Paul Newman as Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler

            Paul Newman was the greatest movie star to ever live. In some ways, he was your stereotypical movie star in that he was classically handsome, charming, charismatic, and lived a rich, luxurious life. But unlike a lot of Hollywood stars he had true character. He was married to the same woman, fellow actress Joanne Woodward, for 50 years, and was one of Hollywood’s most charitable actors. He started the company Newman’s Own in which 100% of its profits goes to charity. So far it has raised over 300 million since its inception in 1982. (link) He also started the non–profit organization The Hole in the Wall Gang - a camp for terminally-ill children. (link)

While there’s no doubt about the fact that the real Paul Newman had character, he specialized in playing people that lacked character and are learning how to obtain it. Think of his most iconic roles in movies such as Hud, Cool Hand Luke, The Sting, Slap Shot, The Verdict, Nobody’s Fool, and, of course, The Hustler and you’ll see that’s true. He was an actor who liked to play people, and who audiences like to watch go from a rebel, misfit outsider to a person who acquires true moral integrity. He didn’t always succeed, as in Hud, as he did in most of his movies like The Hustler, but no matter what, the audience got to experience an authentic performance that was layered with complexity.

The Hustler was released in 1961, and was filmed in black and white. Its story follows Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman), a drifter who travels around the country going to pool halls hustling money. Fast Eddie (nicknamed that because he can beat you so fast at pool, and then turn around and lose just as fast) dreams of being the best pool player there ever was, and he goes to play the best: Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). In their first epic pool match (of two), Fast Eddie begins by completely whipping Minnesota Fats earning over $18,000 dollars. Eddie earlier stated that his goal was to earn $10,000 dollars. But, as he says to his manager, his goal had always been to beat Minnesota Fats and “the game is not over till Fats says it is”. Fast Eddie continually shoots pool (for over 25 hours straight) and incessantly drinks bourbon, until he eventually gets drunk and loses all his money to Minnesota Fats.

 In that match Eddie met Bert Gordon (George C. Scott), the most ruthless manager and gambler around whose only concern is money. Gordon was the one who advised Minnesota Fats to keep playing Fast Eddie after he was ahead over $18,000 dollars, calling Eddie a “born loser”. After the match, Bert tells Fast Eddie what beat him. (This scene illustrates the way Bert manipulates Eddie into letting him become his manager.)

Bert Gordon (George C. Scott) and Eddie Felson

Bert: You got talent.

Eddie: So I got talent? So what beat me?

Bert: Character

Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert explains that, “Bert’s secret is that by character he doesn’t mean goodness, honesty, or other Boy Scout virtues. He means the snakelike ability to put winning above any other consideration, and to never tempt the odds.” (link) Fast Eddie, on the other hand, doesn’t subscribe to Bert’s money-oriented philosophy of character. 

Sarah Packard (Piper Laurie) and Eddie

In the movie, Eddie begins a relationship with the depressed, alcoholic, attractive woman named Sarah Packard (Piper Laurie). These two desperate people are seeking solace from their failed lives and they find comfort in being with one another. In a turning point in the movie, we witness Bert whisper something sinister into Sarah’s ear that greatly upsets her. The viewer recognizes that Bert is manipulating Sarah and trying to bring her down, but Eddie doesn’t realize it yet. Bert wants Sarah out of the picture so that Eddie can shoot pool without any distractions. Bert’s ruthlessness culminates with him seducing Sarah into having an affair with him. This completely degrades and destroys Sarah’s sense of character so much, she commits suicide.

Fast Eddie is devastated and responds to this is by challenging Minnesota Fats to another game of pool. Ebert correctly points out that, “The first meeting of Eddie and Fats was about pool. The second, as Bert correctly predicted, is about character.” At this point in the movie Eddie has acquired true character and he quickly beats Fats in their second match of pool. Fats, in admiration, admits that Eddie has indeed truly beaten him. In the end and at the most tragic cost, Eddie discovered what it took to be the best. 

Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason) vs. Fast Eddie

The role of Fast Eddie gave Paul Newman the chance to show his full range of emotion and talent. At this point in his career, Newman wasn’t yet thought of as a great actor and was considered to be just another Marlon Brando clone. Brando emerged as the master of the method-acting style in the 1950s, and Newman was a method actor. Method acting is a form of acting that pushes the actor to their limits in order to try and achieve as much realism in their performance as possible.

The first quality that we see in Fast Eddie is that he’s charming, and Newman easily conveys that facet of him with the help of his perfect, mischievous smile. In the early part of his career, Newman was frequently criticized for being too good looking and he couldn’t be taken seriously as an actor. Critics said that he too often relied on his good looks and his trademark beautiful blue eyes. But in The Hustler, his handsome appearance was an important feature of who Fast Eddie was, and his trademark blue eyes could not be seen in the movie as it was filmed in black and white.

Another important part of Fast Eddie is that he’s a drinker, and few actors can play drunk as convincingly as Newman. Eddie was also a person who could be stubborn, mean and cruel, and Newman never backed down and tried to soften him up. He played the character straight and allowed the audience to see him for all his strengths and faults.

The most crucial quality of Fast Eddie is his undeniable talent at shooting pool. Newman definitely appears as if he knows how to handle a pool stick. But more than that, Newman is able to convey the character’s drive to be the best there is and in one of movie’s best scenes we listen and watch Newman describe his undeniable talent. In this scene the viewer can’t help but be drawn to Eddie, despite his faults, and we’re fully mesmerized at what he’s conveying to us.

Newman is also able to express anguish as well as any actor. In a memorable scene from the movie, Fast Eddie gets caught hustling and his thumbs are broken. When this happens, all we see is Newman’s face and when we hear his anguished cry the viewer can’t help but wince and feel the pain along with him. In another critical scene, when Eddie discovers that Sarah has committed suicide. Newman’s reaction is devastating and heartbreaking to watch.

By the end of the movie when Eddie confronts Bert and has one final match against Minnesota Fats, Newman carries himself in a different way. He’s now a more direct and focused person, compared to before in their first match when his cockiness was a way of him hiding his insecurities. In the final scene of the movie, Newman gives one of the most passionate and emotionally wrenching speeches ever delivered on film.

For The Hustler, Newman received his second Oscar nomination for best actor but lost out to Gregory Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird. Throughout his long career, Newman would receive a total of 9 Oscar acting nominations and he won once, for best actor, for The Color of Money. In Color he reprised his role of Fast Eddie Felson, twenty-five years after The Hustler. While his performance in The Color of Money was great, many took it, including myself, as belated amends for his performance in The Hustler.

Newman specialized in playing anti-heroes even though he himself was not as flawed as the people he performed. In The Hustler, Fast Eddie Felson doesn’t acquire character until after his girlfriend commits suicide and he knows what’s truly important in life. While Paul Newman, on the other hand, demonstrated his character in the way he lived his life every day. Including in his acting, where Newman created some of our most memorable film characters such as Fast Eddie Felson.

Tom Cruise as Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia

              When a role is specifically written for an actor, the results usually turn out to be something great. This is because the writer will write to that actor’s particular strengths which help the actor create a character that is memorable and can be easily inhabited. That’s exactly what happened when writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) wrote the character of Frank T.J. Mackey knowing Tom Cruise wanted to work with him. Tom Cruise was a fan of PTA’s prior movie Boogie Nights and was interested in meeting the director. The two met while Tom Cruise was filming Eyes Wide Shut and Paul Thomas Anderson visited him on the set.  The two got talking and got along with each other. They then agreed to try to work together. PTA wanted Tom Cruise to have a “goldmine for an actor to work with” and wrote the part of Frank T.J. Mackey for him.

