Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [68]
Southern and Eastman were brought in to satisfy Steve’s specific demand that there had to be at least one fight scene somewhere in the script—he was, after all, still an action star and loved physical scenes—something Chayefsky refused to write. As it turned out, it became the film’s opening, and one more stunt-laden action sequence was added that had Steve jumping onto a roundtable in a train yard in one of the film’s few exteriors.
As for the story itself, it remained a far approximation of The Hustler, but without the hero’s artistic pretensions or suicidal lovers, or even the slightest hint of any of the homoerotic implications of men competing with their sticks all night while ignoring their women. By contrast, The Cincinnati Kid is, quite literally, child’s play, a contest between great poker players, with some gratuitous PG sex thrown in, courtesy of Ann-Margret, whom Steve did not especially like—possibly because she wouldn’t bow down to his image or roll over for him—and Tuesday Weld, who of course did. Steve and Weld remained close during their second movie together, despite the fact they were both married to others, Steve to Neile and Weld to the British actor-comedian Dudley Moore.
Set in the Depression, the film builds to its climactic card game between the Kid and the Man, during which the Kid loses a very high-stakes and extremely unlikely final hand—a full house to a straight flush (professional gambler Anthony Holden estimates the chances of that happening as something like forty-five million to one). Still, long odds make big drama, and the scene plays to a satisfying conclusion, with the Kid walking outside and losing a penny pitch to a shoeshine boy before meeting up with Christian (Weld), leaving the audience with that old only-in-the-movies adage that poor is really rich and that love is always the best bet.
THE CINCINNATI KID opened on October 27, 1965, eight months after Baby the Rain Must Fall, and was scheduled as one of MGM’s major fall films. It received mixed-to-good reviews, with almost every critic comparing it unfavorably to The Hustler.
In the New York Times, Howard Thompson wrote, “The film pales beside The Hustler, to which it bears a striking similarity of theme and characterization.” Judith Crist, in the New York Herald Tribune, noted, “The Cincinnati Kid is quite literally The Hustler in spades. McQueen is at his Great Escape best, embodying the surface cool and high intensity of the man who’ll go for broke but hasn’t had to.”
Time said, “Nearly everything about The Cincinnati Kid is reminiscent of The Hustler, but falls short in the comparison, in part because of the subject matter.… Director Jewison can put his cards on the table, let his camera cut suspensefully to the players’ intent faces, but a pool shark sinking a tricky shot into a side pocket undoubtedly offers more range.… [B]y the time all the bets are in, Cincinnati Kid appears to hold a losing hand.”
Andrew Sarris, in The American Cinema, ranked Jewison in the middle directorial category of “Strained Seriousness” and noted that “Jewison is reasonably good with good actors”; he acknowledged the film as the first notable one of Jewison’s career.
The Cincinnati Kid earned $2.9 million in its initial domestic theatrical release, and nearly three times that in the year it took to travel through the world market. It was the fifteenth-biggest moneymaker of 1965 (Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music was number one) and made a lot of money for MGM, Ransohoff, and Solar. It earned no Oscar nominations (it did win a Golden Globe nomination for Joan Blondell as Best Supporting Actress) and ultimately failed to do what Steve had hoped it would—move him up to Paul Newman–sized respect and superstardom.
During the nearly yearlong gap between filming and the opening of The Cincinnati Kid, Steve had begun work on a new movie, a co-production between Solar and Joseph E. Levine’s Embassy Pictures called Nevada Smith, a “prequel” adaptation of one of the