Love and Tragedy: The Hustler by Robert Rossen

Percy Sledge’s song When a Man Loves a Woman touched enough people to make it a number-one song in 1966. Next, compare the feeling of love in Sledge’s song with that of Odysseus in Homer’s epic the Odyssey. The eponymous hero doesn’t want to fly. When the beautiful goddess Calypso tries to keep him as her bedmate, he turns her down even though she promises him immortality – a place with the gods. He wants to go home to his wife. Before Ekman and Friesen, love had most certainly been considered an emotion. Indeed, the two psychologists were bucking a long tradition that made love not only an emotion but sometimes also the premier emotion. In the 4th century BCE, love was one of 12 passions named by Aristotle (though he knew that he was leaving out many others). In the 13th century CE, Thomas Aquinas made love the prime mover of every emotion. And in the 1960s, Magda Arnold, a pioneer of cognitivism, classified love as a positive ‘impulse’ emotion. For all of these theorists, love was paradigmatic of all the other emotions. Percy Sledge’s inability to think about anything but his girl tapped into a Western tradition of very long-standing: love as an obsession. It means coveting, admiring, desiring and being frustrated. 

Researchers from Harvard Chan SHINE and the Human Flourishing Program have published a new paper in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology (August, 2, 2022) exploring the role of strengths of moral character and love in mental health. Authors Dorota Weziak-Bialowolska, Matthew T. Lee, Piotr Bialowolski,  Ying Chen, Tyler J. VanderWeele, and Eileen McNeely used longitudinal observational data. “Our findings show that persons who live their life according to high moral standards have substantially lower odds of depression.” —Dorota Weziak-Bialowolska concluded. 

In the 18th and 19th centuries, obsessive love’s narrative became darker. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the eponymous hero is hopelessly in love with Lotte. He constantly thinks how, if only she were with him, he would cover her with kisses. He never stops wearing the outfit that he wore at their first meeting and, when it wears out, he gets another that is identical. Lotte is everywhere in his imagination. He loves her ‘solely, with such passion and so completely’ that he knows nothing except her. He measures up because he loves. He’s glad to be miserable. When he kills himself, it is because one must go to any length for love. Romantic profundity is not merely about duration, it is also about complexity. An analogy can be found in music. In 1987, William Gaver and George Mandler, psychologists from the University of California, San Diego, found that the frequency of listening to a certain kind of music increases the preference for it. As with music, so it is with love. The complexity of the beloved is an important factor in determining whether love will be more or less profound as time goes on: a complex psychological personality is more likely to generate profound romantic love in a partner, while even the most intense sexual desire can die away. Source: aeon.co

“Happiness in marriage is not something that just happens. A good marriage must be created. In the art of marriage, the little things are the big things. It's never being too old to hold hands. It's remembering to say 'I love you' at least once a day. It's never going to sleep angry. It's at no time taking the other for granted; the courtship should not end with that honeymoon, it should continue through all the years. It is havig a mutual sensue of values. It is standing together facing the world. It is not looking for perfection in each other. It is cultivating flexibility and a sense of unity and patience. It is doing things for each other not in the attitude of duty or sacrifice but in the spirit of joy. It is having the capacity to forgive and forget. It is finding room for the things of the spirit. It is a common search for the good and the beautiful. It is not marrying the right partner, it’s being the right partner.” – Excerpt from Paul and Joanne’s vow renewal letter.

Robert Rossen came to another performance of our play, and this time he came backstage and was introduced to me by my agent. He was dressed very casually and seemed a little nervous holding the script that he presented to me. “I saw you in the plays at the Actors Studio,” he told me. “I’ve written something I’d like you to read.” My agent Bob Richards thought this approach was a waste of time, but I persisted. I thought of all the hours the writer had spent, and I felt I owed them more than a hasty read. Rossen’s script was called The Hustler. My character, Sarah, didn’t enter till about page forty, but around page five I already knew I wanted to be in this movie. The script was so clean and strong, and I was excited. I had never before read a script where I could so vividly feel the characters and rooms. I could pour myself into it and disappear. I told my agent right away that I wanted to do it. Thank God, Rossen had been patient. We agreed to meet. He came up to my empty apartment, where the living room now had a chair in addition to the daybed, and we talked a little about this mysterious girl, Sarah Packard. Who she really was. I thought I understood her, even if I didn’t know the particulars, the truth about her background. Rossen told me Sarah was sort of a fallen woman, and a romantic at heart. The film was being produced by 20th Century-Fox. The studio had wanted Anne Francis to play the part. They finally relented and agreed to sign me but wouldn’t move above a certain figure. My agents and I stood firm on $40,000—not a princely sum, but a fair one for the time. Rossen took a stand on my behalf and insisted on my playing the role and their paying me the $40,000. The studio finally agreed.