Ross Jeffries

Frank T.J. Mackey was inspired by Ross Jeffries, who was a motivational speaker whose topic was “How to Pick Up Women”. Frank T.J. Mackey, the character, was also a motivational speaker who taught seminars to men about how to pick up women. Mackey was an extreme chauvinist who talked in obscene language and constantly degraded women. Cruise was skeptical at first in taking the role, but then realized it was a great part and he was perfectly suited to play it. 

Tom Cruise is, first and foremost, a great movie star. Cruise is a great movie star because prior to 2005 (when he jumped on Oprah’s couch and ranted about Scientology) almost everyone loved his movie star image and his face could sell movie tickets. He’s also a really strong actor who excels at playing cocky men who end up learning a lesson in life that helps make him become a better person. Think of his characters from movies like Top Gun, Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July, A Few Good Men, Jerry Maguire and the list goes on. Cruise is definitely an actor who has type-casted himself in these types of role. He essentially plays a little bit different version of the Tom Cruise character in almost every one of his movies. PTA recognized that fact and wrote a character that essentially is the Tom Cruise character but to the utmost extreme, and gave the character a twist in that it delves into his painful past that may give cause to his extreme behavior.

I don’t know of a better case of casting an actor that already brings so much to the part by the nature of who that actor is. Everyone knows what to expect when they see a Tom Cruise movie, but they weren’t expecting the irony of the movie star playing up his playboy image. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan said, “Mackey gives Cruise the chance to cut loose by doing amusing riffs on his charismatic superstar image. It's great fun, expertly written and performed, and all the more enjoyable because the self-parody element is unexpected”. (link)

But there was a lot more to Cruise’s performance than just playing up his movie star image, he had to perform in some of the most emotionally complex scenes of his career. There are two big scenes in the movie when Cruise has to be extremely vulnerable. The first occurs when Mackey is being interviewed by a female reporter and is questioned about his family history. The interviewer catches Mackey in a lie and Mackey stays silent for the rest of the interview. The camera stays on a close-up of Cruise’s face throughout the scene and we witness, on his face. his inability to confront the truth about his family. When asked by the interviewer what he’s doing, Cruise coldly replies, “I’m quietly judging you.”

 The second big scene that demonstrates Cruises’ impressive acting chops happens near the end of the film when Mackey confronts his dying father on his deathbed. By this point we have learned that Frank T.J. Mackey’s real name is actually Jack Partridge and his father is Earl Partridge. We learned that Earl left his wife and son when his wife became deathly ill with cancer and his son had to take care of his dying mother while she waited for her husband’s phone call. This type of scene, where the long-lost son  visits his father on his deathbed, is a scene we have seen in countless other movies, but in Magnolia the scene doesn’t play out exactly the way we expect it to.

When Mackey first sees his father (who appears incapacitated because of the morphine he just took) he still holds him in the utmost contempt and doesn’t forgive him for leaving him and his mother when she got cancer. Mackey tries to hold back his emotion saying, “I'm not gonna cry for you…You can just fucking die you fuck, and I hope it hurts.” But Mackey does break down and begins uncontrollably crying and reveals his true feelings to himself and his father. The next time we see Mackey he’s crying even more profusely, pleading to his dying father, “Don't go away, you fucking asshole!”

The most amazing aspect about Cruise’s acting in this scene is the major transition his character goes through during this one scene. When the scene starts we are watching the same character we’ve seen throughout the rest of the movie; he’s angry, holding back his emotions and lashing out at people. But halfway thru the scene Cruise’s acting changes, he clenches his hands and lets loose all the buried emotion he’s been holding back for so long. Suddenly, we feel tremendous sympathy for this otherwise despicable character. While it’s not verbalized in the scene, one can sense what Cruise felt about his dying father all along: which was he loved him and envied him in a strange way. In a sense Frank T.J. Mackey became his father, a person who degrades women. While one might think, given his past history, that Mackey would become the exact opposite of his father. But Mackey ended up taking all his hatred of his father, buried that down deep inside him until he, hopelessly, became him. It’s one of the most touching and heartbreaking scenes I’ve ever seen on film.   

