Pardon our dust! We just migrated to a new host and platform, and we're still doing some fine-tuning. Broken images, URLs, etc. will be par for the course.
The Hustler (1961) [Collector’s Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)
****/**** DVD – Image B Sound B Extras B- BD – Image B- Sound A- Extras A- starring Paul Newman, Piper Laurie, George C. Scott, Jackie Gleason screenplay by Sidney Carroll and Robert Rossen, based on the novel by Walter S. Tevis directed by Robert Rossen
by Walter Chaw When one engages in hunting annis mirabilis, one would do well not to overlook 1961. The year after the cinema went insane (Ethan Mordden coins this wonderful phrase that before 1960, you listened to mother or you drove off a cliff–and after it, listen to mother and you're Psycho) is marked by a beloved film based on a Truman Capote novella about two hookers falling in love in New York (Breakfast at Tiffany's) and by Brando's first and only directorial effort, the marvellously murky anti-western One-Eyed Jacks. Billy Wilder guided Jimmy Cagney through his last rapid-fire explosion in a scabrous screed on the early days of globalism in One, Two, Three, while John Huston charted the last gasps of Old Hollywood and the West in The Misfits. In the sexual repression-drives-you-crazy sweepstakes, Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass makes time with William Wyler's lesbo-drama The Children's Hour (and there's Splendor's Warren Beatty again in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone). You want race? How about the new lyrics added to West Side Story's immigrant lament? Or Lancaster cutting a square swath through the Manhattan barrio in John Frankenheimer's The Young Savages? 1961 was a miraculous year for any number of reasons, but count among the big ones Paul Newman's emergence as the quintessential avatar for the entire decade–the scurrilous anti-hero (some point to Steve McQueen, but McQueen was never an asshole on purpose and never an actor at all) who represented the truthy eruption of everything the Eisenhower kids were holding back during those rocket-bra'd, tail-finned years spent basking in the post-nuclear sun of capitalism-as-panacea.
RUNNING TIME 135 minutes MPAA G ASPECT RATIO(S) 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced) LANGUAGES English DD 2.0 (Stereo) English DD 2.0 (Mono) French DD 2.0 (Mono) Spanish DD 2.0 (Mono) CC Yes SUBTITLES English Spanish REGION 1 DISC TYPE DVD-9 + DVD-5 STUDIO Fox
RUNNING TIME 135 minutes MPAA G ASPECT RATIO(S) 2.35:1 (1080p/MPEG-4) LANGUAGES English 5.1 DTS-HD MA English DD 2.0 (Mono) French DTS 5.1 German DTS 5.1 Spanish DD 5.1 Portuguese DD 5.1 SUBTITLES English French Spanish Portuguese German Norwegian Swedish Finnish Turkish Thai Chinese REGION All DISC TYPE BD-50 STUDIO Fox
Newman's "Fast" Eddie Felson in blacklist whistleblower Robert Rossen's The Hustler is a character marinated in the shame of his moral failing. His stock in trade is deception: he doesn't have friends, he has marks and accessories, and it's to the film's credit that we never learn what broke this man down to his wits and the stroke of his stick. There need not be a headwaters identified for the Fall of Man. The Fall of Man is predetermined. By the end of the film, Eddie will fall in with the wrong manager (George C. Scott's Burt), the wrong game, and the wrong dame (Piper Laurie's Laurie), and though it ends with a whisper of hope, the jury's out as to how much Eddie's really learned–or how much he's capable of learning. The lesson of the rest of the '60s (Marshall McLuhan's "medium cool" generation) follows the trajectory of Felson's decline from irredeemable rapscallion to the kind of beaten, devastated, betrayed antihero who characterized the paranoid cinema of the 1970s. "Fast" Eddie is the spiritual father of Michael Corleone and Joe Frady and Cpt. Willard–all the compromised symbols of cinema's disenchanted adolescence. Fair to wonder if, without The Hustler, anyone would have developed a thick-enough skin to absorb The Conversation or Night Moves or Fat City. Which is not to say that The Hustler was the primogenitor of the New American Cinema, just that it's a product, filthy and true, of the social temperature that would drop to absolute zero in the film-brat generation. If there's ever a question as to what the Sixties are about as a movement in American cinema, Newman's The Hustler and Hud are the thesis statements that launch Warren Beatty's end-of-decade transitional dissertations Bonnie & Clyde and McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
