Robert Aldrich’s second hardboiled detective tale is filtered through Steve Shagan’s style of whining nostalgia. Cop Burt Reynolds wants to fix his problematic relationship with call girl Catherine Deneuve, but he’s caught up in an ugly case involving sex trafficking, corruption and a dead teen runaway. Eddie Albert and Ben Johnson provide different kinds of threats. It’s by turns glamorous, moody and violent — but it didn’t steer Reynolds’ career away from Good Ole Boy action pix.

Hustle
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1975 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 120 min. / Street Date May 16, 2023 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Burt Reynolds, Catherine Deneuve, Ben Johnson, Paul Winfield, Eileen Brennan, Colleen Brennan (Sharon Kelly) Eddie Albert, Ernest Borgnine, Catherine Bach, Chuck Hayward, David Spielberg, Naomi Stevens, Dave Willock, Fred Willard.
Cinematography: Joseph F. Biroc
Art Director: Hilyard Brown
Film Editor: Michael Luciano
Original Music: Frank DeVol
Written by Steve Shagan from his novel
Executive Producer Burt Reynolds
Produced and Directed by Robert Aldrich

The edgy crime thriller Hustle split critics in 1975. Some appreciated its emphasis on character over action, while others thought it a complete miscalculation. Even the kindest critics remarked on some of the strained dialogue. The biggest problem would seem to be the pairing of two incompatible movie stars. Could America’s Burt Reynolds believably inhabit the same universe as France’s superstar Catherine Deneuve?  In 1975 she was still known from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, several exotic European classics, and Polanski’s Repulsion. Deneuve’s one American film previous to this one seems to be Stuart Rosenberg’s The April Fools, which was okay but didn’t make her a dual-hemisphere star.

The legendary producer-director Robert Aldrich had stayed in business by landing a monster hit every few years — Vera Cruz,  What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,  The Dirty Dozen. But much of his work underperformed at the box office, including some of his best pictures, such as the superior adventure  The Flight of the Phoenix. Aldrich ran his own movie studio for just a couple of years, and then returned to independent producing and work for hire.

Robert Aldrich’s late career got a huge boost from The Longest Yard, which led to a pact with star Burt Reynolds, under a company eventually called RoBurt. The director functioned separately from his ‘Associates and Aldrich’ banner but used many of his loyal collaborators. An early plan to hire Brigitte Bardot to play opposite Reynolds proved unworkable. The Aldrich – Reynolds teaming resulted in only one movie, the interesting Hustle, written by Steve Shagan.

Filmed under the working titles City of the Angels and Home Free, the show’s realistic story and context doesn’t seem a good fit with its big stars, especially its glamorous leading lady. The sordid crime takes place in a depressing Hollywood underworld of sex trafficking, and the seedy details are R-rated. Yet the cop shows on TV displayed more accurate police procedures. The handsome detective hero conducts the L.A.P.D.’s business in a shiny red convertible.

L.A. detective Phil Gaines (Burt Reynolds) presently lives with the high-class prostitute Nicole Britton (Catherine Deneuve). As he grows more serious about the relationship, her lifestyle begins to become a problem. Phil’s latest case is Gloria Hollinger (Colleen Brennan/Sharon Kelly), a dead girl washed up on the Malibu shore. He and his partner Louis Belgrave (Paul Winfield) sympathize for Gloria’s father Marty (Ben Johnson of The Last Picture Show), a veteran bitter that ‘nobodies’ like himself are pushed around and ignored by the system.

Marty violently rejects the official conclusion that Gloria committed suicide. Phil discovers that she was a stripper and porn actress. He talks to Marty’s wife Paula (Eileen Brennan) but dares not let Marty know anything more. Gloria was last seen in the company of Leo Sellers (Eddie Albert), a rich but corrupt lawyer rumored to indulge in sex parties, adult movies and labor racketeering.

We’re told that Hustle performed decently at the box office, a feat not respected in a year dominated by the blockbuster success of  Jaws. Did audiences expect another Burt Reynolds action picture, or did they just find the premise unbelievable?  Call girl Nicole lives with Phil in a fancy house in the Hollywood Hills. What macho cop would accept such an arrangement?  The film’s one novel wrinkle is its vivid depiction of a vice underworld that exploits underage runaways. In that sense it predates Martin Scorsese’s  Taxi Driver and Paul Schrader’s  Hardcore. Arthur Penn’s Night Moves is also about a precocious Hollywood teenager engaged in adult sex games. Hustle doesn’t seem as substantial as those modern classics.

