Last Chance for Paul Newman in THE HUSTLER   There will be only one more screening of a beautiful 35 mm CinemaScope print of Robert Rossen's THE HUSTLER starring Paul Newman, Piper Laurie, Jackie Gleason, George C. Scott, Myron McCormick and Murray Hamilton. SHOWTIME: Thursday, November 12 - 9PM. 1961 Robert Rossen. Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, George C. Scott, Myron McCormick, Murray Hamilton, Michael Constantine, Stefan Gierasch, Jake LaMotta (bartender), Art Smith (uncredited). 134 m. bw. Cinemascope. "Paul Newman won his only Oscar for best actor in Martin Scorsese's "The Color of Money," the 1986 sequel to Robert Rossen's 1961 masterpiece, "The Hustler." He ought to have won it for "The Hustler." Here, as Eddie Felson, Newman creates a portrait of the artist as a pool player. His pride in craft should make him a Hemingway hero. But he shows gracelessness under pressure in an epic match with Minnesota Fats ( Jackie Gleason) and lets a Satanic gambler-manager named Bert ( George C. Scott) get his hooks into him by calling him a born loser. This black-and-white marvel of action and character helped Newman mint the image that he would refine and vary in later hits like "Hud" and "Cool Hand Luke." Neither of those other beautiful performances has the dimensions of his title character here. His hustler is part self-centered bastard and part magnetic underdog. And Eddie's drama of corruption and regeneration depicts what great art demands: qualities of character like patience and honesty, as well as talent and originality. The love of a sad lady named Sarah ( Piper Laurie) nearly heals Eddie after Fats busts his ego and waterfront thugs break his thumbs. Unfortunately, he doesn't trust love any more than he does his own mental fiber. Rossen intersperses the consummate pool matches - the rare sporting sequences that show men battling their demons as well as each other - with equally probing scenes of romance between two wounded people. Laurie's contribution to this movie is underrated: She evokes the hidden power of a wayward, self-destructive personality as superbly as Newman does conflicted emotions. And if Rossen's adaptation of Walter Tevis' novel takes the shape of a moral fable, it's not a sentimental one. There's no phony attempt at "closure" with characters like Eddie's tossed-away old manager, Charlie (Myron McCormick). Sarah nurses Eddie back to health, but before long he falls under the spell of Scott's glittering-eyed Bert, who vows to reintroduce him to big-time pool. The rap on this movie has long been that its strength is in the poolrooms, not in the bus-station cafe and bar or the apartment and hotel room where Sarah and Eddie come together and apart. But see the movie fresh, and its two halves feel unbreakable. Rossen uses Eddie's games of pool to open up a man's soul, and Laurie's Sarah is the one who sees exactly what's at stake. Her presence is as indelible as Scott's sinister yet somehow seductive Bert - and Gleason's graceful, enigmatic Fats. "The Hustler" takes Eddie Felson from despair to tragedy-tinged triumph. There's no Rocky finish. What Eddie shouts to Bert at the climax is a two-sided death threat: 'You tell your boys they better kill me, Bert. They better go all the way with me. Because if they just bust me up, I'll put all those pieces back together, and so help me, so help me God, Bert ... I'm gonna come back here and I'm gonna kill you.' " -Michael Sragow