Eddie Felson and his mentor, Charlie, are pool "hustlers": they go from bar to bar, claiming to travel to a sales convention, but in reality persuade local people to gamble on a game of pool, which is naturally always won by expert Eddie. Finally, Eddie challenges "Minnesota Fats". Eddie wins, game after game, earning 11,000$, but insists on playing "Fats" again and again. After 25 hours of pool, Eddie gets drunk, loses focus and loses all he won. He parts from Charlie and starts a relationship with a local girl, Sarah, an alcoholic who wants to be a writer. Bert offers Eddie to be his manager in exchange for a 75% profit. Broke and too famous to hustle people, Eddie grudgingly accepts. They challenge the wealthy Findley to billiard. Eddie wins, but refuses to listen to Sarah, who commits suicide. Eddie returns to play pool against "Fats", and this time wins when "Fats" admits the defeat.
Excellent drama which works on almost all levels, this sports film uses its ostensible main topic of pool only as a catalyst and mirror for its main theme about human relationships, contemplating about the development of character. Brilliant Paul Newman probably delivered one of his five best performances in his entire career as the conflicting Eddie Felson, a man who is great at pool, but awful at human relations: the opening 20-minute sequence of pool, displaying his duel with "Minnesota Fats", is almost as suspenseful as a thriller, with the protagonist exclaiming: "I'm the best you ever seen, Fats. I'm the best there is. And even if you beat me, I'm still the best." Eddie indeed wins in several games in a row, only to then go the opposite curve and lose everything because his obsession didn't allow him to stop while at his prime, since after 25 hours of the game he is past his prime, and sinks into alcohol to keep awake. He doesn't know when to let go.
"The Hustler" shows the three characters at their opposites: Eddie and Sarah are two aimless people who are depressed because they cannot do anything out of their talents (pool; writing), while Bert (genius George C. Scott) is the embodiment of greed and wants to dominate them completely. Director Robert Rossen crafts the film in an incredibly elegant way, and the running time flows smoothly throughout, whereas the sharp script is full of quotable lines and situations—when Eddie slaps Sarah, she just turns her head back and looks at him, without a reaction, to say: "Are you waiting for me to cry?" In another sequence, Eddie says: "I just had to show those creeps and those punks what the game is like when it's great. When it's really great. You know, like anything can be great! Anything can be great! I don't care, bricklaying can be great, if a guy knows." While the ending is kind of contrived (Sarah's fate in the storyline comes off as sort of forced and surprising) and somewhat anti-climatic, it still rounds up its theme nicely: for every victory on one area, there is defeat in something else. Eddie chose the game, but lost his relationship. This ties into the yin and yang notion that there is always balance in life, and the people have to choose to give up something to pursue something else.
Grade:+++
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