A pre-credits sequence establishes the con: Eddie plays a lush of a traveling salesman, talking big and making an impossible shot, missing it a second time, and then scoring the stake of the watering hole's suddenly predacious clientele the third time around. It's a hustle that puts the audience in Eddie's pocket, because no matter how brash and arrogant he turns out to be later on, we remember this scene's lesson that this world is swollen with vultures looking to pick the flesh off a weakened animal. When the movie proper begins, Eddie enters the rarefied, mote-filled still of Ames Pool Hall and declares it a church. (His partner calls it a morgue.) Soon, Eddie finds a high-stakes game with legendary Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason) that he doesn't know to leave in time. Too much to read into this as Rossen's own initial resistance to HUAC followed by his exhausted, calamitous decision to fold?
The rest of The Hustler deals with Eddie's efforts to piece his confidence and stash back together and go another twelve with Fats. These include gaining Fats's ruthless manager Burt and shacking up with a bus stop girl too smart to fall in love with him but too hopeless to stop herself from doing so anyway. There's a seduction/rape in the picture that spools out slippery like a biblical allegory, climaxing with a message of self-abnegation written on a bathroom window and a realization by our antihero that he's doomed to learn something from the destruction of every single thing in his life that's pure, of everything that comes with the potential for a future. If the narrative structure of the piece is framed by two matches between Eddie and Minnesota, the thematic structure is a freight train to Hell punctuated by first a late-night train ride where Burt lays out what he thinks of Laurie, then this rape sequence, which cements the transition from Elia Kazan's Breem-contaminated A Streetcar Named Desire to the collapse of Breem's Code later in The Hustler's decade. How Eddie attains wisdom is cynicism elevated to philosophy. In Rossen's world, the only victories are won at the expense of those who believe in you, the creeds you've embraced, and the values you've gathered as fortification against the rising tide of entropy and chaos. Eddie plays a game whose only resolution is isolation, whose only victories are Pyrrhic; it provides the illusion of control in its phallic strutting and bursts of antic motion. In a way, Eddie's true modern progeny is There Will Be Blood's Daniel Plainview, drinking bitter milkshakes since 1961.
THE DVD The first platter of Fox's two-disc Collector's Edition reissue of The Hustler sports the film in a slick but unfortunately nonprogressive 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. Essential to see the picture in 'scope regardless, with Rossen exhibiting more compositional prowess here than anywhere else in his filmography. The Dolby 2.0 audio, offered up in barely-distinguishable stereo and mono options, crisply delivers the jazzy score and dialogue without distortion. A commentary ported over from the previous DVD has Stuart Galbraith leading a lively roundelay with Newman, Rossen's daughter Carol, legendary editor Dede Allen, bit-player Stefan Gierasch, assistant director Ulu Grosbard, critic Richard Schickel, and producer-writer Jeff Young. The usual stories are rehashed–the last-minute recruitment of Newman, his billiards apprenticeship beneath Willie Mosconi–and Galbraith, to his credit, raises the spectre of the HUAC hearings with Ms. Rossen and the rest. Schickel proves the lone weak link, perhaps not surprisingly.
