½*/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Burt Reynolds, Catherine Deneuve, Ben Johnson, Paul Winfield
screenplay by Steve Shagan
directed by Robert Aldrich
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover In 1955, Robert Aldrich directed Kiss Me Deadly. Ending in a fiery conflagration that suggested the end of civilization, its chief selling point was the chance to watch a bunch of degenerates lose their last shred of decency. And because it transgressed norms that would not be fully shattered until a decade-plus later, it had a nasty kick that was hard to shake. Flash forward twenty years to 1975, and the director is in a bit of a bind: with norms everywhere falling like a stripper's pasties, it's clear that civilization has, indeed, come to an end–not with the bang of Kiss Me Deadly, but with the whimper of Hustle, a film that flaunts its creep credentials with such pathetic stridency that you can't even raise the enthusiasm to take offense. You're merely bored with a director whose raison d'être had been rendered obsolete.
Hustle's second-string Mike Hammer is Lt. Phil Gaines (Burt Reynolds), one of those stoic defenders of freedom who decries women resorting to porn while romancing a high-priced call girl named Nicole Britton (Catherine Deneuve). The subtleties of his position remain opaque, as there are more pressing concerns–chiefly, the discovery of a young woman's body washed up on the beach. The coroner's position is suicide by barbiturate overdose, but the shady circumstances inspire her obsessive, veteran father Marty (Ben Johnson) to launch his own investigation despite a total lack of experience. This provokes Gaines and his partner Belgrave (Paul Winfield) to do some digging of their own; corruption, perversion, and general not-niceness ensue.
None of this gets the rise out of us that Kiss Me Deadly does, because the attitude is so apathetic. The horror of "holy-shit-this-is-really-happening" has given way to the lethargy of "this-happens-every-day, what-of-it." The movie goes through the motions of shocking us with the introduction of porn, repeated slapping-around of women, and a cadaver with big tits. (Even albinos come in for abuse.) But it just makes us roll our eyes as if to ask: can't they do anything more creative than this? The answer, in the form of TV-movie direction and writing, is an emphatic "no," and the limp parade of grottiness continues to the tedium of many. I can't think of a single film by a director of Aldrich's stature that's this lazily directed, as though with a constant stream of profane images Hustle would direct itself.
To be sure, the lip-smacking sensationalism and bald-faced hypocrisy gets to be a little much. The film is less concerned with avenging the death of an innocent woman than with healing her father's resulting wounded pride–pure, dumb, macho territoriality. And someday I want writer Steve Shagan to explain the ethics of sex work to me, since he flip-flops between Paul Schrader anti-porn moralizing and laissez-faire prostitution-boosting that left my brain completely scrambled. But assembling a coherent position is really not what this movie's about: rather, it's about what happens when a famously corrosive director finally arrives at the total corruption his work has been soothsaying for years. That is, he loses any interest in human issues and settles for a leaden edition of PENTHOUSE FORUM. And damned if I don't lose my interest in him.
THE DVD
Paramount's DVD release of Hustle has its own problems. Not only does the 1.78:1, 16×9-enhanced presentation jack up brightness to the point of glare on skin tones, but gatefloat becomes a problem now and again, too. Still, good saturation otherwise, and fine detail is respectable. The Dolby 2.0 mono sound is better, sharp and full enough to count without being truly spectacular. There are no extras.
119 minutes; R; 1.78:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Paramount
