Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Hustler
1961 · Robert Rossen · The Hustler on Sightlines
A green table under a hanging lamp. Around it, in the dark, a ring of faces that will not leave. At one end, Paul Newman's Fast Eddie Felson, jacket off, shirt going limp. At the other, Jackie Gleason's Minnesota Fats, almost motionless, saying very little. Night turns into morning. Somebody chalks a cue. Somebody sights down it. The click of a ball, then the murmur, then the hush again. The Hustler opens with this all-night match, and much of what the film knows is already inside it.
It is built like a duel, and that is the right place to start, because Gilles Deleuze's first great category of cinema fits it closely. He called it the action-image. A character faces a situation, and acting changes that situation. Most classic Hollywood storytelling runs on this loop. Within it Deleuze picked out the large form. A whole milieu presses on a hero until one decisive confrontation settles things. The milieu has a name in his scheme, the synsign, or 'encompasser': the world that surrounds the characters and calls the fight out of them. Rossen and his art directors, Harry Horner and Gene Callahan, made that world unmistakable. Ames Billiards is a secular temple, high-ceilinged and church-like, the tables sitting like altars under the lamps while spectators keep a reverent quiet. The fight itself is what Deleuze called a binomial, force against force: the brilliant young challenger against the legend.
So everything is set up for the action-image to pay off. Eddie has the better talent. Then he loses. He doesn't lose on skill. He loses on character, and the film spends its remaining length working out what that word means.
This is where the lens becomes useful rather than decorative. Deleuze argued that postwar cinema lived through a crisis of the action-image, in which characters could no longer answer what they perceived with an act that fit it. Their actions misfired or came to nothing. The Hustler is not a modernist film. It keeps its continuity, its stars, its moral fable. But it puts the classic climax first and then shows that the climax decided nothing. Eddie can make any shot on the table. What he cannot do is read the situation he is standing in, and the person who can read it is George C. Scott's Bert Gordon. Scott plays him cold, watchful and transactional, a man who treats character as a commodity to be bought. The film gives the power to whoever watches best, and Eddie, the one with all the action in him, is the one who sees least.
Dede Allen's editing makes this physical. She doesn't cut the opening match for excitement. She builds it from duration and accumulation, staying with the ritual of chalking and sighting and with the slow spread of exhaustion through a night that won't end, until the hours register in your own body. Late in his two cinema books Deleuze wrote about a cinema of the body, where the tired, waiting body carries time itself, so that fatigue becomes a way of seeing time pass. Rossen's film only leans toward that idea, but the lean is real. Allen sets these endured, almost real-time passages at the table against sharper cutting in the human scenes, and the contrast splits the film in two. At the table, time is endured. In the cramped rooms Eddie shares with Piper Laurie's Sarah, time presses.
The light comes from somewhere older. Eugen Schüfftan, who won the Oscar for this photography, came out of Weimar cinema. On Metropolis he sharpened his command of architecture carved out of light, and Deleuze's name for that tradition is expressionism: a gradient of light and shadow in which rooms and objects seem charged with a strange life of their own. Schüfftan brought it to New York. The arena of the match is bright and unforgiving. The corners where money and manipulation change hands sink into shadow. On Menschen am Sonntag he had already mixed documentary location texture with Expressionist tonal control, and that mix is the look of The Hustler: smoke, felt, sweat and worn wood, lit as if each one carried a moral weight.
There is a contrarian bet in the format too. Fox shot the film in CinemaScope, the widescreen process the studio used for color spectacle, but here in black and white. Its width is turned inward onto the long rectangle of the table and the layered space of the poolroom, and it isolates people instead of glorifying them. The deep focus descends from Gregg Toland's work on Citizen Kane, keeping the table, the hustler and his backers all sharp at once. André Bazin, the critic who championed Toland, argued that deep focus respects reality by letting us see a whole situation in a single frame. The champion Willie Mosconi, the film's technical advisor, executed many of the trick shots on camera. That is a Bazinian kind of truth: the ball really went in.
Rossen built this from his own earlier work. Body and Soul gave him the gifted man who has to sell his talent to survive, plus James Wong Howe's in-the-arena camera, which treats sport as fate. All the King's Men set his method of semi-documentary, deep-focus realism carrying a moral fable. Champion had already shown the sports antihero whose need to win corrodes everyone around him. Fast Eddie completes that arc and then goes past it, because the film cares less about whether he wins than about whether he can become someone worth being.
It also opened doors. Allen would go on to Bonnie and Clyde, the film often credited with bringing European New Wave cutting into Hollywood. The wounded, arrogant, self-destroying hero Newman defined here became, in the decade that followed, the beautiful loser at the center of American film. Twenty-five years later Martin Scorsese made a sequel, and it finally won Newman the Oscar this film had been nominated for. The Hustler sits on a hinge. It is one of the last great studio pictures shot in expressive monochrome, and one of the first to suspect that the decisive act no longer decides.
Watch the opening match again, and this time don't watch the balls. Watch the faces in the dark around the table, and watch Bert. Then watch the clock running down inside Eddie's body. The film asks a question it never quite closes: what is the difference between winning and being a winner? It shows you that the answer was in the room all night, and the man holding the cue was the one who couldn't see it.
Concepts in play
- action-image (large form) — The opening all-night duel with Fats is built as the decisive confrontation, then turns out to be a false climax: Eddie loses on character, not talent.
- the encompasser (synsign) — Ames Billiards as a secular temple: high church-like ceilings, tables like altars under hanging lamps, spectators in a reverent hush ringing the performer.
- binomial — Eddie's challenge to Minnesota Fats, the gifted, self-sabotaging challenger against the still, composed legend.
- crisis of the action-image — Eddie has the superior talent but cannot read the situation; the watchful Bert Gordon, who treats character as a commodity, holds the real power.
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — Dede Allen holds on the ritual of play, chalking, sighting and the slow drift of exhaustion across the marathon night, so the hours are felt physically.
- expressionism (light-shadow gradient) — Schüfftan's Weimar-derived chiaroscuro: the bright, merciless arena of the match against shadowed corners where money and manipulation change hands.