Hustle’s begins a bit like Jules Dassin’s The Naked City made a generation earlier. In that classic an elderly midwestern couple comes to New York to claim the body of their daughter, a young woman who ran with a bad crowd and ended up murdered in a bathtub. The father says something to the effect of “O Lord, why couldn’t she have been born ugly?

The fact that Gloria Hollinger probably wasn’t murdered makes no difference to her heartbroken father Marty, a damaged Korean War vet who figures that cops like Phil Gaines are just there to obstruct justice. Mary has a point, as ‘the system’ is indeed influenced by political pressure. Both Leo Sellers and Phil’s boss Santoro (Ernest Borgnine) ask if Marty is ‘anybody,’ just in case his daughter’s death might merit a special investigation. Santuro is more interested in fishing and politics than solving crimes.

Burt Reynolds’ Phil Gaines is one of those modern existential cops for whom the proven virtues of courage and loyalty have lost their luster. As Marty says, the system is rigged in favor of wealthy guys with ‘juice.’ The slimy Leo Sellars is known to be involved in gang murders but all Phil has against him is tainted wiretap evidence. Leo dabbles in porn vice and contributes to the deliquency of minors through sex parties at his house. Phil can’t pursue that avenue either, because Leo knows that Phil is shacked up with Nicole. Leo obtained Nicole’s work visa, and is one of her customers.

Meanwhile, Marty Hollinger is learning for himself what Phil wouldn’t tell him about the sleazy underworld that used his daughter as a disposable sex object. Marty wants somebody to punish for Gloria’s death. Losing his patience, Phil shows Marty the porn film starring his daughter … a serious breach of ethics. Marty indeed responds with violence — to get Leo Sellers’ name, he beats up Gloria’s friend Peggy Summers (Catherine Bach).

That fact that Hustle puts character before action doesn’t alleviate its many problems. The ultra-sophisticated Catherine Deneuve always looks more perfect than Grace Kelly; her Nicole must be the most elegant call girl alive. We never see her do anything more suggestive than making phone sex calls (without as much as a naughty word spoken). The film’s leads wield considerable star power, but little chemistry. Reynolds has his charm and Deneuve is pleasantly amorous, but their scenes seem forced. Even their poses seem disconnected. (top image  ↑ )  If we didn’t see Nicole in contact with other characters, we’d suspect that she was a fantasy in Phil’s mind, a dream of a more romantic life.

Just as damaging is the movie’s lack of realism. Phil and his partner Louis Belgrave don’t follow anything like real crime scene protocol, and are free to drift around in that red car, like William Shatner in a TV show. The banter at the police station is tough-talk phony, with Phil, Louis and Santoro swapping gross sexist remarks and racial slurs. The script gives Phil and Louis conflicting attitudes in the scene where Marty Hollinger must identify his daughter. Louis and Phil are overly callous, for no good reason unless they were trying to provoke a reaction from Marty. Aldrich is not the kind of director to skew the scene in an attempt to express Marty’s subjective trauma. When Gloria’s nude body is so rudely displayed the scene comes off as borderline exploitative.

“Don’t you know where you live, Marty?  Can’t you smell the bananas?  You live in Guatamala with color television.”

The shows many introspective speeches hammer away at Phil Gaines’ interior discomfort. Phil waxes nostalgic over music and memories from earlier decades, times he can’t have experienced firsthand. The soundtrack leans on romatic source music from Charles Aznavour, big bands, etc. Thus Phil is established as a semi-tragic figure out of his time. Writer Steve Shagan doesn’t believe in subtle hints. When Nicole and Phil watch a scene from Moby Dick on TV, we recoil at the blunt symbolism. Poor Phil is fighting a losing battle against the world.

Even Phil’s choice of car is a disappointment — a bright red ’73 Mustang, that oversized offense to the appeal of earlier models. Phil is likely wishing he had a ‘Stang like that of San Francisco’s Frank Bullitt. At the long-gone Plaza Theater in Westwood, Phil and Nicole watch the conclusion of Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, the entire finale with Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant. It’s another unsubtle symbolic Moment — real romance is harder to capture than Moby Dick.