Rossen felt he couldn’t speak to an actor about what he wanted for a particular moment or scene in terms “useful to the actor,” though he knew it when he saw it. If it rang true to him, he’d record. I’d done Until They Sail with Paul Newman two years before at MGM, but on that film there had never been an occasion for me to be close to him. Lifting my head from the script to speak my first line to Paul, I was met with the blinding force of his unearthly blue eyes. It was more than the eyes; it was also of course the mouth, and the unbelievable grace of his cheekbones. Almost two weeks passed before I could do my work and just see a man acting his part. Working with Paul was a joy from the beginning. I’m sure he was unaware of the effect his beauty had on people. He was very serious about the work, often thinking he wasn’t good enough. But outside the work, he was generally easygoing and quite down to earth. When I arrived every morning, I would see Paul reading a newspaper in the makeup room. Up to that time, he was the only actor I had ever seen doing that. Not many actors read anything but the trade papers or their script that early in the morning. It surprised me because generally Paul made an effort to come off as cool and casual. I saw clearly he had a lot of interests. Was I seeing the budding philanthropist he'd become in the future? 

And he liked to joke with me, trying to soften the gritty tone of the film. In an innocent way, I played house with Paul. Our cell-like dressing rooms were right next to each other, somewhere upstairs in the huge warehouse that was now our studio. We each had only a cot and a small table. I set up a hot plate in my room and brought soups for myself for lunch. One day Paul told me of a favorite imported dehydrated soup that he loved. After that I made a point of getting that soup or something close to it, heating it up, and bringing him a mugful at lunchtime. I sat on his cot with him while we both smiled and ate. It was a silent bonding time. One day Paul invited me to join him and his wife, Oscar-winning actress Joanne Woodward, at a fund-raiser ball for the Actors Studio. I had met Joanne only once. She visited the set for a brief time, wearing a beautiful red coat. I believe it was the only time she came to the set to see Paul. I thought it was very sensitive of her. My boyfriend John was shooting in California, so Paul and Joanne suggested their friend Gore Vidal be my escort to the ball. The night of the ball we all met at the Newmans’ apartment (I had heard about their dining room, and yes indeed, it was completely empty save for a large pool table). Joanne wasn’t quite ready and invited me to come back to the bedroom to keep her company while she was finishing up. A couple of flourishes to her hair, a powder puff, and some jewelry. I doubted I would have been that open with a woman I didn’t really know, but John, who knew her, was right; he had described her as someone I would like, “a really straight dame.” Gore Vidal was charming and witty, and the evening seemed festive. It was a release for everyone. 

Every morning while we were shooting, the hairstylist would come to my apartment and blow-dry my hair straight in front of the makeup mirror. Then she’d wrap my head carefully with fine tulle to protect it for the drive to the location or the studio. One day Paul asked if I’d like him to pick me up for work in the morning on his motor scooter. Of course, I said yes. The next morning we flew through Central Park. It was beautiful, no traffic, round and around through the trees. Somewhere in Central Park my head covering floated away, but I didn’t care. Bob Rossen greeted us when we arrived at the studio and gave us both holy hell before he sent us to makeup. Rossen was very caring of me, beyond my being the actress in his movie. When he found out I was not sleeping well, he hired a masseuse to come to my apartment a couple of times a week at the end of the day. It didn’t help my sleep much, but it sure felt good. When I’d first told John I was going to do the movie, he’d asked about Rossen’s interest in me. Was it personal or strictly professional? I told him I thought it was both. There had been some unspoken but palpable anger between Rossen and Paul on the set. I think Paul may have been aware that he was not Rossen’s first choice, and that couldn’t have made things easier. Rossen once told me that his dream casting would have been John Garfield, if he’d been alive, or Peter Falk, whom the studio vetoed because he wasn’t a big enough star. Peter was terrifically attractive in the days before he dressed himself down for Columbo.

