September 12th: HUSTLE (Robert Aldrich, 1975)

A cynical Los Angeles police detective investigates the death of a young woman.

Robert Aldrich worked his way up through the Hollywood ranks the old-fashioned way, starting as a clerk at RKO studios and eventually moving up to assistant directing, working on films by Charlie Chaplin, Jean Renoir, and Max Ophüls. When he began producing and directing his own films in the mid 1950s, he quickly gained a reputation for his bleak worldview in film noir titles like Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Knife, and brutally tough actioners like Vera Cruz and The Dirty Dozen.

Aldrich took a slight detour in 1974 with the prison football comedy The Longest Yard, which became one of his biggest box office hits. That film's star, Burt Reynolds, was looking to be taken more seriously as an actor, and approached Aldrich about another collaboration. Reynolds had acquired a script by Steve Shagan based on his own novel (whose previous effort Save The Tiger was an Oscar-winner for Jack Lemmon). The two purchased it and formed a production company and retitled the script from "City of Angels" to Hustle.

The two assembled an impressive cast, including French icon Catherine Deneuve (during her brief foray into English-language films), Eileen Brennan and Academy Award-winner Ben Johnson (both from The Last Picture Show), Paul Winfield (Sounder, The Terminator, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn),  Eddie Albert (Roman Holiday, TV's Green Acres), "Daisy Duke" herself Catherine Bach (TV's The Dukes of Hazzard), and Oscar-winner Ernest Borgnine.

The film was shot on location in Los Angeles, including notable locations like the L.A. Memorial Coliseum, Marina del Rey, Westwood Village, and LAX. Behind the camera was Aldrich's regular cinematographer Joseph Biroc (It's A Wonderful Life, Samuel Fuller's Forty Guns, Viva Las Vegas).

Aldrich brought in other longtime collaborators in post-production; for the musical score, composer and arranger Frank DeVol (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Pillow Talk, Cat Ballou). Editor Michael Luciano worked on 20 of Aldrich's feature films.

Hustle was released to mostly positive reviews and reflected a hard-boiled world-weariness found in other crime films of the decade. While not a huge success, the film made over 3x its budget. Reynolds would soon burst into superstardom two years later with Smokey and the Bandit.

Running time is 2 hours.