Cruise receiving Golden Globe

For this part, Tom Cruise received the Golden Globe award for best supporting actor and received his third Oscar nomination. He was expected to win, come Oscar night, for best supporting actor. But lost out to Michael Caine for The Cider House Rules. Tom Cruise will best be remembered for being one of America’s biggest movie stars in 1980s and 90s, before he went “crazy” in the 2000s. But his gifts as an actor should not be overshadowed - as his performance as Frank T.J. Mackey was a performance that truly could not have been delivered by any other actor - and in my opinion is one of the greatest film performances of all time.

Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho

Congratulations Christian Bale for your recent Oscar win for Best Supporting Actor in The Fighter! For some strange reason award accolades have escaped you until this past year. Bale has delivered an abundance of great performances throughout his long career. His career began at the age of 13 with one of the best juvenile (18 & under)  performances ever in Spielberg’s little seen gem Empire of the Sun, which was released in 1987. In the 1990s, Bale appeared mostly in musicals, romantic dramas, and coming-of-age stories in movies such as Newsies, Little Women, and All the Little Animals. Although Bale was successful at playing these young, naive character roles, he hadn’t yet achieved any sort of notoriety or much acclaim as an actor. At least none that matched the reception he received after his debut performance in Empire of the Sun. In 2000 that all changed for Bale, when he got the role of his career playing Patrick Bateman in the adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ controversial bestseller novel American Psycho.

The story of American Psycho takes place in the mid-1980s in New York, and it follows the character of Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street yuppie who also happens to be a serial killer. The movie and the book it’s based on can be described as a psycho thriller with elements of black comedy, satire, and horror woven into it. The character of Patrick Bateman appears to be your typical ideal male of the 1980s; he’s handsome, in impeccable shape, rich and incredibly materialistic. He’s also a complete narcissist who's mentally unraveling at the seams. He's unable to control his violent urges, so he ends up killing lots of people in the most brutal ways. It’s an extremely tricky role for an actor to play, because you don’t want to glamorize the character and make him someone you'd admire or care about. While Christian Bale looks strapping and built as Bateman; he acts very despicable, his social ineptitude is laughable, and he's a complete dork. The movie and Bale’s performance never asks you to envy this horrendous character, it does the opposite in fact, it helps to make you despise everything that Patrick Bateman stands for.

Bale in The Machinist

Christian Bale is known as an extreme method actor, meaning that he’ll do almost anything if it will help him portray his characters. Bale has had to fluctuate between losing and gaining unhealthy amounts of weight for his roles. He holds the record for the biggest weight loss ever by an actor - at 63lbs for his role in The Machinist. Bale, who is from Wales, also has an uncanny ability to speak authentically in a different accent. He has employed a different accent for almost every one of his characters. For American Psycho, Bale had to get in the best shape of his life and speak in an affluent New York accent, which he does flawlessly. He also likes to stay in character whenever he's on the set filming.
          Christian Bale has built up a reputation as one of the most dedicated, committed and respected actors working today. While his dedication to his craft of acting is usually inspiring, the ugly side of his acting methods came out in 2009 when his infamous three-minute f-bomb filled rant on the set of Terminator Salvation was leaked online. Bale said, "I completely mixed up fact and fiction, I'm half John Connor (the character he was portraying at the time), I'm half Christian there." (link)

It’s hard to categorize what kind of performance Bale delivers in American Psycho, because there are so many different layers to it. He easily embodies the stoic playboy persona that Patrick Bateman appears to be. But when Bateman turns violent in the film, you suddenly see the true nature of this character and Bale is frighteningly convincing with his transitions. Whenever Bateman is about to kill a person he’ll play a song from one of his favorite musical artists including Huey Lewis & The News and Whitney Houston. During these scenes, Bale talks in the most poignant emotional way, as if he’s saying the most profound things ever about the music. Then he’ll instantly turn to a violent sociopath. We then understand that this is Patrick Bateman’s murder ritual to help get him excited, and Bale’s performance is so soulful and energetic that we can’t help but be amused and disturbed at the same time. 

