Robert Aldrich—not Robert Altman, who people confused him with during the 1970s through his premature death in 1983; Altman may have been mistaken for the director of The Dirty Dozen and The Longest Yard just as often, but his golden years were Aldrich’s last full decade alive. Altman went on making a movie every two years until his death in 2006, and by then, he’d been canonized by multiple generations, helped in the last stretch by the unbridled enthusiasm of acolyte Paul Thomas Anderson. Robert Aldrich had no such boosters late in his life; Quentin Tarantino would reference 1955’s Kiss Me Deadly in Pulp Fiction, and he continues to wax rhapsodic about the one Hollywood director modest enough to name his production company the “Associates and Aldrich,” not the other way around.
The Longest Yard was a big hit for Aldrich and star Burt Reynolds in 1974. They immediately formed a company together, RoBurt, and started looking for projects. It took a while, but in 1975, Hustle emerged, making over $10 million against a budget of $3 million. Reynolds: “I think it was a good film… Catherine Deneuve and I were a case of one plus one makes three so that brought about some interest.” The Longest Yard had a legacy simply by being a successful sports movie—there aren’t that many for each sport if you start counting—and besides, Adam Sandler starred in a 2005 remake that was even more successful. Hustle is a staple of the thrift store, and a movie always available to stream in transfers of varying quality. There are posters, merchandise, and paraphernalia for it everywhere. But besides that anonymous title, Hustle has no legacy because of how it looks.
Burt Reynolds plus Catherine Deneuve may have made three in 1975, but the legion of loyal Reynolds fans is thinning. Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run? Again, it’s surprising how few truly great car movies there are to each decade. These films were also of their time, new, while Hustle is more like a warm bath: evenly lit, comfortable, relatively risk-free. She’s a prostitute, and he’s a detective, and they live together—it could be a sitcom, and Aldrich’s pitch black sense of humor does steer the movie into bizarre comedy at times (Ernest Borgnine and Paul Winfield talking about how much “joy juice” was left in “every orifice” of Ben Johnson’s dead daughter). Aldrich was convinced that an American audience would never accept an American prostitute married to an American detective—“she had to be exotic.” Maybe he was right: the movie did do well.
But whether or not Americans felt uneasy about Reynolds possibly marrying a working prostitute isn’t the reason Hustle isn’t talked about or remembered today. It’s because Joseph Biroc’s cinematography makes the movie look like The Mary Tyler Moore Show. From the early-1960s on, Aldrich shot with at least two cameras (often more), and to do that you have to blast the set with light. All the technobabble in the world about diffusion and smoking out the room is just as valid as the gut reaction people have to something that looks like it belongs on television. I’m sure Hustle did very well on television whenever it debuted in the second half of the 1970s, and I liked it when I watched it on Sunday—a hangout movie, one that reminded me most of Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. Despite the dated look—I mean seriously, compare this to Jaws or Nashville or Shampoo—it’s a movie you could live in. It’s caustic, but not a cesspool like The Choirboys, and even though it has a typically tragic 1970s ending, it’s easygoing, sure is, and Reynolds’ charm hasn’t aged one bit.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith