PRO POKER SCHOOL Learn Before You Earn

Poker Review

Review by John Harkness

Just to confuse matters, there's two new Steve McQueen box sets available, one from MGM featuring the previously issued DVD's of The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven and Junior Bonner with a new Special Edition of The Thomas Crown Affair, and the other from Warner Home Video with a new special edition of The Getaway and new to DVD issues of Tom Horn and, at long last, The Cincinnati Kid, regarded in many quarters as the finest poker movie ever made.

If one is only interested in the poker movie, it is available singly, at long last. To answer the question "why did it take so long to get this out on DVD'" we need to remember that with corporate sales and shifts over the years, there's a fair amount of consolidation of back catalogues, which means that Warner owns most of the old MGM films. Since The Cincinnati Kid is a fairly cultish item, and in terms of broader sales, doesn't quite have the marketable pizzazz of, say, Singin' In The Rain, it took Warner a while to get to it.

The transfer is very good, and in its original widescreen aspect ratio, so we can finally dump our old pan and scan VHS tapes. As extras, the DVD offers an alarmingly dull commentary from director Norman Jewison, and a fitfully amusing commentary from the Celebrity Poker Showdown team of ex-Tiltboy Phil Gordon and comedian Dave Foley. Gordon offers some interesting insights into the world of big stakes poker and player psychology, even though he sort of chokes while defending the madly improbable final hand. There's also a little nifty period featurette about the film's card consultant teaching Joan Blondell how to deal in the big game.

So how does The Cincinnati Kid hold up forty years down the road'

According to Jewison, parachuted in after Sam Peckinpah had been shooting for two weeks, he found Ring Lardner's adaptation of the Richard Jessup novel to be "turgid." Not having ever seen that script, we can't judge Jewison's assessment. We can say that the film is considerably softer than the novel a terse piece of hard-boiled existential fiction with debts to Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett.

One sees this particularly in the way the film treats the principal female characters - the soft lit lyricism of the scenes where The Kid follows Christian (Tuesday Weld) home to her family farm have no equivalent in the novel, and casting Ann-Margaret as the bad girl temptress is vaguely bizarre (Ann-Margaret may have looked hotter than Georgia asphalt, but she always had to strain to play bad girls - she just seemed like a nice girl in a sexy package, as if her jaw-dropping physical presence was a form of dress-up).

The poker scenes, though... Steve McQueen remains the guy every poker player wants to be when he sits down at the table (Matt Damon notwithstanding), the essence of cool. And when he takes that hellacious beat at the end of the movie, one only wishes that any number of tournament pros would choose to emulate his icy emotional control. You don't hear him berating Lancey for misplaying his hand (let's face it, he does misplay that final hand, badly).

Tony Holden in Big Deal has delineated what's wrong with the final scene of Cncinnati Kid in excruciating detail, its mathematical improbability, the way it misplays the film's own themes (Lancey's the man because he improbably outdrew the kid at the river' How does that make him "The Man'").

And, as Phil Gordon notes in the commentary, even though Karl Malden's Shooter announces "no string bets" before the game starts, there's at least two old school string raises in the final game - I call your five hundred... and raise you two' thousand"

The atmosphere in the film is tremendous, even if the period detailing is vague. It's supposed to be Depression New Orleans, but don't study the wardrobe two closely. The performances, most notably of McQueen and Edward G. Robinson in particular, but also Rip Torn as the film's villain, are superb. And who can forget Robinson looking at Torn and telling him "What you paid is the looking price. Lessons are extra."

A very worthwhile issue that should be in any poker player's movie collection, though so old-fashioned, with its emphasis on five card stud, that it was a period piece forty years ago. I'd rank it slightly lower than Rounders as a poker film and slightly behind The Hustler in the "gambling as existential quest" genre.