Film critic Roger Ebert remarked in his review of the movie that, "Christian Bale is heroic in the way he allows the character to leap joyfully into despicability; there is no instinct for self-preservation here, and that is one mark of a good actor.” (link)            

There’s also an unmistakable comic aspect to the performance. Throughout the film we see Patrick Bateman having a hard time relating to those around him, even though, on the surface he appears to be just like everyone else. There are scenes when Bale seems so remote and unaware of how to act in social situations that we almost feel bad for his character, that is if he wasn’t a serial killer. The fact that Bale doesn’t ever let the audience look at his character with sympathy, allows us to view him as the pathetic person  he truly is. In one of the movie’s most hilarious scenes, all of the co-workers at Bateman’s Wall Street firm are comparing their business cards. In this scene, we witness how intense Bateman gets during male competition games. Bale’s intense demeanor combined with his overly concerned and passionate voice over during this scene, make it very comical. This is where we truly begin to realize that his character isn’t all there mentally, he even later kills one of his colleagues because he had a better business card than him.

In the third act of the film, Patrick Bateman gets closer and closer to getting caught by the police and he starts to unravel. The line between what’s real and what’s coming from inside Bateman’s head is completely blurred by this point in the movie. This is when Bale’s performance goes all out. In the confession scene, Bateman calls his lawyer on the phone and leaves him a message where he admits to every awful thing he can remember doing. (“I just had to kill a lot of people!”) In this scene the camera stays on a close-up of Bale’s face throughout. This scene exemplifies the extraordinary abilities of Bale’s acting; his character is completely hysterical at this point and is crying profusely throughout the entire scene. In this scene we see the character go through many emotions of panic, sadness, remorsefulness, disgust and relief. The director of the film, Mary Harron, in her commentary track says, “I don’t know of a screen performance where more emotions flicker past in mere moments. If Bale’s performance was just manic energy, it would be a Jim Carrey performance, but what’s remarkable about it are the subtleties of it.”

After we witness his confession where Bateman admitted everything to his lawyer, the audience expects the movie is coming to a close and Bateman will be caught. But that’s not what happens.

            After this scene, Bale has to continue keeping up the character’s manic energy because Bateman still manages not to be caught. When Patrick Bateman confronts his lawyer about the message he left on his machine, his lawyer is baffled and says he doesn’t believe him. At this moment, Bale goes back to his normal stoic Patrick Bateman persona and we understand that the character will never receive punishment for his crimes. The movie ends up with a close-up on Bale’s face; the last shot is the camera zooming into his blank emotionless eyes. We understand this scene because of the voice-over, “my punishment continues to elude me... there is no catharsis”, but we feel the true impact and message of it through Bale’s performance.

            Christian Bale’s performance in American Psycho is one of my favorite acting performances in all of movies. Patrick Bateman is one of the most loathsome characters ever to be portrayed on film, and Bale’s performance brought out all the aspects of the character. He was able to project the handsome, narcissistic facade that men may aspire to be, but he also portrayed the character’s pathetic nature and allowed you to laugh at him. It takes guts to play a character that has no redeeming qualities. When the movie was released in 2000, it received a mixed reaction from both critics and audiences at the time. Now the film is highly-regarded, and is recognized as Christian Bale’s star making and possibly best performance. His performance in this movie was the reason director Christopher Nolan cast him in what has become his most well known role as Bruce Wayne / Batman.

When director Mary Harron was originally looking for actors to cast as Patrick Bateman, she had a hard time finding an actor who didn’t want to discuss the psychological nature of the character. Christian Bale was the first actor that she met that said there really was no psychological basis for this character. Patrick Bateman is a representation of the worst of the male ego. Recognizing that idea was what got Bale the job; being able to portray all the layers of that idea within this vile character is what made the performance and Christian Bale legendary.