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.

Separate Tables (Delbert Mann, 1958)

Cast: Deborah Kerr, Rita Hayworth, David Niven, Wendy Hiller, Burt Lancaster, Gladys Cooper, Cathleen Nesbitt, Felix Aylmer, Rod Taylor, Audrey Dalton, May Hallatt, Priscilla Morgan. Screenplay: Terence Rattigan, John Gay, based on plays by Terence Rattigan. Cinematography: Charles Lang. Production design: Harry Horner. Film editing: Charles Ennis, Marjorie Fowler. Music: David Raksin.

This somewhat stodgy drama set in a residential hotel in England received seven Academy Award nominations, including best picture, and David Niven and Wendy Hiller actually won for best actor and supporting actress. Unfortunately, today it seems tired and rather clichéd, with Gladys Cooper reprising her smothering mother role from Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), this time keeping her thumb on Deborah Kerr (who racked up the fifth of her six unsuccessful Oscar nominations for the film). Burt Lancaster and Rita Hayworth were called in for star power, but only seem miscast as the squabbling divorced couple. Niven's performance as the faux major whose imposture is exposed when he's arrested for sexual harassment in a theater is indeed the standout in the film, but the Oscar is also a reward for a quarter-century of playing second leads and sidekicks.

Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1950)

Cast: Judy Holliday, Broderick Crawford, William Holden, Howard St. John, Frank Otto, Larry Oliver, Barbara Brown, Grandon Rhodes, Claire Carlton. Screenplay: Albert Mannheimer, Garson Kanin, based on a play by Garson Kanin. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Production design: Harry Horner. Film editing: Charles Nelson. Music: Friedrich Hollaender.

Judy Holliday's best actress Oscar win, over the classic performances of Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. and Bette Davis in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve, still ranks as one of the award's more jaw-dropping moments. But if there was ever a case for a three-way tie, this might be it. Because Holliday's Billie Dawn is a great performance, and it lacked the comeback aura of Swanson's or the career-valedictory overtones of Davis's. She had, of course, perfected the role on Broadway, but it's also to her credit that she never seems stagy, even in the confines of what is too often a filmed play dogged a bit by the censors.

The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949)

With 12 Oscar nominations and three wins for directing, William Wyler holds a firm place in the history of American movies. But not without some grumbling on the part of auteur critics like Andrew Sarris, who observed, "Wyler's career is a cipher as far as personal direction is concerned." His movies were invariably polished and professionally made, but if what you're looking for is some hint of personality behind the camera, the kind that Hitchcock or Hawks or Ford displayed no matter what the subject matter of the film, then Wyler is an enigma. His most personal film, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), grew out of his wartime experiences, but they are subsumed in the stories he has to tell and not revealed with any assertively personal point of view on them. And anyone who can trace a Wylerian personality latent in movies as varied as Mrs. Miniver (1942), Roman Holiday (1953), Ben-Hur (1959), and Funny Girl (1968) has a subtler analytical mind than mine. What they have in common is that they are well made, the work of a fine craftsman if not an artist. The other thing they have in common is that they won Oscars for their stars: Greer Garson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlton Heston, and Barbra Streisand, respectively. The Heiress, too, won an Oscar for its star, Olivia de Havilland, suggesting that in Wyler we have a director whose virtue lay not in his personal vision but in his skill at packaging, at arranging a showcase not just for performers -- he also directed Oscar-winning performances by Bette Davis in Jezebel (1938) and by Fredric March and Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives -- but also for production designers, costume designers, composers, and cinematographers: Oscars for The Heiress went to John Meehan, Harry Horner, and Emile Kuri for art direction and set decoration, to Edith Head and Gile Steele for costumes, and to Aaron Copland for the score, and Leo Tover was nominated for his cinematography. Wyler lost the directing Oscar to Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives, but is there any doubt that The Heiress would have been a lesser film than it is without Wyler's guidance? All of this is a long-winded way to say that although I honor, and in many ways prefer, the personal vision that shines through in the works of directors like Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, et al., there is room in my pantheon for the skilled if impersonal professional. As for The Heiress itself, it's a satisfying film with two great performances (de Havilland's Catherine and Ralph Richardson's Dr. Sloper), one hugely entertaining one (Miriam Hopkins's Lavinia Penniman), and one sad miscasting: Montgomery Clift's Morris Townsend. It's a hard role to put across: Morris has to be plausible enough to persuade not only Catherine but also the somewhat more worldly Lavinia that he is genuinely in love with Catherine and not just her money, but he also needs to give the audience a whiff of the cad. Clift's Morris is too callow, too grinningly eager. There is no ambiguity in the performance. If we like Morris too much, we risk seeing Dr. Sloper more as an over-stern paterfamilias and less as the cruelly self-absorbed man he is. Richardson's fine performance goes a long way to righting this imbalance, but he's fighting Clift's sex appeal all the way.