Meanwhile, Mike Massey hosts a "Trick Shot Analysis" feature highlighting five of the film's, yes, trick shots. Here's my complaint with this extra and others like it on the second disc: the movie's not really about pool. Don't get me wrong–I love pool. Here's an anecdote from my professional history: I was once asked to oversee a presentation of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly that had as its central attraction a contest with prizes that would go to the person who could identify the most historical errors in the piece. I declined. I declined, too, to ever work with that particular organization again by the fervour of my "no." You see, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is as much about the Civil War as The Hustler is about pool, if you catch my drift. Anyway, you can watch Massey demonstrate the five shots as pop-ups while the film unravels or separately via the menu.
Disc Two launches with a retrospective overview, "Life in the Fast Lane: Fast Eddie Felson and the Search for Greatness" (12 mins.), that recycles the same-old stories the yak-track does, the difference being that you get to watch Newman as he's telling them. "The Hustler: The Inside Story" (24 mins.) is the same thing, ultimately, but sixteen minutes longer. I know I seem grumpy, but I would've preferred the Criterion approach of fewer witnesses and more scholars for this film–and I would have asked Ethan Mordden to contribute the lion's share of analysis. You get a little of that in "Milestones in Cinema History: The Hustler" (28 mins.), a cursory examination of the film's impact on the rest of the Sixties and beyond that for the most part resists hagiography. "Swimming with Sharks: The Art of the Hustle" (10 mins.) does the macho posture cha-cha with "experts" talking about the vernacular related to pool hustling–which, again, in relation to this picture, just pisses me right off. "Paul Newman: Hollywood's Cool Hand" (44 mins.) is the Biography Channel's survey of Newman's career. It's exhaustive and superficial in the same motion. Lastly, Massey returns to perform five more trick shots. A stills gallery plus Newman-centric trailers for The Hustler, The Towering Inferno, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Quintet, Hombre, The Long Hot Summer, From the Terrace, The Verdict, and What a Way to Go! round out the presentation
The first platter of Fox's two-disc Collector's Edition reissue of The Hustler sports the film in a slick but unfortunately nonprogressive 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. Essential to see the picture in 'scope regardless, with Rossen exhibiting more compositional prowess here than anywhere else in his filmography. The Dolby 2.0 audio, offered up in barely-distinguishable stereo and mono options, crisply delivers the jazzy score and dialogue without distortion. A commentary ported over from the previous DVD has Stuart Galbraith leading a lively roundelay with Newman, Rossen's daughter Carol, legendary editor Dede Allen, bit-player Stefan Gierasch, assistant director Ulu Grosbard, critic Richard Schickel, and producer-writer Jeff Young. The usual stories are rehashed–the last-minute recruitment of Newman, his billiards apprenticeship beneath Willie Mosconi–and Galbraith, to his credit, raises the spectre of the HUAC hearings with Ms. Rossen and the rest. Schickel proves the lone weak link, perhaps not surprisingly.
Meanwhile, Mike Massey hosts a "Trick Shot Analysis" feature highlighting five of the film's, yes, trick shots. Here's my complaint with this extra and others like it on the second disc: the movie's not really about pool. Don't get me wrong–I love pool. Here's an anecdote from my professional history: I was once asked to oversee a presentation of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly that had as its central attraction a contest with prizes that would go to the person who could identify the most historical errors in the piece. I declined. I declined, too, to ever work with that particular organization again by the fervour of my "no." You see, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is as much about the Civil War as The Hustler is about pool, if you catch my drift. Anyway, you can watch Massey demonstrate the five shots as pop-ups while the film unravels or separately via the menu.