One day I went to Rossen and told him that I didn’t think I should be wearing clothes in the scene where Fast Eddie and I first wake up in bed. I should at least appear as if I weren’t. The bedsheets would hide most of my body. The production code was still very strict at the time; even married people could not be seen sleeping in the same bed. But Paul and I would be in the same bed, and Paul, of course, wouldn’t be wearing much, so why should I? I asked Rossen to tell Paul what I was planning to do beforehand so it wouldn’t be a total surprise. Rossen said, “I don’t think Paul is going to like that; he may be uncomfortable.” But nothing more was said about it, and that’s what we did. Rossen shot two versions: one for the foreign market, with Paul and me undressed under the sheets, and one for the United States, with me wearing a robe and lying on top of the sheets and Paul wearing a T-shirt. Interestingly, the acting in the clothed scene was far better, so that’s the one that was used. A few days later John went back to California to finish All Fall Down. Paul had seen John coming to pick me up at the rehearsal hall after work when John visited. He used to say to me, “Why don’t you marry the guy?” 

I didn’t know if Paul was serious or not, but that idea, even with John, was frightening to me.  It took fifteen years to pass for me to see the genius of what was done, of editor Dede Allen’s brilliant work. How perfect the movie is. I saw how wrenchingly sensitive Paul’s Fast Eddie was, and how brave. He made me weep over my own (Sarah’s) death. It’s a pity it took me so long to see it. There were lots of subsequent screenings of The Hustler, and though I did not attend them, I heard about them. Everyone seemed to love the movie, even the critics. —Learning to Live Out Loud (2011) by Piper Laurie

By the time of The Hustler’s completion, Rossen summed up one capsule version of his intentions in this way: “The game represents a form of creative expression. My protagonist, Fast Eddie, wants to become a great pool player, but the film is really about the obstacles he encounters in attempting to fulfill himself as a human being. He attains self-awareness only after a terrible personal tragedy which he has caused—and then he wins his pool game. Eddie needs to win before everything else; that is his tragedy.” In later discussions, Rossen touched on more intertwined aspects of the themes. “Filming The Hustler, I was extremely conscious of what I was doing from beginning to end. In every region, on every level, from that of billiards to the fact that Eddie associates with a cripple. In fact, why is she lame? It is hard to say, and yet it could not be otherwise. He too is a cripple, but on the level of feeling, while she is one even physically.” He spoke of this again when he was asked about his tendency to speak of disability in his last films. He replied, “It is because if I look at the world in which we live, if I think about this world of today, I cannot keep from seeing in it a great number of cripples, and I want to speak of them with sympathy, to try to understand them.”

In April 1966 the influential French journal Cahiers du Cinema devoted a special issue to Rossen’s work, two months after his death. It was an important, if still limited, re-claiming of the value of his work—at least in Europe. In his homage to The Hustler, Jacques Bontemps poetically evoked this motif of being “crippled” and its relationship to a central theme of knowing yourself, of attempting to know and connect to others: This was a story of wounded ones, of isolated ones, of unknowns. Constrained to limp alone. At the threshold of the insurmountable strangeness of the other was revealed an irremediable strangeness to one-self. Bontemps wrote of one provocative sense of these resonances: “The film, its story full of digressions and lacunae, said that, essentially ‘hustled,’ each person was perhaps most deeply his own ‘hustler’ forever.” For Rossen, the materials of the story, as he adapted them, resonated on a personal level. With the ideological turmoil of the blacklist and testifying somewhat loosening its hold on his imagination, he sensed in this narrative a parable on the hustlers of Hollywood—at any time. Bontemps, again, was insightful on this implication, writing that in “a universe dulled with leveling... the one who wins is not the one who concerns himself with the beauty of the gesture, but he for whom everything poses itself in terms of efficacy of return. Compromise and resignation are required. There is a place only for Bert or for Minnesota Fats.”

The gesture of The Hustler, with its own kind of beauty, is jagged and unsettling, a paradox. As Claude Ollier had perceptively written when the film first came out, what gives The Hustler its special quality, its staying power, goes beyond its “ultra-classical skill.” It is that “one has the constant impression that something else is happening that is escaping, being only briefly suggested by acting and dialogues with two meanings.... A sense of indecision hovers permanently over this strange film, and the final explanations are not enough to dispel it.” Nevertheless, the preconceptions of the critics kept most from seeing The Hustler for what it really was. Most critics, while praising it, did not allow it to resonate on these deeper themes. Some even complained that the whole affair with Sarah—the crux of the film’s deepest feelings and insights—was too depressing and destructive. Brendan Gill in The New Yorker felt Rossen had become “over-ambitious.” He bemoaned “the marvelous picture it might have been if it hadn’t got so diffuse.” For Gill, Bert Gordon was another “tough gangster-gambler.” Pauline Kael dug a bit deeper into it: “George C. Scott in The Hustler suggests a personification of the power of money. The Last American Hero isn’t just about stock-car racing, any more than The Hustler was only about shooting pool.” She does not, however, go on to differentiate the vast differences in insight and artistry in dealing with what else the two films were about. The Hustler is the most achieved and fulfilled of Rossen’s films. It is the quintessential version of Rossen’s deepest, abiding interests and insights, his core sense of the shape of things, and his unflagging hopes. Rossen felt that we could all be driven through the turbulent, often inexplicable flux of our inner weaknesses and external pressures, to betray others—and ourselves. 