Reynolds takes a good whack at selling Phil’s soured speeches, but we have a hard time seeing him as a tragic figure. All of Phil’s retro whining makes us wonder if Shagan is recycling unused material from his Save the Tiger, an annoying ode to masculine midlife self-pity. How that movie garnered awards, I don’t know. It did serious damage to my appreciation of Jack Lemmon.

Were the film’s action scenes an afterthought?  Leo Sellers’ villain status is cemented via a cutaway to a car bombing in Akron, Ohio. The extraneous scene feels like it wandered in from Murder, Incorporated. Phil Gaines takes time out to defuse a hostage situation straight from a TV cop show. The action cutting seems fumbled, as if a key shot were missing. Such confusing moments recur in Aldrich movies. The gunplay at the film’s finish has more clarity. This downbeat finale is too similar to what Richard Fleischer came up with for Joseph Wambaugh’s cop saga The New Centurions. Hustle scores points for not tying everything up with a pat denoument. But it never decides whether it is a crime thriller, corruption mystery or unlikely romance.

Hustle’s real ending involves the deliberate faking of a murder scene, to ‘correct’ the unfair course of justice. Never mind that the charade is insane: the unstable but moral Marty could easily decide to atone, confess, and land everyone in jail. Phil drags his partner into a major felony without even asking permission. It’s a bold move, faking evidence and rigging the system, and no less corrupt because Phil has a benevolent motive.

All of the actors are reasonably good. Ernest Borgnine doesn’t overact, as he sometimes did for Aldrich. Eileen Brennan is terrific in a smallish role. The talented Eddie Albert had scored big with Aldrich as far back as Attack. He again makes a slick, hateful villain. Paul Winfield contributes to the film’s surface credibility, helping Reynolds with the overwritten cop-talk. Ben Johnson also scores, although he’s acting beyond the limit of his range. The script never examines Marty Hollinger’s real problem — where was all of his heartbreak and concern before Gloria turned up dead?  Coould he be so completely ignorant about runaway daughters?  Marty’s tearful viewing of the porn film prefigures George C. Scott’s wrenching scene in Hardcore. Among the familiar faces seen in small roles is future horror star Robert Englund. He serves a Bruce Dern-like function in the film’s final scene.

Aldrich’s Hustle uses the abuse of women as an exploitable context for Steve Shagan’s general complaints about American society. How that fits in with the presence of Catherine Deneuve as a fantasy sex worker, is hard to explain. We readily agree that America routinely sacrifices its sons to war and its daughters to sex killers. The most meaningful movie with that message is Ivan Passer’s superb Cutter’s Way, made six years later.

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of Hustle is a new 4K remaster of this handsomely-filmed show. Aldrich didn’t often go for a glamorous look, but with Ms. Deneuve involved he surely had no choice. Phil Gaines does a lot of prowling at night, listening to his music. We hear Cole Porter, Lalo Schifrin & Francis Lai, and that’s not counting incidental bits of swing music. Gaines may not be a jazz connoisseur like Hieronymous Bosch, but he has general good taste. Any opportunity to hear even a snippet of So Rare is welcome.

Hustle is technically a post-period film noir, or an early neo-noir, depending on one’s definition of the style. Kino’s commentary taps Aldrich’s key biographers Alain Silver and James Ursini. The track carries expert, pertinent information, especially about the colorful maverick director, who started as an assistant to some of the noir greats of the late 1940s. The talk eventually settles into a lot of scene-by-scene analysis. Alain Silver also remarks on Aldrich and editor Michael Luciano’s occasional erratic cutting, which he calls ‘fractured.’  We made a big deal of this ‘fractured’ cutting, which almost sabotages the grand big-screen spectacle of Aldrich’s very strange Italian epic Sodom and Gomorrah.

Also included are a trailer and some TV spots. With the end of his business relationship with Burt Reynolds, Aldrich made just four more movies. Only Twilight’s Last Gleaming rises to the level of his earlier work. At the time of this writing, the last major personality from Hustle still standing is the unsinkable Catherine Deneuve, who has just turned 80.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Hustle
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Audio commentary by Alain Silver and James Ursini.
Trailer, TV spots
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: November 26, 2023
(7033hust)

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