The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961)

Paul Newman in The Hustler

Cast: Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, George C. Scott, Myron McCormick, Murray Hamilton, Michael Constantine, Stefan Gierasch, Clifford A. Pellow, Jake LaMotta, Gordon B. Clarke, Alexander Rose, Carolyn Coates, Carl York, Vincent Gardenia. Screenplay: Sidney Carroll, Robert Rossen, based on a novel by Walter Tevis. Cinematography: Eugen Schüfftan. Production design: Harry Horner. Film editing: Dede Allen. Music: Kenyon Hopkins.

You can't say The Hustler isn't educational: It made me Google the difference between pool and billiards. Otherwise, it stands as a direction the American film might have gone in the 1960s, after the breakup of the studios, the waning of anticommunist hysteria, and the weakening of Production Code enforcement. Instead, the movies went in the direction signaled by the Oscars for that year, in which Academy voters chose West Side Story (Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins) over The Hustler as best picture, indicating a trend toward big, bright entertainment rather than gritty, intense films of the sort that were being turned out in Europe and Japan during the 1950s and '60s. The Hustler seems more like a film from the 1970s than one of the better films of the 1960s. It did land Oscars for Harry Horner's production design and Eugen Schüfftan's cinematography, as well it should have. CinemaScope could be an unwieldy format, especially in black-and-white, but Schüfftan mastered it beautifully, working with director Robert Rossen to make the most of Horner's unglamorous and sometimes cramped settings. The camera sometimes gives us the full spread of a set and lets us search for the key figures in it: The introduction of Piper Laurie's Sarah is not a grand entrance or a tell-all closeup but an at first insignificant figure in a train station diner, gaining prominence only through the eyeline of Paul Newman's Fast Eddie Felson. Later, when Sarah returns to that diner, Eddie is seated at the far right of the frame, not front and center as you'd expect the protagonist of a movie to be. Pool, being a horizontal game, is more in line with the demands of CinemaScope, and it's here that Dede Allen's editing works particularly well. As for the actors, Newman, Laurie, George C. Scott, and Jackie Gleason all covered themselves with glory -- and Oscar nominations, which of course Scott declined. If I have reservations about The Hustler it's that the bluesy score by Kenyon Hopkins is laid on a little too thickly and that its story, hinging on a suicide and a redemption, strays to the edge of being contrived and melodramatic, but at least doesn't fall completely into happily ever after mode.

The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985)

Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, and Judd Nelson
in The Breakfast Club

Cast: Emilio Estevez, Paul Gleason, Anthony Michael Hall, John Kapelos, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy. Screenplay: John Hughes. Cinematography: Thomas Del Ruth. Production design: John W. Corso. Film editing: Dede Allen. Music: Keith Forsey.

John Hughes's movies have stood the test of time, not by evoking nostalgia so much as reflecting a moment in American cultural history: the peaking of the Baby Boom. The central figure in The Breakfast Club is none of the teenage detainees -- the jock Andrew (Emilio Estevez), the nerd Brian (Anthony Michael Hall), the hood John (Judd Nelson), the princess Claire (Molly Ringwald), and the basket case Allison (Ally Sheedy) -- but rather their harried detainer, Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason), struggling to assert the authority that he thinks belongs to him. The year of the film's release, 1985, is the point at which the Boomers were on the cusp of turning 40, with all the anxious reappraisal that comes with that birthday. It's summed up in a conversation between Vernon and the janitor, Carl (John Kapelos), in which Vernon expresses his angst at the thought that when he gets older, the detainees are "going to be running the country ... these kids are going to take care of me." To which Carl responds, "I wouldn't count on it." The fear being expressed is clearly that of writer-director Hughes, born in 1950 and hence right in that moment of recognition. A lot of the movie's contemporary critics didn't see this, dismissing The Breakfast Club -- and most of Hughes's other films -- as entertainment for the kind of kids shown in the film, whose actors became rather condescendingly known as the Brat Pack. Hughes, however, recognized and even celebrated the self-awareness that develops in these teenagers, contrasting it with the worn-down cynicism of their parents, who want the kids to achieve the things they failed to do: Brian's parents pressure him to excel in school; Andrew's father looks to him to accomplish the athletic feats he failed at; Claire's obviously see her social status as a validation of their own tenuous success; meanwhile, John's and Allison's have simply given up, letting him run wild and her slump into disarray. The Breakfast Club could have been stronger in moving its subtext into the explicit substance of the movie, but to do so would probably have heightened the didacticism into which the film threatens to fall when Brian reads aloud his essay, protesting against being stereotyped and insisting that each of them is a little bit of a brain, jock, princess, basket case, and hood.

Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975)

Cast: Al Pacino, John Cazale, Charles Durning, Chris Sarandon, Sully Boyar, Carol Kane, James Broderick, Lance Henriksen, Susan Peretz, Judith Malina. Screenplay: Frank Pierson. Cinematography: Victor J. Kemper. Production design: Charles Bailey. Film editing: Dede Allen.

Dog Day Afternoon is a tragicomic docudrama about an ill-advised, ill-planned bank robbery that went wrong in almost all ways imaginable. It gave Al Pacino one of his most entertainingly flamboyant roles as Sonny Wortzik, who wants the money to pay for his lover's sex reassignment surgery. In its day, this motive might have been played more for laughs than it would be today, but Chris Sarandon's performance as Leon, who wants to transition to female, brought a measure of sympathy to the character that it might otherwise have lacked. The film is, like so many of director Sidney Lumet's, notable not only for standout performances like Pacino's and Sarandon's, but also for its exceptional ensemble work among the hostages in the bank and the cops outside, a result of Lumet's going beyond the screenplay (which won an Oscar for Frank Pierson) to workshop dialogue and business among the groups, playing up the emerging Stockholm Syndrome of the hostages and the itchiness of the impatient cops.