Poker In Cinema: The Cincinnati Kid
by Bodog Poker | Aug 31 2010
Steve McQueen, as you know, is basically the coolest human being to ever walk the planet Earth in the history of ever. So surely a movie featuring him and poker is going to be absolutely amazing, right? There are stretches of The Cincinnati Kid that live up to the idea you've already got in your head: Bullitt kicks butt and takes names at the tables, but there's also some general incompetence on the part of the screenplay and director that keeps the last act from being as powerful as it should be.
The 1965 movie was directed by Norman Jewison, who later became known for The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming and In The Heat Of The night along with The Thomas Crown Affair. He replaced Sam Peckinpah, who was fired for "vulgarizing the picture," and scrapped all the black-and-white footage that the auteur behind The Wild Bunch had directed, instead using a muted color palette throughout to evoke the period.
With Steve McQueen playing alongside Ann-Margret and Tuesday Weld and character actors like Karl Malden and Rip Torn providing opposition and support in equal doses, you'd be hard-pressed to find a cast that's more fun to watch. Edward G. Robinson plays The Man, the player that The Kid is going to have to take down if he wants to win big and it's fascinating to watch an actor of his caliber, who'd arguably long passed his peak, eat scenery with the best of them. The first two acts of the film are great, really evoking the feel of poker in the 1930s, when walking away with $6,000 after 30 straight hours of play meant that you totally devastated another player.
The poker action is shot well and there are a lot of great individual moments, including some world-class backstabbing. The way that the game allows each hand shown to breathe a bit really captures how it frequently feels when you are playing a higher-stakes, stressful hand, and the various railbirds and interlopers that provide necessary color to a sport that isn't as visually dynamic as, say, football.
The real problem with enjoying the film occurs in the final act, when Steve McQueen is dealt a full house and loses to a straight flush. Now, the odds of any full house losing to any straight flush are ridiculously high. In a two-handed poker game, it's 45,102,781 to 1. As both of the hands in the final scene involved 10s, the odds shoot up to the truly ludicrous: 332,220,508,619 to 1. Against. That's three hundred and thirty-two billion to one. To put that into perspective, Anthony Holden calculated that if The Kid and The Man played 50 hands of stud poker an hour, eight hours a day, five days a week, that situation would come up once every 443 years.
The Cincinnati Kid is an engaging, funny and frequently earns its place in the pantheon of poker movies, but that final hand asks for just a bit too much from the audience. The director's cut ends on Steve McQueen's stunned face, and that look of shock easily matched my own as the final hand played out. Worth it for the acting and plot, if not the mathematics.
