The Age of Incompetence Chapter XXVI

There are some films I avoid; The Hustler is one of them. As I wrote yesterday I had intended to write my last blog built around that 1961 film. But when it came time to sit down and review it, I found I had no stomach for it. I could read the script O.K. but the film, no go. There seems to me 50 years after its release something more than ever quintessentially American about it.

A young man, Eddie Felton, from California has a dream to become a champion at the game of pool and the champion pool player lives in New York City so he sets off, along with his buddy, Charlie, his alter ego and manager, cross country to New York. To finance their journey they play the small town pool halls along the way. They are con men, but not thieves. Like so much in America they just hide who and what they are. Fast Eddie and Charlie are hustlers.

In New York the big match comes off with the champ. Eddie wins big at first then his ego gets in the way and he drinks himself into a stupor and not only loses the match but every penny of their stake they've built up. It causes the split up of Eddie and Charlie. But Eddie charms a lonely young woman, Sarah, and she takes him in off the streets. Charlie offers to take him back on the road with him and back to Oakland, but Eddie has only one thing in mind: get another match with the champ.

Broke Eddie has to make a deal with the devil more or less to get the money for a re-match. So he sells out to a big time gambler, Burt Gordon, who also bank rolls the champ, but is willing like most wheeler dealers to cut a deal with whomever he thinks can make him a buck. Eddie's girl tries to warn him he's playing with fire, but his obsession with being the champ blinds him to anything but his own ambition.

Eddie's girl is destroyed, just as his friendship with Charlie is destroyed. His last words to Charlie are, "Go die by yourself but

Fast Eddie Felton                                        
don't take me with you," after Charlie admits to Eddie that he'd be satisfied to have a small pool hall with six pool tables in Oakland. He adds, "I'm getting old, Eddie."

Sarah, deeply in love, watches this drama play itself out and later asks Eddie, "Will you someday tell me to go die by myself?" No need for that, Eddie's new manager, Burt Gordon, will see to that. Gordon operates on a 75-25 cut of the winnings, with him getting the 75%, of course. So he sees Eddie's girl as an unwanted distraction and ruthlessly dispatches her. She takes it hard and ends up a suicide.

In his rematch with the champ Eddie wins. But when Burt Gordon asks for his cut, Eddie balks because he has figured out it was Gordon that drove Sarah to suicide. Eddie sudden discovery of conscience redeems him and the death of Sarah, who he too late understands he loved. Burt Gordon allows Eddie to keep his winnings but warns him never to show up in a big time pool hall again. There's a critical scene earlier in the film between Eddie and Burt Gordon:
Gordon: I don't think there's a pool player alive who shoots better pool than I saw you shoot the other night at Ames. You got talent.
Eddie: So I got talent? So what beat me?
Gordon: Character.
Eddie: Sure, sure.
Gordon: You're damn right I'm sure. Everybody's got talent, I got talent. You think you can play big-money straight pool or poker for forty straight hours on nothing but talent? You think they call Minnesota Fats

the best in the country just cause he got talent? Nah, Minnesota Fats's got more character in one finger than you got in your whole skinny body.
Eddie: I got drunk.
Gordon: He drank as much whiskey as you do.
Eddie: Maybe he knows how to drink.
Gordon: You bet he knows how. You think that's a talent too, huh, knowin' how to drink whiskey? You think Minnesota Fats was born knowin' how to drink?
Eddie: OK, OK, what do I do now? Lie down on the floor and, uh, bow from the ankles? What do I do, go home?
Gordon: That's your problem.
Eddie: So I stay. I stay until I hustle up enough to play Fats again. And maybe by that time, I'll develop myself some character.
Gordon: [chuckling] Maybe by that time you'll die of old age.

It's all so American. Small town boy wanting to become a big shot in New York. A woman who risks everything she has for a man with an ego too big for his age or I.Q. And the wheeler dealer who has all the money and uses it to control people as a spoiled child plays with toy soldiers and then when he is tired of playing with them scatters them with a swat of the hand.

Eddie became champ, but in doing so he destroyed everything human around him. That's what is so quintessentially American about the film: greed is the ultimate cancer.

I think of Hunter Thompson in the same way I see Fast Eddie. He grew up in Louisville and when he got out of the Air Force he went straight to the bright lights of New York to make a name for himself as a writer. He wanted to be another Fitzgerald or Hemingway, but never made it. And instead became a muckraker, a kind of hustler who promoted his image as a wild man. Maybe that was why he needed the heavy drugs. With enough drugs he could forget what he failed to be in life. But in the end there weren't enough drugs to make him forget and he put a pistol next to his head. It was a question of character.

For Tiger Woods being a champion golfer wasn't enough, he wanted to live on the wild

side, but he had to hide it so he could pocket the endorsement money. So like a good hustler and a good American, he hid it. It was a question of character.

It seems it's in the genes of Americans to be hustlers and that we secretly admire them or how to explain that after George W. Bush hustled the American public on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and it was exposed as a fraud Americans didn't angrily turn him out of office instead of voting him back in for four years and then allowed him to retire as a respectable pensioner. It was a question of character in Bush and a lack of character in Americans.

Then there's Barack Obama. He had to promote an image to get elected. But as soon as he got elected it became clear he was like Fast Eddie. Eddie sold out to money man Burt Gordon and Obama was in the pocket of the Wall Street crowd. Obama will go down as perhaps the greatest hustler in American history. It was question of character.

I fear we have somehow passed that point of no return for a country and can never recover the character that made America the last best hope of mankind. Maybe it was too much to ask of one man, but still there was a historic moment when Obama, with courage and the masses at his back, could have done it. Now with his character exposed we can only wonder forever more, what if he had tried.

The message of a film like The Hustler is that character matters - even more than intelligence. People too often forget that courage is an essential part of character. Obama is a living reminder to us that no matter how much charm or intelligence, without courage, charm and intelligence is only part of the hustle.

It is all about character. As Heraclites said all those centuries ago, "Character is destiny." It is true for the individual and true for a country and sadly, we are now getting the destiny our lack of character deserves.