THE HUSTLER (Robert Rossen, 1961)

Robert Rossen’s The Hustler is a film of cheap effects. For me, the low point of Rossen’s mise-en-scène arrives when the thugs take Eddie behind the frosty screen and break his thumbs. Oh, really? Why take him behind the screen? After all, the thugs don’t know that a camera is there watching them. The answer is: Of course, the thugs wouldn’t take Eddie behind the frosty screen; Rossen has them do this for no other purpose than to manufacture an arty composition. That’s his method throughout: mise-en-scène not to help develop ideas, but to generate selfconscious visual effects.
     The script; the dialogue! This line always cracks me up: “You’re not a loser, Eddie. You’re a winner!” Rossen and Sidney Carroll’s script is dotted with inanities such as this.
     Jackie Gleason’s performance as Minnesota Fats. He doesn’t even give it! The next time you watch the film, note Dede Allen’s cutting. It is Allen who manufactures that performance out of bits and pieces that she has assembled. Gleason’s own contribution is uproariously minimal. Rossen set him up to wear one expression, then another, then another; and Allen went to work, creating the illusion that Gleason was playing the part of Minnesota Fats.
     The Sixth Sense guarantees that I will never again consider The Hustler the worst movie ever made, but I can never think it much better than that, not with its creaking good-vs.-evil allegory, its prettified pool hall, its gratuitous suicide, its cruel (when not laughable) exploitation of medical affliction. To me, it’s like fifties dramatic television (of the Playhouse 90-sort)—only, not quite as good.
     For me, The Hustler is the Anti-Ozu. It is all shallow fashion and easy effects, literary, academic, divorced from the fullness and richness of life with which Ozu’s films overflow. It adds nothing to my understanding of either the problem of good and evil or humanity’s exploitation of humanity. Rossen indicates themes rather than searching them out to the bottom of the human condition. He is a fraud, and I find this film of his almost impossible to get through.

MY NIGHT AT MAUD’S (Eric Rohmer, 1969)

Jean-Louis Trintignant is terrific as Jean-Louis, an unmarried engineer in his mid-30s, who knows his ideal woman when he sees her. Writer-director Eric Rohmer’s brilliant Ma nuit chez Maud opens with him in contemplation over a balcony on a Sunday morning; a sporadically devout Roman Catholic, should he attend Mass when what is really drawing him to church is a beguiling blonde parishioner? He goes and takes his glimpse, which is how in retrospect we are able to figure out what he had been contemplating. We “feel” his eye on this stranger by her uncomfortable looks back at him.
     Jean-Louis runs into schoolmate Vidal after fourteen years. Over dinner they discuss Pascal’s Wager, the probabilities game of getting oneself in line for Eternity, whether one is a believer, just in case God exists. Jean-Louis finds many grounds on which to dispute Pascal, including the philosopher’s eventual repudiation of mathematics, upon which Jean-Louis’s professional life is based, but Vidal, a Marxist, dazzlingly applies Pascal’s Wager to history. And then he proceeds with yet another application, replacing Eternity with temporal bliss, by introducing Jean-Louis to Maud (Françoise Fabian, fabulous), a fresh divorcée with a quick intellect to match Jean-Louis’s. Jean-Louis spends his night with Maud but marries Françoise, the blonde from church, whom he meets after departing from Maud, and who, unbeknownst to him, may have participated in the adultery that precipitated Maud’s divorce. Like Maud, the couple have a child, and in a five-years-later coda, for all his intelligence at math and science, Jean-Louis is distinctly lagging understanding of his own wife and their marriage, the conventionality of which he clings to as to a life preserver.
     Rohmer, a devout Roman Catholic, witheringly ponders Jean-Louis, who naïvely asserts, “Religion adds to love.”
     Captivating, devastating comedy.