The Cincinnati Kid (1965)

The Cincinnati Kid is an American film first released in 1965, directed by Norman Jewison.  The film is based on a novel by Richard Jessup and stars Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann-Margret, Karl Malden and Tuesday Weld.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


In 1930s New Orleans, Eric Stoner, nicknamed The Kid, has earned a reputation as a formidable poker player.   When he learns that Lancey Howard, the reputed king of the game, is in town, Stoner decides to take him on.  Another gambler, Slade, hires Stoner’s friend Shooter as dealer at this high stakes contest.  Slade is desperate to have his revenge on Howard after he cleaned him out in a previous poker game, so he blackmails Shooter into slipping Stoner a few winning cards.  When Stoner realises this, he dismisses Shooter and another dealer takes his place.  The Kid is confident that he can beat Howard by his own skill and good fortune, perhaps too confident...

Whilst it does a very good impression of a film that is in search of a plot, The Cincinnati Kid is a surprisingly gripping and stylish piece of cinema, one which presages the American counter-culture movement of the late 1960s, early 1970s.  It has often been compared, usually unfavourably, with Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961), both films being the gambling room equivalent of the old gunfighter western.  Plot similarities aside, the two films are stylistically quite different.  In contrast to the sweaty monochrome realism of The Hustler, The Cincinnati Kid has an unsettling dreamlike quality and sometimes feels like a parody of a glossy Hollywood feature.

After an almost painfully slow build-up, in which the two principal characters (played to perfection by Steve McQueen and Edward G. Robinson) are established, we finally arrive at the centre-piece card game.  Director Norman Jewison and his cinematographer Philip H. Lathrop handle this with consummate skill and deliver one of the most nail-biting pieces of cinema to come out of an American film studio.  You don’t have to know anything about poker to be completely hooked by the gripping McQueen-Robinson psychological duel, with Joan Blondell providing a few fleeting moments of comic relief from the almost unbearable tension.  Yes, the film is badly lacking in substance and could have benefited from a bit more in the way of character detail, but this doesn’t prevent The Cincinnati Kid from being a compulsive classic of its kind.

© Steve Chandler 2010

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