From the masterful Crimes & Misdemeanors to the mirthless Horrible Bosses, the movie trope of the over-pampered looking to the underworld to commit reprehensible acts on their behalf is a cinematic mainstay. A variant of this narrative cliché is when highbrow culture survives only through its dependence on lowbrow culture.
Such is the storyline behind “The Hustler,” (1973), an episode from the third season of the award-winning television series The Odd Couple. In this billiards TV episode, Felix Unger (Tony Randall) is desperate to generate enough money to buy costumes for his opera group. As the frou-frou members are unable to raise the funds on their own, Unger turns to his roommate, Oscar Madison (Jack Klugman), who is unencumbered by the same blue-blooded sensibilities, and thus far more capable of raising money through less desirable means, such as gambling and pool hustling.
After the underground casino plan backfires and puts Unger into greater debt, Madison agrees to raise the money through a 250-point match of straight pool with a local shark, Sure-Shot Wilson. As Madison prepares for the match, the highbrow/lowbrow divide between the two roommates becomes farcically obvious. Unger, whose “mother wouldn’t let him [go to a pool room],” thinks that “pool is the same as golf – you just put a ball in the hole,” learns that the billiards balls have “little numbers on them” and realizes that the game is “much harder that way” when you can’t put the ball anywhere on the table.
The next day, the two men return to the pool hall for Madison’s math against Sure-Shot, a corpulent, tousled man with a sonorous cough and a penchant for smoking while shooting. With Madison in danger of losing, Unger engages a reluctant Sure-Shot in a conversation about his cough and the deadly effects of smoking four packs a day. Sure-Shot becomes so distracted and concerned with his well-being that he opts not to take his next shot while holding his customary cigarette, and ends up missing, ceding the game and the winner’s pot to Madison. Of course, the irony is not lost that it is Unger who, in effect, saves the game, which in turn, saves the opera club.
As far as the actual pool-playing goes, it’s pretty uninteresting, though Jack Klugman has a strong stance and seems very comfortable with a cue stick in his hand. Perhaps that’s because twelve years earlier, he starred as Jesse Cardiff, a pool shark, in The Twilight Zone episode “A Game of Pool,” still probably the single best billiards television episode. (In fact, Klugman was known to be a fan of billiards. He even played pool with Three’s Company actress Suzanne Somers on the 1977 television special, Celebrity Challenge of the Sexes 2.)
Interestingly, “The Hustler” episode was remade when The Odd Couple was updated on ABC in 1982 as The New Odd Couple. Desmond Wilson played the role of Oscar Madison. This is another sign of billiards television continuity, as Wilson formerly played Lamont Sanford on the series Sanford & Son, which had its own billiards episodes, “A House is Not a Poolroom” (1973).
“The Hustler” episode of The Odd Couple is available to stream on Hulu.
