“Fast” Eddie Felson, rendered in a superlative performance by Paul Newman, is an absurdly talented pool player who is, as his long-suffering, fatherly business partner Charlie puts it, “a high class con man. He can charm anybody into anything.” Eddie and Charlie run their hustle in bars and pool halls across America, effortlessly raking in enough cash to live the good life and never look back. At the start of the film, Eddie appears not to have a care in the world; feeling his supremacy unquestioned, he settles for continually chasing after bigger payoffs.

Then Eddie goes to a high-stakes pool hall in which his reputation is already known, and learns that this is the turf of the legendary Minnesota Fats (played by a superb Jackie Gleason). “Nobody’s beat him in 15 years, he’s the best player in the country,” Eddie is told, to which he responds with unflappable confidence, “No he’s not, because I am.” That very night, the two phenomenal players embark upon an epic game. After 25 hours of play, Eddie is up by a whopping $18,000, but he insists that the game isn’t over until Fats admits he has lost. It is then that Bert (George C. Scott), an unscrupulous bettor and shrewd observer of human nature, advises Fats to keep going, because “the kid is a loser.” And thus this sinister character first asserts his poisonous influence upon the surprisingly sensitive Eddie.

The game ends with Eddie drunk and collapsing from exhaustion, having lost all but his last $200. He is broken and humiliated, and from that point on, he is obsessed with getting another chance to beat Fats.

Eddie abandons Charlie, and starts living out of a bus station locker. At the bus station diner, he first notices a sweet-looking girl named Sarah (Piper Laurie), sitting by herself, reading; the next morning, he sees her again, drinking alone at a bar. “You look different,” he says. “More relaxed.”

“It’s the light,” she replies. “And the scotch.”

And so these hard-drinking, confused souls fall into an unquestioning, sex-based relationship. Sarah doesn’t trust Eddie at first; “why me?” she asks. But Eddie refuses to heed her objections; he moves his things from the bus station locker to her apartment, and Sarah’s outlook becomes increasingly less negative. Clearly, an affair with the young Paul Newman does wonders for a person’s self-esteem.

Sarah is a writer, and Eddie is enraged when he finds that she is writing about their relationship: “We have a contract of depravity,” he reads aloud off her typewritten page. “All we have to do is pull the blind down.” They never talk about anything of consequence; they remain, essentially, strangers. “What happens when the liquor and the money run out?” Sarah asks him. But gradually, they grow closer; Sarah reveals her sad, utterly unglamorous life story. She longs for Eddie to tell her that he loves her. “You need the words?” he asks. “Yes, I need them very much,” she responds. “If you ever say them, I’ll never let you take them back.”

Hungry to get back into the pool circuit, Eddie agrees to an unholy union: he will travel to Louisville for a tournament, with Bert serving as his new partner and manager. Bert’s comment about Eddie being a loser still haunts him. According to Bert, talent is easy to come by; what Eddie lacks is character. “Fats has more character in one finger than you have in your whole skinny body,” Bert famously quips. Thus the poison of self-doubt he has put into Eddie grows increasingly concentrated.

Sarah is the only one who sees the parasites hanging around Eddie for what they are, and she tries to warn him: “ This place, the people. They wear masks, Eddie. And underneath the masks, they’re perverted, twisted, crippled.” But Eddie won’t listen, and by the time he does it is too late.

This film is, in my opinion, close to perfect. The dialogue is brilliant: profound, witty, relentlessly sharp. The characters are often ugly and pathetic in their realism, and the film steers clear of simplistic moralizing with a frankness that is refreshing and rather astonishing, considering the period in which it was made. If you haven’t seen this film, or haven’t seen it for years or decades, I urge you to watch it again. As with all great works of art, its truths become only more resonant with the passage of time.

- Kate Folk