The Cincinnati Kid
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Movie Reviews of The Cincinnati Kid
Movie Review: The Cincinnati Kid DVD Review
Summary: 4 Stars
A good movie, which is not a typical action film by Steve McQueen. It is always a delight to watch Edward G. Robinson and Karl Malden. Very good picture and sound.Movie Review: Over rated
Summary: 3 Stars
First of all this is not a bad movie, even a flawed movie. It's just that it ain't anything special either. One of those movies that nobody pays much attention to until years, many years later and -for whatever reason- it grabs the hearts of nostalgics who want to believe that they really like it and that it really is a great movie.
Nonsense. I was very much interested in checking for myself -after reading/hearing the stream of good reviews- how good this movie was. Sure it's nice to watch Steve McQueen play a cool role in a quality movie (since he had not many grand roles in his career) but the director just wasn't good enough to give him the vehicle that Steve needed to satify the inteligent critics (nor the audiences of its time).
It reminds me of the case of Elvis Presley in the movies. You would love to see him in a great role, sure, who wouldn't. But how many (not good but) great movies did he make? To my count only one: Michael Curtiz's King Creole. Truly a masterpiece. But, I am sorry I have to say, ole buddy Steve wasn't even lucky to get into one of this caliber. However much we would like to think this is the one, it just ain't.
And I am writing this because I am disappointed after all the expectations I had of watching a truly grand Steve McQueen movie at last. So go out, get it, and check it yourself. But me, I am not watching any more second rate director movies any more. I've had it!
Movie Review: For TV (...) Fans Only
Summary: 3 Stars
I will give "The Cincinnati Kid" this much; the film perfectly and colorfully captures the milieu of the gambling world of Depression-era New Orleans. There are a number of colorful character performances on hand here most notably by Edward G. Robinson, Karl Malden, and Ann-Margret. My problem with the film is that as a non-afficienado of card-playing this film did not engage me. It is not necessarily a prerequisite to be a fan of the game to appreciate the film. A good example of this would be "The Hustler" which involved pool-sharks, another sport that is alien to me. That film at least involved you because you had compelling combatants in the persons of Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. Herein lies the enigma of "The Cincinnati Kid": the Kid is not a particularly fleshed out or interesting character to engender our rooting interest. This is odd because Steve McQueen usually imbues his characters with some depth but he seems lost with this character. Either that or the Kid is not a particularly well written character. Your enjoyment of this film is dependent on your interest in stud (...) while others be forewarned.Movie Review: could've been
Summary: 3 Stars
This thing could have been as great as Robert Rossen's The Hustler, instead what we get is a second-rate
flick by a second-rate director.
They screwed up big time when they let the original helmer go, namely Sam Peckinpah, and hired a guy like Norman Jewison, who wasn't even good enough to shine Bloody Sam's shoes.
Movie Review: Poker deserves better.
Summary: 2 Stars
The Cincinnati Kid (Norman Jewison, 1965)
Gambling is an endlessly fascinating film subject, at least two me. (Two films about very high-stakes gambling, Intacto and 13 Tzameti, made it onto my list of the hundred best films of the 2000s.) Not so much for the gambling itself, for watching gamblers on film will never be able to compare to doing it oneself, but for watching how a director will handle it. Will he try for realistic gambling, as John Dahl does in Rounders, or go for the artificial drama of the straight flush beating four aces in a game of five-card draw, Richard Donner's thoroughly idiotic climax in Maverick? How will the screenwriter draw the characters, and what abrasive edges will each find to rub against in the other? Will there be that one guy who exists in real life, the one who just sits at the table watching everything and never speaking? (One of my favorite parts of one of my favorite movies, Mamet's House of Games, is that first card game, because each of the characters at the table is so godawfully real.) I knew the answers to none of these questions vis-a-vis The Cincinnati Kid when I signed up for this ride, only that I'm a big fan of everything Norman Jewison touched between In the Heat of the Night and Agnes of God, that the cast is jaw-dropping, and that poker was involved. You throw those three things in a pot and I'm a guaranteed viewer. It was only later I found out some of the many reasons why this film is such a colossal failure at everything it attempts. Bear with me here. Or don't, because there are a number of sacred cows I'm going to attempt to turn into shishkebab in this review.
The title character, played by Steve McQueen, is a young, up-and-coming card player who specializes in five-card stud (another of those games you almost never see any more) who makes a living by traveling around the country sitting in on high-stakes cash games. (And yet he knows the local shoeshine boy.) The undisputed king of five-card stud is a guy by the name of Lancey Howard (Edward G. Robinson); the Cincinnati Kid decides it's time for him to pit himself against the best. With the help of his old friend Shooter (Karl Malden), he gets the game set up amidst a sea of distracting subplots. Then comes the second half of the movie, which mostly focuses on the game. And that last hand? Think Donner, not Dahl.
First off is Ring Larnder Jr.'s script. Lardner's celebrated father was one of the best sportswriters of the first half of the last century. Junior's particular strengths lay more in melodrama (he won an Oscar for Preminger's Laura, and wrote both the film version and many of the TV episodes of M*A*S*H). Sports were not his strong suit at all; witness his last two films, the Ali biopic The Greatest and the Burt Reynolds vehicle Semi-Tough. Secondly, the script was keyed to two key players who ended up bowing out: director Sam Peckinpah, who was fired over a nude scene, and Spencer Tracy, who was slated to play Lancey Howard but had to withdraw due to illness. From the standpoint of raw talent, Jewison should be more than able to fill the shoes of Sam Peckinpah; Jewison is, in general, the much better director. At the time, though, Jewison was mostly a TV director whose big-screen efforts had been fluff pieces. Good fluff pieces, mind you, but fluff pieces. (In fact, right after this, he made The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!. There are few better definitions of "fluff piece" in Hollywood history.) Jewison got real good real fast a couple of years later with In the Heat of the Night, but here, he was still feeling his way around the script, which is trying to be noir, but is too caught up in that patented Lardner melodrama to really pull it off. Rounders does it a great deal better. As for the Tracy/Robinson switch, in this case, while Robinson is capable of chewing scenery with the best of them, and was right up until the end of his life (my favorite Robinson performance remains Soylent Green, his last picture), and Robinson was probably a bit better at portraying menace, there can be no question who would win the talent contest in that pairing. While it does lead to an interesting contrast between the Kid's suaveness and Howard's jagged edges, that tension is not enough to sustain the second half of the film. It's possible to make poker interesting, even riveting, on a screen; World Series of Poker broadcasts are so highly-rated on ESPN and its various affiliate networks that they are rerun almost constantly. But just as Lardner didn't know how to write sports (and anyone who disagrees needs to compare the climactic hand here to that of Rounders; there's simply no comparison), Jewison didn't know how to film sports. (Given the cheesiness of Rollerball, this is one area in which I'm not sure he ever improved.) The second half of this movie is in many sections dull as dishwater, and about as tasty.
I'm certainly willing to grant you that I'm not reviewing this in any objective way; I'm coming at it less as a media critic than I am as a poker player, and I can't get past the poker to examine the film's other merits, if it has any, on an objective level. Thus, take this with as much salt as necessary, but if you're looking for a good poker movie, watch Rounders again. It's the definitive take on the sport. **