece of work.

The Hustler premiered in 1961, directed by Robert Rossen from a screenplay he wrote with Sidney Carroll, adapted from Walter Tevis’s novel. Eugen Schüfftan photographed it in black and white; Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie and George C. Scott head the cast. Nominated for nine Academy Awards and winner of two, it runs a hundred and thirty-four minutes and has not aged a day where it matters.

Tags: drama, paul newman, George C. Scott, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, Robert Rossen, The Hustler