Hustle
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Movie Reviews of Hustle
Movie Review: Aldrich strikes again!
Summary: 4 Stars
"Hustle" represents perhaps the bleakest Noir of the seventies. The remarkable and talented Robert Aldrich (Kiss me deadly)directed this emblematic film filled of satirical cynicism about the personal life of the main investigator, the dark revelations about an overdoses about the daughter of his colleague as well as the fact a corrupt attorney is involved with nasty influences responsible for bringing his couple to USA.
An emblematic Noir with a shaterring performancve of Ben Johnson.
Movie Review: Good noir that should have been better
Summary: 4 Stars
A good movie that could have been a great movie if Burt Reynolds was a better actor. It's dark, bitter noir, abut cop in love with
high priced call girl. He gets sucked - against his will - into the case of a murdered wild teen girl.
Some amazing scenes, and powerful (if obvious) last twist, but Burt can't ultimately sell the complexity of the man.
Still, interesting enough that it's sad to see it seems to be out of print.
Movie Review: BETTER THAN SOME.......NOT AS GOOD AS OTHERS.
Summary: 3 Stars
HUSTLE is better than some other Burt Reynolds movies, while not as good as others. The film is a very good film, however, a problem arises in that the subject matter is very sleazy, many of the people are sleazy, and in the end the movie suffers from all the sleaze.
I'm a Burt Reynolds fan, always have been, so when I watch one of his movies I am pretty much happy to watch ole Burt do his thing, which is entertain. I've been able to collect some of his DVDs with this one being a recent acquisition. I had seen the picture when originally released and it did not make much more of an impression on me back then than now, some 33 years later. The list of actors is impressive but the final script is depressing, overall serving to drag the movie down even farther, you keep watching because you want to know how it all comes out.
But Gloria's problems and resultant suicide are not much different from many other similar lost souls of the 1970s, and to build an entire movie around this doesn't quite work. And then the relationship between Burt and Catherine is unravelling and doesn't work at all. But just when you think they will surmount their problems, crawl out from under all the sleaze, the movie ends in an entirely unsatisfactory manner offering more sleaze to an already overly sleazy movie.
The film looks very dated and stark in a film noir way, while the dress and smoking and drinking all give an aura that is strictly 1970s. For me the 70s decade did not serve up the best ambience and this movie reflects all that, moreover brings it back all too vividly. Not too many folks would choose to relive the 1970s. And my 'armchair director's award' goes to Ben Johnson, he pretty much gives whatever spark is present in this movie.
I will continue to rewatch this thing, but for me I take an ending away that somehow evaded the director:
Burt doesn't stop at the liquor store, no, he is too pumped and excited to get into that weekend with Catherine, and when he asks her to marry, she says yes, and they both break out into another life. He quits, she quits, they start anew.
Crazy you say, not at all. Today many movies have alternate endings, I just cannot abide the stupid ending in this movie. Throughout the movie Burt tells Marty he ain't a professional. Well in this last scene Burt's standing up, out in the open, with a snub nosed .38 firing at a fleeing car is just not professional, not even smart. Talk about throwing peanuts at a fleeing elephant. And then how many liquor store robbers are going be able to shoot center, bulls eye, while moving excitedly away from someone with the distance continually increasing? Sorry, not plausible for anyone who ever infrequently handled firearms, pistols especially. They buried Wild Bill a long time back, the age of the shootist is way past.
Semper Fi.
Movie Review: The good, the bad and the indifferent
Summary: 3 Stars
At times it's hard to know quite what to make of Hustle. There's certainly a good film in there, but there's also a bad one as well and Robert Aldrich doesn't make the two into something entirely cohesive. Joseph Biroc's photography is somewhat schizophrenic too. The police station interiors and night shots look great with a classic neo-noir look to them with their deep blacks, but some of the daytime work looks like painfully artificial TV movie stuff. Some of the editing is awkward and some of the writing so on the nose it's like someone decided to film `My First Cop Movie' while the references to Moby Dick (the film, not the book) come over as Symbolism 101, but then it delivers something good enough for you to want to file away and use yourself at a later date.
Where it scores is in its portrait of a job and a place where you can all too easily lose all sense of yourself, a side of Los Angeles the film captures remarkably well (there's a reason so many Angelinos move to different States or even countries). Burt Reynolds' cop is so desensitized to his job that he obliviously talks to the morgue staff about football scores while escorting a father to see his daughter's dead body, behavior no-one finds shocking in a place where people only count if they're `somebody.' In many ways the most impressive thing about it is its determination to avoid becoming a murder mystery: no-one, least of all Reynolds, has any interest in investigating a murder, and neither does the film. Instead it's more interested in the emotional fallout from the death and how it affects (or rather fails to affect) those around the death. It all ends in violence, naturally, albeit with the caveat that you end up paying for the sins you didn't commit rather than the ones you you did.
Movie Review: What might have been...or not.
Summary: 3 Stars
Those born in the Reagan years may not realize that for a brief shining moment in the late 1970s, Burt Reynolds was the most popular movie star on the planet. Just prior to that, in 1975, he made this movie, and gives a creditable, serious and even moving performance.
If he had not grown the mustache and played up the good old boy shtick and annoying high pitched laugh, he may not have been Numero Uno for those couple of years, but he might have been taken more seriously and made better movies.
Perhaps not. This is the man who was first choice to play the Jack Nicholson part in TERMS OF ENDEARMENT and opted to do STROKER ACE instead.
In any event, this is a good example of gritty, bleak 1970s movie making, when mainstream Hollywood flicks could be dark and even have an unhappy ending. In 1976 ROCKY came along and changed all that.
A little dated, and a less than crisp DVD transfer, but worth checking out.
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