Certainly part of the work’s artistic fulfillment was his writing the best dialogue of his career—credible and moving, yet thoughtful, meaningful, and even iconic. Rossen’s wonderful use of Cinemascope (in black and white) to create an oppressive, elongated world in which ceilings always seem terribly low; and people terribly separate from each other; in one shot Newman is even separated from his own image in a mirror by almost the whole width of a very wide screen. It is a world in which the pool table seems the one natural shape, while human beings seem untidy intruders, and that, of course, is the film’s chief concern: the human cost of being the greatest pool player in America. This sense of oppressive, enclosing settings—décor in the broadest sense—is one of the central constellations of visual motifs that span the structure of the film. These settings help to shape the restricting pressures of the world in which the characters live—their enclosed trap and arena. Only one major scene takes place within an outdoor setting. The sensitive, quietly magnificent cinematography of Eugen Shuftan captures and projects every nuance. 

In Rossen’s parable of the artist in Hollywood, all are merely human, all are hustlers. They need—to win, to be right, to believe. The artist strives too much to hustle and win, to be a success; the Party member goes beyond reason to hold on to his beliefs. The more either (or both in one) hustles and strives, the more he betrays his gift, his élan, betraying his ideals and dreams of a better world. And the more he strives, the more he ends up placing himself in the hands of the moguls who not only want to control the product, but, like the gambler Bert Gordon, want to own and control the people who create it for them—or in the bloody hands of political tyrants, who, too, must control all in ways that have even more dire and dreadful results. But Bert is a more subtle Hollywood power broker, a Congressional Committee member, a Communist Party manipulator. He too is one of those who will use you and break your spirit if he has to. Bert’s drive for power rises from an ego that is paradoxically both strong and uncertain. 

The woman in this strange triangle of struggle and power also is more fully, and ambiguously, developed than any of Rossen’s previous female characters. Patric Brion even saw “the center of interest displaced from Paul Newman to Piper Laurie and, indeed thereby, acquiring a very attaching [attachant, engaging] truth and tenderness.” He saw Sarah as a mid-point in an important new strain of interest, from Adelaide in Cordura to Lilith. Sarah is a potential artist, a writer, but far from the perfection of her counterpart, Peg, in Body and Soul. She understands and spreads the value and joy of love (a scene lovely in her awkwardly winning openness when she goes shopping and girlishly proclaims, “I’ve got a fella”). But, lame and alcoholic, she too is psychologically crippled. She is, as Bert Gordon recognizes, a born loser. Too familiar with defeat, Sarah is drawn to it, almost seems to need it. And so she cannot help herself; she lets Bert Gordon win, and lets herself betray Eddie and herself, as though she just couldn’t fight anymore, as though that were the only tragic way left for her to win. ”Well, what else have we got? We’re strangers. What happens when the liquor and the money run out, Eddie? You told Charlie to lay down and die. Will you say that to me too?” When he slaps her, she says coldly “You waiting for me to cry?” Wearing a jacket and tie, he had taken her to a fancy French restaurant. She won’t believe him, can’t. “Is that your idea of love?” “I got no idea of love,” he answers. “And neither have you. I mean, neither one of us would know what it is if it was coming down the street.” She says later, “They wear masks, Eddie. And underneath they’re perverted, twisted, crippled. Bert's not going to break your thumbs. He’ll break your heart.” 

Pool is Eddie’s craft, his way of expressing himself. It is what he does best; yet, until the very last game, it reveals the worst and most destructive drives and needs within him. Eddie’s redemption is not in his winning, but in why he wins, in what he recognizes and accepts about himself. And so he will not play their game anymore—the Bert Gordons, the dominators, the moguls, the tyrants of the world. His redemption comes not only from what he has won for Sarah, but what he is willing to lose for her. It has left him exiled from the world of pool playing that he now for the first time really understands. He will never be able to play pool in the places and competitions that he deserves. He gives up all that he has left to love. He is alone and has given up what he does best, and he accepts that. He has paid his debt—by winning and losing. One can sense the personal echoes for Rossen in this final resignation: Eddie’s acceptance of this risk and his banishment, his exile, for the sake of what he believes in. —Robert Rossen: The Films and Politics of a Blacklisted Idealist (2013) by Alan Casty