“A Game Of Pool” (season 3, episode 5; originally aired 10/13/1961)
In which being the best comes with a price…
(Available on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu Plus, and CBS.com)
Let’s start with the ending. A great twist is a bit like a rhyme, only with story instead of words; the best Twlight Zone shock endings serve to snap the episode that preceded them into focus, providing a kind of clarity and gratifying focus to all that build-up and character work. A great twist is something that we can’t imagine before it happens, but can’t imagine being any other way after it does. And that is incredibly difficult to pull off, especially once, as Todd noted last week, audiences are on their guard and get a sense for your best-loved tricks. “A Game Of Pool” was written by George Clayton Johnson, not Serling, but anyone sitting down to watch it with a few Zone episodes already under their viewing belt is going to be waiting for the figurative other shoe drop. But the problem here is less a case of predictability than it is a certain lack of definition. This is, on the whole, a good thirty minutes, with two strong performances and a compelling premise. The last minute doesn’t change that. But it does leave things feeling oddly incomplete. From the moment Jesse Cardiff (the always excellent Jack Klugman) agrees to put his life on the line for a game of pool, you know there’s going to be some kind of irony, something that will punish Jesse for his obsessive, maddening devotion to the game. But when that punishment arrives, it's thin gruel compared to the passion which came before it.
The idea is, Jesse wins his game against the legendary pool hall champ Fats Brown (Jonathan Winters, in one of his rare dramatic turns), and doesn’t find out until after he dies that this puts him under a certain obligation; as he is now the best pool player who ever lived, he (like Fats before him) will have to spend his afterlife taking on any young punks who think they can beat him until one of them does. This isn’t presented as a happy ending. Fats is clearly relieved when Jesse beats him, and Klugman’s slumped shoulders in the final shot as a disembodied voice calls him to work is not the look of a man who loves his job. But as a “twist,” it doesn’t snap, y’know? I’m too busy trying to work out the details. What did Jesse do with the rest of his life? How bad would it be, really, to play a bunch of pool games until someone beat you? The game has a certain degree of luck to it. You wouldn’t have to wait that long to lose. And wouldn’t it be nice to pop back down to Earth for a bit, just to get some fresh air?
Silly, I know, and as I said, I think this is overall good episode. Plus, the ending does play into an idea Fats raises earlier in the story, that by fixating so much on one thing, Jesse risks losing the rest of the world. But, again, we don’t know what happens to him after he wins, and before the funeral, and, as Hells go, this is a minor one at worst. Not that Jesse deserves Hell, mind you. But if they’re going for a twist, the choice needs to be something stronger than a vague sense that he’s maybe going to have some boring times after he dies. The script’s original ending had him losing the game, and Fats telling him “You’ll die… eventually,” and then giving a speech how much it sucks to be a loser. Which is, again, unexpected, but it still doesn’t have a lot of oomph behind it. It still feels like the work of someone reaching for something and not quite getting it. I suspect the episode would’ve played better without any surprise ending at all, because either version mostly serves as a distraction.
Anyway, enough of that. “A Game Of Pool” is a lot of fun to watch because Klugman and Winters are both at the top of their game (so to speak), throwing off some of the most gorgeous trash talk I’ve ever heard. (“You’re a big balloon, waiting for somebody to stick a needle in it” is great, as is “You like to play with fire, but you don’t like to cook.”) It’s a two person episode, with all the action (apart from those two brief shots up in the clouds) taking place in some greasy dive where apparently everybody else has gone home for the night. The whole thing is very simple: Jesse complains that no matter how good he gets, everyone is always telling him he isn’t as good as James Howard “Fats” Brown, but Fats is dead, so he’ll never get a chance to prove them wrong. Somebody up there here’s Jesse’s shouts, and Fats appears in the pool hall, with a proposition: one game of pool, life or death stakes.
Here’s where normally I’d start railing about the stupidity of playing life-or-death stakes for anything when you don’t have to, but honestly, “A Game Of Pool” makes it work. Fats is very convincing, but even more importantly, the script makes it fairly obvious that Jesse has nothing else in his life he considers worth living for. As another in a long line of The Twlight Zone’s Lean And Hungry Men, Jesse is fixated on a single idea: being the best pool player there is. For a normal person, risking death on account of a game where the only bonus is bragging rights no one will ever believe is a no-brainer of a choice. But to Jesse, through the dialogue and Klugman’s furious, heartbroken performance, it makes sense for him to take the chance. If he doesn’t, to his eyes, it would be as bad as if he lost.
With the set-up out of the way and the bait taken, the episode gets down to the game itself. It’s thrilling stuff, and well-handled, making sure we understand the basic outlines of the back and forth between the two players even if the details aren’t clear. The 14.1 rack to 300 points that Fats proposes is, despite the name (I had to look it up, pool shark though I am)(I am not), straightforward, just calling shots and dropping balls, and neither player makes much in the way of trick shots. As they say, the game’s more mental than physical, with Jesse and Fats sparring at each other, trying to psyche the other man out in the show’s colorful venacular, occasionally tossing out bits of slang that still sound fresh. (My favorite is Jesse’s “That’s a pocket hanger,” about his last, and easiest, shot.) Without saying much specific about themselves, you get a sense of who they are. Fats makes sure to tell Jesse how much life he lived outside the pool hall, trying to shake the other man some, get him to realize he’s making a mistake. But Jesse’s stuck where he is. His “That was great,” after he makes a terrific shot and doesn’t get the praise he expected, is wonderful, a little boy bringing home an all A report card to an empty house. As a story of the fantastic, this never entirely gels. But as a look at a lonely man determined to stay lonely, it’s not bad at all.
What a twist: Jesse wins the game against Fats, but finds out after he dies that he has to take up the mantle of the Best Pool Player Who Ever Lived, and face off against anyone who challenges his record.