“When you hustle you keep score real simple. The end of the game you count up your money. That’s how you find out who’s best. That’s the only way.” The lines come from The Hustler (1961) starring Paul Newman, George C. Scott, Piper Laurie and Jackie Gleason. Forget about the divide between red and blue, liberal and conservative, MAGA and woke, Harris and Trump. America’s true division is between Eddie Felson (played by Paul Newman) and Bert Gordon (George C. Scott).
The movie was co-written and directed by Robert Rossen, who had been a member of the Communist Party until he broke with it in 1947. He was initially blacklisted, but then testified behind closed doors and named names. The Hustler was his first, and only, successful film after the blacklist and his testimony. It is a parable of the inextricable links between money, character, success, failure and love. American style.
“YOU OWE ME MONEY!” Bert the professional gambler, backed up by thugs, unforgettably erupts at Eddie, the pool-playing genius, at the end of the movie. Scott roars the last word out as if it were the eternal answer to an eternal question, the alpha and omega of creation itself. And that is what the movie is about: money as a finality. Not as in The Color of Money — the trite title of Martin Scorsese’s disappointing sequel. Rather, money as ontological essence; money as, to borrow Spinoza’s characterisation of it, “the abstract of everything”. Money as the consummate medium for the human desire to possess.
Eddie “Fast Eddie” Felson is a young, uncannily gifted pool player. But he’s also a pool hustler. He enriches himself by tricking other players into thinking he’s not that good. He gets them to place high bets in the expectation they will beat him, and then relieves them of their money once he’s taken them in.
Eddie, though, has his hamartia, his tragic flaw. He travels all the way from California to New York — from the kingdom of illusions to the city of grimy reality — accompanied by his shill, a middle-aged sad-sack named Charlie, to play Minnesota Fats, performed to perfection by Jackie Gleason. After playing the legendary Fats, considered the best pool player in the world, for hours in Ames, the pool room that is Fats’s domain, Eddie trounces him. He wins $10,000 — the equivalent of over $100,000 today. Charlie tells him it’s time to leave. Eddie refuses. “The pool game is over when Fats says it’s over,” Eddie snaps. Fats waits, uncertain whether the match will continue. Bert, clearly Fats’s backer and handler, has quietly seated himself in the pool room, in a chair slightly higher than the others. He says to Fats: “Stay with this kid, he’s a loser.”
Eddie doesn’t care about the money. In that sense, he is what an American is supposed to be, from the Western sheriff, to the outsider-hero private eye or cop, to Superman and Batman. He cares about being true to himself. So he looks at Bert with pain and surprise when Bert makes his comment. They continue to play and Fats ends up destroying him. Eddie is left with nothing. Wildly drunk at this point, he stumbles toward Fats with a few crumpled $100 bills and begs Fats to keep playing. Money is still the medium of his pride. Fats declines. Eddie falls to the ground, and the poolroom clears out. Bert departs, shaking his head.
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