No.233 : The Hustler (1961)

 

The Hustler at the IMDb

I’d seen ‘The Hustler’ a couple of times before, most notably during my quest to see all of the films in the IMDb top 250. A change in the voting criteria means that I have now only seen 227/250 of the films on the list and ‘The Hustler’ is nowhere to be found. It’s probably ‘bubbling under’ as it has an 8.0 rating the same as the last 25 or so films on the list. I gave it an 8 myself and it’s well worth these high marks. That said, it wasn’t as good as I remembered it with the period between matches is a bit long and populated by the needy girlfriend.

Anyway, as you no doubt know, Paul Newman stars as ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson a pool shark with ambitions to be the best. The film opens with them hustling some rubes, with the drunk salesman routine - a scene that was only bettered in ‘Kingpin’ - I think I am punctilious in that assessment. The scam works fine and Eddie and his partner make a decent, if transitory living. It’s not enough for Eddie though, who dreams of beating the best - Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats. Bit sizeist that.

With a big enough bankroll Eddie gets the match and quickly shows that he has what it takes to beat the best. He lacks character and stamina however and after he gets drunk, Fats takes him for nearly all his cash in a 25 hour marathon. Eddie and Charlie go their separate ways, with Eddie falling into the arms of alcoholic Piper Laurie. The two have a pretty abusive time but bond when a hustle goes awry and Eddie gets his thumbs broken.

As he recovers he vows to prove he’s the best and, with the questionable help of George C. Scott as his manager, a second match with Fats is on the horizon. Will Eddie win the day or do tragedy and his own demons wait in the wings? Probably going to be the second one isn’t it?

This is a cracker of a film, even if you don’t like the manly world of pool halls and heavy drinking. The pool action is fantastic and they must have shot miles of footage to get the sequences of shots that the actors execute without an edit. There was no explanation of the rules and I wasn’t clear what variant of pool they were playing - no one ever said ‘I’m on stripes’. Being in black and white it would probably have been a waste of time anyway and you just have to accept the characters know what they are doing.

Newman and Gleason were excellent as the stick wielding sluggers with Fats never sweating or looking a stich out of place. Newman in comparison went through the wringer with him looking convincing when he was dead beat or getting beaten up. Laurie was a bit annoying as the doomed love interest and George C. Scott could have yelled less and shown more menace.

At 135 minutes the film was longer that I remembered it, with a large fallow section in the middle where you are just willing Eddie to get back to the pool hall. He and Laurie were both doomed and reckless characters and you just knew a happy ending was never on the cards for them.

The bar room smoke and sleaze was well executed and you got a real feel for the gritty desperation on show.

I’ll probably check back on ‘The Hustler’ again one day and will no doubt get something different from it then too. A great period piece and a sports picture to match any other. Except ‘Kingpin’.

THE Tag Line : Rack ‘Em Up! 80%

No.219 :The Gambler (2014)

The Gambler (2014) at the IMDb

It was always going to be a tough ask to have Marky Mark fill James Caan’s 70’s Cuban heels, but this remake falls well short of the original. It does have a decent cast, but with nothing new added you have to wonder why they bothered.

The film opens with George Kennedy on his death bed - presciently so as it turned out to be his last role. He offers sage advice to his son Jim (Marky Mark) who proceeds to ignore it, heading off instead to a casino. He has $10k, which he bets on a single hand of blackjack, which he doubles up again and again before losing the lot. The casino’s owner is owed $240k and refuses any more credit. That’s fine as Omar off ‘The Wire’ is there and offers a $50k loan for a vig of 20 points a week - ten grand to you or me.

These rates would make Brighthouse blush but Jim is an addict and pisses the cash away. If you think he doesn’t convince as a gambler wait til you see him as a university literary professor. He tells his students not to try and write unless they are a genius or Captain Marvel who has shown up, as she’s not due to save the world for at least five years. He has another student who doesn’t care for class but he’s good at basketball and needs the scholastic credit. Might come in handy later that nugget!

Jim then goes hunting for more credit with John Goodman, using the impeccable logic that he can gamble his way out of his financial hole. When that doesn’t work out he heads to his mother Jessica Lange, who gets him a big bag of cash out of the bank. Problem solved.

No wait, he’s off to Vegas with Captain Marvel and he pisses that all away too. With the loan sharks circling Jim has only one shot - his ‘in’ with his basketball playing student. Can he corrupt the youth to save his neck and if he does is he only postponing the inevitable?

As a standalone movie this was decent but it pales in comparison to its predecessor. I felt Marky was too young to convey the gravitas as a professor or the world weariness needed to portray a gambler, keen to lose his cash as soon as possible.

The film followed the same narrative lines as the original but with some changes - there is no long suffering girlfriend here, only a prospect of a better life in the shape of Brie Larson. The mother role was transplanted intact but it was a mistake to have so many loan sharks played by familiar faces. Omar and Goodman both lacked menace and were too fond of talking and not keen enough on the leg breaking. I found it hard to believe the lines of credit being offered and the fact they were cool with Jim being in hock to so many bookies.

The film tried to add a bit of tension by having captions counting down the days until the debts became due. This was mostly pointless as Jim got shaken down every day anyway.

The gambling was mostly restricted to blackjack and roulette which at least it kept simple, without rules having to be explained. The Vegas sequence was a misfire with the ‘hit me on 18’ scene stuck in at the start which totally missed the point for me - in the original this was a sign that Caan was on an unbeatable lucky streak. Here he wins that one and then loses the lot.

The film missed the thrill and sleaziness of the gambling life with most of the bets being skill free coin flips. Fair enough the man’s an inveterate gambler, but his motivations and redemption were lacking for me.

Over all a decent character piece but one lacking any real insight or tension.

THE Tagline : Stick to the Seventies!  60%

No.197 : The Replacements (2000)

The Replacements at the IMDb

Time for a bit of sporting fun now as we try to cram every cliché possible into this unsatisfying American football romp.

We meet our hero Shane Falco (Keanu Reeves) as he clears barnacles off the hull of a boat whilst scuba diving. He finds an old American Football trophy discarded on the sea bed and relives a moment of glory before going back to his work. We learn he was a former star who froze during his big chance at the Sugar Bowl a few years back. They didn’t explore why he didn’t use his time travel phone box to fix things, which may have made for a more exciting film.

His chance of redemption comes along pretty quickly, as all the overpaid football stars are going on strike. The producers must have been a bunch of commies as the players were made out to be the bad guys with one moaning about the price of Ferrari insurance. Too bad it’s a short career that leaves most with brain damage!

Local team, the Washington Sentinels, are an outside bet to make the playoffs - if they can win 3 out of their last 4 games they qualify. The club’s owner gets washed up boss Gene Hackman to take over the team and to recruit a posse of replacement players to win the day. We get a quick montage of loads of characters who might, just might, be the greatest players you’ve ever seen.

Strangely the cheerleaders are also recruiting - must be out in support of the players- , with the ladies getting a ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ style montage of all the losers making a tit of themselves. A full stable of cheerleaders is however found in the strip joint with their leader definitely not going to fall for Keanu’s quarterback, as she doesn’t date players. Well for about five minutes she doesn’t.

The team go through training, fights and then bonding and soon the first game looms. Can they win  3 out of 4 after losing the first? - 3 out of 3 then Duh! And will the various misfits find the redemption they crave?

This was a strange kind of film that had no interest in the labour laws situation and it didn’t address things like crossing a picket line or undermining the original players’ genuine grievances. I’m no Ted the Red (Cuba!) but it seemed a bit strange for a blue collar film to side with the management - it was ‘Carry on at Your Convenience’ all over again.

The reasonable cast fared badly with some poor material. Reeves was OK in the lead but Jon Faverau was wasted as an annoying character who just ran into people. Rhys Ifans was better as soccer player Nigel from Wales who could kick massive field goals whilst smoking a fag. It looks like he was let down in the edit as his arc didn’t make any sense at all. There was also a lot of shoving and name calling and, most regrettably, dance numbers.

Hackman phoned it in and showed no passion at all - compare him to Pacino in ‘Any Given Sunday’ and you’ll see a lightweight getting smashed by a heavyweight in the 'down at heel football coach' role.

The games were poorly scripted with each of the four games coming down to the last seconds with our guys just behind. There was very little in the way of actual game play, the kind you see most Sundays, with every point being either a comical mishap or a death defying kick or throw.

It was OK in places but ultimately it was an uneven mess with unengaging characters and a suspect premise.

THE Tag Line : Strike it off your list!   55%

No.150 : The Natural (1984)

The Natural at the IMDb

I always enjoy a good sports film but I’d never seen ‘The Natural’ before. Maybe the long run time of 137 minutes put me off or maybe the whole thing looked a bit too wholesome for my slightly seedier tastes. Well, now that I have seen it I can say it’s well worth a look and, although not the best baseball film I’ve seen (Major League 3 : Back to the Minors, seeing as you ask) it’s still pretty good.

We open with a young lad playing ball with his Dad - an idyllic scene right up to the point Pop has a heart attacked and snuffs it and then a tree gets hit by lightning for good measure. The lad is Roy Hobbs and when fate gives him an exploded tree he makes a baseball bat out of it. He calls the bat ‘Wonderboy’ just like Homer Simpson’s ‘Wonder bat’ - in fact most of the baseball Simpsons episode pays homage to this film, so that’s a blind spot in my education erased.

We jump forward a few years and the young lad has become Robert Redford. That’s one tough paper round he had! Redford was 38 when he made this, and there is no effort to explain why a 38 year old is playing a teenager. I thought I’d stick with it an all would be revealed - an old man’s fantasy maybe? No, they just didn’t have ‘The Irishman’ style de-ageing then, so just go with it.

