Hustle
With Burt Reynolds, Catherine Deneuve, Ben Johnson.
US, 1975, 35mm, color, 120 min.
Print source: HFA
If The Longest Yard was a gritted-teeth uprising against bureaucratic corruption and abusive power, its follow-up, Hustle, is a long, aggrieved sigh of resignation to the very same forces. One of Aldrich’s most leisurely paced films, it gradually shades in the gloomy existence of Burt Reynolds’ taciturn Los Angeles cop who tends to the city’s sleaze by day and bumbles through a tentative relationship with Catherine Deneuve’s glamorous French escort by night. There’s a procedural at the heart of the story—a teenage girl has washed up on shore, and a multifarious porn business appears to be the culprit—but Aldrich’s chief interest lies in the texture of his protagonist’s daily life, as well as in his ravaged emotional climate. Boasting a career-best Burt Reynolds performance of underplayed discontent and pitilessly harsh lighting schemes from cinematographer Joseph Biroc, Hustle draws a shadowy portrait of a cruel, mercenary urban environment—one where love, however commoditized and fleeting, is the only respite.
