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"Hey, Mister," Eddie calls out.

"The name's Gordon ... Bert Gordon," Scott tells him, as smoothly as Sean Connery saying, "Bond ... James Bond."

By the time Eddie starts blathering about how great he is, Scott's Gordon has his number.

"Stay with this kid," he tells Fats. "He's a loser."

Scott himself was anything but. He seldom even played losers, as Mel Gussow noted in the New York Times obituary on Friday, two days after Scott's death of a burst abdominal aortic aneurysm at the age of 71. In "The Hustler," he carved out a formidable space in a superb ensemble that included Jackie Gleason as Fats, Paul Newman as Eddie and Piper Laurie as Sarah, Eddie's doomed lover (Bert Gordon's chief victim). When the director, Robert Rossen, cast Scott in 1960, the actor had developed a reputation on the New York stage for his fierce originality. He'd also won an Oscar nomination for a supporting role in his second movie: the slick prosecutor from the city who tries to best folksy lawyer Jimmy Stewart in Otto Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959).

Scott brought something novel to the screen: an electric wariness. No actor was better at portraying the point where thought and instinct fuse -- and he did it best in "The Hustler" (racking up another supporting-actor nomination). If you saw it as a teenager, his image embodied everything murky and menacing in city life. He was the nightmare image of the man in the back room. Bert Gordon knows things -- in his own twisted way, he teaches Eddie that character, not talent, perfects pool players. And he owns things -- a new car each year, and a hefty portion of the winnings of each man he bankrolls. Scott gave Gordon a terrifying authority and a connoisseur's eye -- what helps him get his prongs into Eddie is that he appreciates the boy's talent. Studying the play of the game, Scott's craggy face oozes alertness from its pores, and his trim, energetic body (Scott grew massive later on) keeps him from seeming sedentary. He's like an evil version of a director who acts as an omniscient, subtly manipulative appreciator. Eddie's girl, Sarah (Laurie), recognizes that Bert wants to control Eddie because he resents Eddie's gift. Bert knows that she knows: That's why he wants to destroy her.

To many people, Scott's movie image is frozen in the magnificent, imperial bravado he brought to the title role of "Patton" in 1970. But in the '60s, Scott had developed a spiky metropolitan persona. He conveyed a consciousness of "what's going on" that transcended the class or situation of any particular character and could energize not only villains but put-upon heroes, like the one he played in 1963 and '64 on a socially conscious David Susskind-produced TV series, "East Side, West Side." Scott returned to this vein only now and then, notably as the beleaguered, disgusted surgeon in "The Hospital" (1971), which showcased Scott at his humorous-blustery pinnacle and was in the works before he won (and refused) his best actor Oscar for "Patton."

Of course, Scott was always surprisingly versatile for an actor of such strong personality. His filmography is studded with oddities, sometimes pleasurable, like the 1978 parody of '30s films "Movie Movie," and sometimes just plain strange, like 1971's mock-Sherlock Holmes film "They Might Be Giants." He was a joyous cartoon general heading the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" (1963). Indeed, Scott's Buck Turgidson was in such all-out crackpot love with the perks and the prowess of the military that the impending end of the world didn't faze him.

John Huston, who cast Scott as a razory detective in "The List of Adrian Messenger" (1962), also knew he had the backbone and grandeur to portray the patriarch's patriarch, Abraham, in "The Bible" (1966). That movie secured him the role of Patton. And that role sealed Scott in people's minds as a sort of thinking man's volcano. My own visceral impression of Scott is as the commanding yet troubling urban presence in films ranging from "Anatomy of a Murder" to Richard Lester's "Petulia," where he was touching as a divorced surgeon in love with a married "kook" (Julie Christie). And if Scott had followed "Patton" with "The Godfather" -- early on, Coppola thought him a plausible choice for Don Corleone -- his career could have had a different and more rewarding second act.

Next page | Piper Laurie remembers her dangerous co-star