General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Hustler

The Hustler is a 1961 American black-and-white drama film directed, co-written, and produced by Robert Rossen, adapted from Walter Tevis's 1959 novel about pool hustler "Fast" Eddie Felson. It stars Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, and George C. Scott, was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning two, and is credited with helping revive popular interest in pool in the United States.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	September 1961; drama, 133 minutes per the AFI Catalog (other sources list 134 or 135 minutes)¹^•³^•⁴
Source	Walter S. Tevis's novel The Hustler, published 1959 by Harper & Brothers; Rossen purchased the film rights in 1959¹
Principal cast	Paul Newman ("Fast" Eddie Felson), Jackie Gleason (Minnesota Fats), Piper Laurie (Sarah Packard), George C. Scott (Bert Gordon)⁴
Academy Awards	Nine nominations; won Best Art Direction, Black-and-White (Harry Horner, Gene Callahan) and Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (Eugen Shuftan)²^•⁵
Format	Black-and-white CinemaScope (2.35:1), photographed by Eugen Shuftan, edited by Dede Allen³^•⁴
Technical advisor	Professional pool champion Willie Mosconi, who stood in for some of Newman's close-up shots⁴^•²
Cultural effect	The film and the novel drove a boom in American billiards interest in the early 1960s⁶

Spoilers

Story and characters

The film follows "Fast" Eddie Felson, a small-town pool hustler who takes modest stakes from local players but wants a shot at big money in the city.² Its central matches pit Eddie against the champion Minnesota Fats, played by Jackie Gleason, and the story builds toward a final high-stakes game with Fats and a showdown with the gambler Bert Gordon, played by George C. Scott.² Piper Laurie plays Sarah Packard, Eddie's girlfriend; Roger Ebert's Great Movies essay describes her as a lame alcoholic who goes to college on Tuesdays and Thursdays and drinks on the other days, and notes that Rossen gives her character full weight and screen time.⁷

Rossen focuses on the characters' reactions during the matches rather than on the game itself, a choice that film critic Gerardo Valero identifies as one of the director's best decisions, since most viewers do not closely follow pool technique.⁸

The sequel

Twenty-five years later, Martin Scorsese directed The Color of Money (1986), in which Paul Newman reprised Fast Eddie Felson as an older man who, in the image of the Bert Gordon character, sponsors a young player played by Tom Cruise; the film was based on Tevis's own sequel novel.⁸^•¹⁶ Newman won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the sequel, his only Oscar, which Ebert calls ironic, "unless it was belated amends for The Hustler."⁷^•¹² Critics have noted how different the two films are in tone: where Rossen's film is dour and austere, with lingering shots and extended dialogue, Scorsese's is frenetic and florid, and the sequel makes little attempt to recreate the original's world.¹⁷^•¹⁸

Production

A Daily Variety news brief of April 24, 1959 announced that Rossen had purchased the film rights to Tevis's novel, published that year; United Artists was initially set to produce and distribute, with shooting planned for New York City in late 1959. The production ultimately began under Rossen's own Rossen Enterprises with 20th Century Fox, with a production start date listed as March 27, 1961, though later trade items indicated principal photography would begin in February 1961.¹

Rossen filmed over six weeks, mostly in and around Manhattan, using locations including the Ames Billiard Academy off Times Square, the old Greyhound Bus terminal, and Hell's Kitchen in the West 50s.³ In the film's big matches, set at Ames, the novel's fictional "Bennington's" stood in for the real Bensinger's Billiard Academy of downtown Chicago.⁹

Visual style

The film is in black-and-white, a common choice in 1961 for gritty subjects, and Rossen shot it in CinemaScope, the widescreen 2.35:1 process previously used mainly for color spectacles. Yale film historian Michael Kerbel notes that Rossen used the format effectively: isolating characters at the edges of frames, creating distances between people, and exploiting CinemaScope's de-emphasis on verticality to heighten the constriction of the interiors.³ Encyclopedia.com's assessment singles out the monochrome work of the German émigré cameraman Eugen Schüfftan as an object lesson in framing and lighting the wide image.⁴

Performances and technical work

Newman, who had never held a cue before the film, learned enough to perform most of his own shots, with Willie Mosconi standing in for some close-ups; Gleason performed all of his own shots, as camera positioning shows.³ Mosconi, a real-life pool champion, is credited as technical advisor and appears in the cast list.⁴^•¹⁰

The film marked a turning point for its actors. Piper Laurie, whose career after her 1950 screen debut had consisted mostly of unremarkable pictures and who had stayed away from films for four years, earned the sole Academy Award nomination of her career as Best Actress for the part.³ Ebert writes that the film provided Newman's breakthrough into the first rank of Hollywood actors.⁷

Awards and reception

At the 34th Academy Awards, honoring films of 1961, The Hustler was nominated for Best Picture, Best Directing (Rossen), Best Actor (Newman), Best Actress (Laurie), Best Supporting Actor for both Gleason and Scott, and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Sidney Carroll and Rossen), among others; it won Best Art Direction, Black-and-White, for Harry Horner and Gene Callahan, and Best Cinematography, Black-and-White, for Eugen Shuftan.⁵^•² It also received British Film Academy Awards for Best Film from any Source and Best Actor (Newman) in 1961.⁴ The New York Times of November 26, 1961 deemed the film a "sleeper" hit.¹¹ On Metacritic it holds a score of 90 based on 18 critic reviews, in the site's "universal acclaim" range.¹² The American Film Institute named it among the greatest sports movies of all time.¹³

Influence on American pool

Tevis's 1959 novel and Rossen's 1961 adaptation are described by the billiards history project Best in Billiards as two of the most important popular works in American billiards history; equipment sales increased and new "family" billiard centers opened during the early 1960s, and the film's popularity combined with the introduction of coin-operated tables to create a temporary boom in public interest.⁶^•¹⁴ The Billiards Forum credits the movie with keeping pool and billiards alive in North America in the decades after its release, after a decline in the decades before it.¹⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1960s › Released 1960 to 1965

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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