It’s been a long day. To tell you the truth, I feel a little bit drained, and beaten up. Exhausted, yet kind of nervy and alert. My worst possible combination.
So I’m going to watch:
Tribute not up yet. We’re working on it,
I have immersed myself in Newman tributes today (including this one – with which I have a personal connection … not to mention the fact that Newman’s hot salsa is the only kind of salsa I buy). It makes me crazy to see so many of these movies again. I haven’t seen Cool Hand Luke (according to the barflies in Cheers “the sweatiest movie ever made”) in years … or Butch Cassidy or Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (a personal favorite, as excruciating as it is). So I pulled out The Hustler tonight. Not only is Newman in it, but Jackie Gleason is one of my favorite people to ever walk the planet. Humphrey Bogart said that acting (good acting) should be “six feet back in the eyes”. No matter what Gleason did – comedy, drama, farce, or variety shows – it was “six feet back in the eyes”. He just makes me happy, that’s all. To know he existed. He seems rather impossible, doesn’t he? But there he is, a force of nature. I walk by his semi-silly statue every day outside of Port Authority in Times Square, and while I look upon it as kind of like the Rocky statue (like: let’s not pretend it’s Michelangelo’s David, mkay?) – it still makes me happy to see it. Because it’s a daily reminder that such impossible creatures as himself did actually walk the damn planet.
The “sweatiest movie ever made” quote was also used again by NBC writers in a Friends episode.
Well, Cheers beat Friends by about 10 years! It was such a funny scene – Norm and Cliff and all the other dudes were betting on it – screaming out the names of sweaty movies -they were all so manic and into it – it was so hysterical!
I can’t believe how enduring that “Cheers” scene is. How ridiculous is it to sit around contemplating which movie is the “sweatiest ever made”? But it’s so funny. And when someone says (I think it was Cliff?) Cool Hand Luke…it’s like “oh, yeah. Contest OVER.” Hahahaha. Of course, a movie about prisoners on a chain gang. How could you get any sweatier than that?
I bet if I typed “sweatiest movie ever made” into Youtube’s search engine, this scene would come up somewhere.
Jackie Gleason. I’ll be thinking about him all day now. Thanks, Sheila. In a really, really good way. :)
Love that pic, Sheila. One of my favorite scenes ever.
“How should I play that one, Bert? Play it safe? That’s the way you always told me to play it: safe… play the percentage. Well, here we go: fast and loose. One ball, corner pocket. Yeah, percentage players die broke, too, don’t they, Bert?”
Emily – It’s amazing that pretty much all Gleason says in The Hustler is stuff like “6 in the corner pocket” and he was nominated for an Oscar. Really goes to show you that it’s not the lines – or the scenes – it’s what you DO with them that elevates. I love what Ebert wrote about Gleason’s performance:
With Gleason it is all presence, body language, the sad face, the concise, intent way he works the table, the lack of wasted moves. He gives the impression of a man purified by pool, who has moved through all the sad compromises and crooked bets and hustling moves and emerged as a man who simply, elegantly, plays the game. He has long ago given up hustling; unlike Eddie, he makes his living by dependably being the best, time after time, so that others can test themselves against him. He is the ruler of a shabby kingdom, and at the end of the film, as Eddie and Bert have their merciless confrontation, he sits passive in the middle of the floor, listening to what he has heard countless times before, knowing that to practice his gift he has to accept this world.
Spot ON.
And let’s just have a moment for how terrific Piper Laurie is in the movie. Heartbreaking. Her last scene has always brought me to tears. What a wonderful thing: to have a movie like this that gives the woman not just equal time – but fantastic and complex things to DO … Very rare in a movie such as this, to have the woman be as well developed a character.
She is so good.
And George C. Scott is amazing – you’d never know he wasn’t a veteran of 100s of movies.