Disc Two launches with a retrospective overview, "Life in the Fast Lane: Fast Eddie Felson and the Search for Greatness" (12 mins.), that recycles the same-old stories the yak-track does, the difference being that you get to watch Newman as he's telling them. "The Hustler: The Inside Story" (24 mins.) is the same thing, ultimately, but sixteen minutes longer. I know I seem grumpy, but I would've preferred the Criterion approach of fewer witnesses and more scholars for this film–and I would have asked Ethan Mordden to contribute the lion's share of analysis. You get a little of that in "Milestones in Cinema History: The Hustler" (28 mins.), a cursory examination of the film's impact on the rest of the Sixties and beyond that for the most part resists hagiography. "Swimming with Sharks: The Art of the Hustle" (10 mins.) does the macho posture cha-cha with "experts" talking about the vernacular related to pool hustling–which, again, in relation to this picture, just pisses me right off. "Paul Newman: Hollywood's Cool Hand" (44 mins.) is the Biography Channel's survey of Newman's career. It's exhaustive and superficial in the same motion. Lastly, Massey returns to perform five more trick shots. A stills gallery plus Newman-centric trailers for The Hustler, The Towering Inferno, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Quintet, Hombre, The Long Hot Summer, From the Terrace, The Verdict, and What a Way to Go! round out the presentation. Originally published: April 29, 2008.
THE BLU-RAY DISC by Bill Chambers Fox brings The Hustler to Blu-ray in the film's most supplement-rich edition yet. But in a way, this is the inverse of Fox/MGM's concurrent BD of The Manchurian Candidate, in that it looks artificial but sounds, despite the upgrade to 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, very natural. The Hustler's 2.35:1, 1080p transfer is entirely too smooth; while not as severely airbrushed as DVNR poster children Predator and Patton, the image lacks texture (fine detail proves frustratingly elusive) and depth–and, needless to say, grain, finally costing the gritty black-and-white picture some of its social-realist capital. Greyscale contrast is magnificient, however, and the source print is in pristine condition. The attendant remix seems more reverent of the movie's aesthetic virtues and limitations, barely doing more than providing a lossless platform for the original mono track, which is on board as well in DD 2.0. What few discrete effects there are blessedly lack the aggressive localization that plagues The Manchurian Candidate on the format.
Joining the 2008 Collector's Edition DVD's batch of extras on this disc are three newly-minted featurettes, the best of which covers the life and times of novelist Walter Tevis. But first, "Paul Newman at Fox" (27 mins., HD) reviews Newman's tenure at the studio, meaning it doesn't really delve into his later years since the narrative stops at 1982's The Verdict, his last film for Fox. Still, this is an informed, fairly candid piece wherein the likes of biographer Eric Lax and punmeister Gene Shalit–who was evidently close friends with Newman–touch on the actor's collaborations with Martin Ritt (inevitably, Paramount's Hud gets short shrift, while the movies Newman made for Robert Altman at Fox are not even mentioned), his feud with Jack Warner, and the two films in which he directed second wife Joanne Woodward. The interviewees also spark to the idea that the 1978 death of Scott Newman informed père's performance in The Verdict, the brief HiDef glimpses of which are gorgeous. Similarly anticlimactic but far more elliptical, "Jackie Gleason: The Big Man" (12 mins., HD) finds writer Michael Preminger (no relation to Gleason's Skidoo director Otto Preminger) and others recounting Gleason's climb to the top and…apparent obsession with aliens?! In addition to dropping that inexplicable tidbit, the piece places undue emphasis on Gleason's follow-up to The Hustler, Gigot.
Lastly, in "The Real Hustler: Walter Tevis" (19 mins., HD), family and scholars of the late author discuss Tevis's difficult upbringing and later battles with alcoholism, each of heavily which informed his work–though the latter would significantly curb his output, too. Son Will Tevis opens with a telling anecdote about how when he used to play the board game "Careers" with his father, Walter would always choose the "fame" track. Only the stills gallery and Newman trailers were dropped for this release (the latter replaced by U.S. and Spanish theatrical trailers for The Hustler), whose Digibook packaging is slimmer than the kind Warner and Sony use. Originally published: May 24, 2011.
![Jackie Chan's First Strike (1996) + Rush Hour (1998) [New Line Platinum Series] - DVDs](https://filmfreakcentral.net/wp-content/plugins/contextual-related-posts/default.png "Jackie Chan's First Strike (1996) + Rush Hour (1998) [New Line Platinum Series] - DVDs")