Hustle (1975)

Sick Product of a Sick System

Best movie ever!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I have to agree with the reviewer who gave it an 8. I give it a 10. I caught this movie randomly channel surfing; on The Retro Movie channel. The listing gave it two stars; and I have to say it deserves a 4 stars out of 4 stars. I also, can't believe Comcast; or whoever rated the movie gave it two stars. It is Just a very intelligent movie; that works on many levels. It is a sophisticated movie; and that might have something to do with it getting such a low rating from a general American audience? I can see that in Europe it would have been appreciated more; for obvious reasons. There is a scene where the protagonist and girlfriend are in a cinema; watching "A Man an A Woman"; which is a French Film by the esteemed; French New Wave Director; Francois Truffaut; this right there is a good example of why an American audience would not appreciate this film; for what it is? A great film.

This is a really lousy movie. Somewhere buried in endless blather about life, love and hopping the next plane for Rome, there's a murder mystery involving a young girl whose body turns up on a strip of beach. The case is handled by Burt Reynolds, a Los Angeles detective whose amorata is French prostitute Catherine Deneuve. Most of his time is spent yakking with the victim's father, compulsive redneck Ben Johnson. Involved somehow is Eddie Albert as a Los Angeles politico who has arranged for a union headquarters in Ohio to be blown up for no discernible reason. By the time the talkathon ends, much of the cast has been rubbed out, largely to satisfy the production code of 1975. Yes, Deneuve is gorgeous and Reynolds wanders through the gabfest as if it actually made sense. But the real mystery here is how Steve Shagan's script went before the cameras without a slew of rewrites.

A somewhat typical and halfway decent neo-noir in the vein of Chinatown and Night Moves, though perhaps some wouldn't include it since the protagonist (played by Burt Reynolds) is a police detective. Still, it plays out very much like those kinds of mysteries. Reynolds is investigating the death of a teenage girl. It seems a pretty open-and-shut suicide case, but the girl's father (a really nasty Ben Johnson) insists that he's going to find out more. Reynolds and his partner (Paul Winfield) try to keep him out of trouble. Meanwhile, Reynolds is dealing with his complicated girlfriend situation. Catherine Deneuve plays his high-class whore girlfriend. The film also stars Eileen Brennan, Eddie Albert, Ernest Borgnine and Catherine Bach (Daisy Duke from The Dukes of Hazzard!). Robert Englund (Freddy Kreuger) also shows up as a liquor store robber late in the film. The story's okay, but kind of slow moving.

2 out of 5 (points off for sagging and failing to connect the characters with the plot, therefore pissing me off). Initially, the striking resemblance between the young Burt Reynolds and a young Marlon Brando caused such a distraction that it was a challenge not to try to stick an orange in his mouth and make him say "Respeck me, respeck the family" .But then Reynolds' eyebrows started acting up.Burt's eyebrows have such an amazing screen presence of their own it becomes difficult to focus on anything else. If they aren't insured I don't know what is (see also Tom Selleck's moustache for hairy trade marks. {Incidentally my spell check offers 'Saltlick' as a substitute to Selleck…Tom Saltlick}). Watch Reynolds in this film as he winces in a desperate attempt to restrain his eyebrows; the concentration on his face is amazing. Those eyebrows seem to have the ability to go all the way up and over his head to meet his arse like some cheeky Mexicans crossing a border.I have a theory that Reynolds had to grow his big moustache which we all know him for to counter balance the gravitational pull of his brows. Anyway…this film; almost really good. Paul Winfield (Chekov's captain in the 'Wrath of Khan') puts in a great performance as Reynolds' partner. Did I mention that Reynolds and Winfield play really rubbish cops? That's the mainstay of this film. These guys think that being a cop involves sitting in their office having a bitch about the world while drinking whisky from their filing cabinet; "What's this? The father of his dead child cares about her death? For Gods sake! What the hell does he have? Emotion? And he wants us to do what? Investigate? What a bastard." That wasn't a quote, even though it had quotation marks. My favourite quote comes from Winfield's character, who is inexplicably interrogating an albino black person for no reason. Yes. An albino black person. With an awesome white afro. For no reason. He beats the apologetic albino in question and yells "you chalky mother f*?ker!" at him, which I have appropriated as my new favourite insult. Later on we learn that he's trying to single-handedly cut down the worldwide albino population. It's good to have a hobby I suppose, although it has nothing to do with the plot (very few characters in this film do, including our protagonists and most of the antagonists).When you can draw your eyes away from Reynolds eyebrows (something he himself tries to do constantly) you can definitely notice the Foley artist hard at work. One scene had Reynolds' hooker girlfriend brush her hair which sounds like she was tearing newspaper, or when a guy walks across a boat deck sounding like he's Mr. Tumnus tap dancing on the roof of a garden shed.Burt's girlfriend in this film is some kind of sexual businessperson who likes to sleep with old people for money, and takes "interesting" phone calls on Burt's funky telephone (that's not a euphemism). He doesn't mind though, presumably because of the two crazy eyebrows he has to deal with, which he probably calls his 'twins'. I have to say I have never been confident on the phone, and so don't phone the 'sex lines', however if I did, and had to pay for it, then I wouldn't want the kind of indifference that this woman deals out to her clients, I get enough of that in real life. She actually ends one saucy phone encounter with "…and there you go" like she's just solved a sudoku puzzle. Sexy.Overall this is a good film with good performances from everyone, but the script seems to be confused. The message seems to be that if you are a nobody then nobody cares. Unless you're an eyebrow.To be honest I watched an episode of Magnum PI, incidentally starring 'Tom Saltlick', called 'Way of the Stalking Horse' (season 6) which was stylistically similar to this film. It was gritty and dark, but just plain better. And shorter.As a geeky side note; a security guard confuses Magnum with Burt Reynolds in the season 7 episode of Magnum P.I called 'L.A' …and Tom Saltlick's eyebrows don't dance on his face like two drunk monkeys at a rave.Ross @ www.musiconthemoon.com