Roy gets a call up to the Chicago Cubs and says goodbye to his equally middle-aged, but playing it  young, girlfriend Glenn Close. Roy gets on the train to Chicago and meets sports hack Robert Duvall and ‘The Whammer’ a Babe Ruth type baseball legend. The journalist sets up a bet that Roy can strike out The Whammer which he does, and in turn attracts the attentions of psycho groupie, Barbara Hershey. Barbara takes him back to hers but shoots him in the guts for his trouble. Not what he expected when she agreed to fire into him!

16 years pass and we meet the same Robert Redford whom everyone is now calling ‘Granddad’. He has been signed up by the New York Knights, the worst team in baseball. The manager doesn’t fancy Redford and keeps him on the bench, but a couple of strokes of luck, and a bad bay for Mr Blonde, see him in the team. Roy is a smash hit until he meets floozy Kim Basinger, the squeeze of the local bookie. Soon Roy is facing bribes and a slump in form. Will an old flame reignite the magic and will an old would prevent Roy from winning the pennant and saving the club?

You could probably delve into the subtext of this film and come up with an allegory for the corruption of the American Dream. I didn’t bother and enjoyed the tale of a man striving to win against the odds for what it was. There was a lot of nostalgia flying about with the games and crowds all wonderfully realised by director Barry Levinson.

The turning points of Roy’s life all involved the dames and I think the message is that you’d do better if you kept your pecker in your pocket. The villains such as the bookie and wannabe club owner, The Judge, were all a bit boo hiss and I wondered why they didn’t just bump Roy off rather than try to turn his head.

Some of Roy’s hits were great such as one where the ball is knocked out of it’s cover and others that destroyed clocks and stadium lights. It was well done and you’d be a cold individual not to get the chills when Roy faces the last pitch 2-0 down with two outs and two men on. To be honest I wasn’t sure he was going to win when a young version of himself was the new pitcher - would the story continue with the new ‘natural’? Nah, but it was a nice thought.

I was surprised that the film did as well as it did in awards season as I thought it was a bit slight, but like ‘Field of Dreams’ I think it would speak to Americans about better, more innocent times when you could meet women on trains and be shot by them!

Redford was good, but it was a mistake not to have any attempt at him looking any younger in his adolescent scenes - at one point I’m sure the conductor was going to give him senior citizen discount! The film more than makes up with that one conceit with an excellent cast and a finely realised world.

THE Tag Line :  Whammy!  79%

No.32 : The Club (1980)

The Club at the IMDb

Here’s an oldie but a goodie from 1980. I saw this a few times on late night BBC2 and it always raised a smile so let’s see if it still hits the mark or whether its ‘Goliath Awaits’ all over again.

‘The Club’ is Collingwood, an Australian Rules Football team that’s living on its former glories. In a bid to get back to the top they sign Jeff for what is seemingly a high figure of A$120,000. The rest of the team quickly take against him when he plays a stinker and soon the manager and the board are at each other’s throats.

With Jeff on the dope and giving up on football the chairman is forced out after hitting a stripper and the rest of the board scheme to get the manager out. With a fearsome new manager lined up the guys come together to try and win the championship and save the manager and the spirit of the club.

‘The Club’ started life as a stage play and that’s pretty clear when you see how many scenes simply involve the characters all talking and mostly fighting with each other. Some films like this can be a bit dull but like ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ this fair crackles along with great characters and brilliant dialogue.

The Aussie Rules sport itself isn’t explained at all and it’s not always clear who’s doing what and who’s winning. That said the game scenes are excellent and obviously filmed in front of a real 100,000+ crowd - they must have laid on free beer.

The best character for me is the scheming Jock played by Frank Wilson who’s a petty and conniving old git. He does have all the best lines however and a great scene with Jeff where after being plied with drugs fully takes in his star’s confession of incest, a gullibleness that later comes back to haunt him.

The rest of the cast are great too with perennial Aussie star Jack Thompson taking centre stage as the volatile coach who tries to hang onto the club’s traditions as the money men start to take over. I also like the slimy chairman played by Graham Kennedy who slowly loses power to the plotters on the board.

If I had a criticism I felt that Jeff’s transformation from pariah to saviour was a bit sudden but I suppose they argue that the coming together was to face a common enemy. The ending itself was a bit rushed with the players agreeing to knuckle down one minute and then playing in the championship match literally a minute later.

The film gave a great sense of the passing of the guard and the transition from aplayer who played for the jersey giving way to the ones with dollar signs in their eyes. Scenes of the club’s glory days were skilfully recreated and the action was always running at full pelt.

I’m sure ‘The Club’ will resonate soundly with anyone who’s ever sat on a committee or board and dealt with all the petty self interests that stop anything actually getting done. All in all it’s a funny, all action sports movie with great characters and a great script.

THE Tag Line : Join The Club 77%