On demand: "Hustle"

Overseen by Robert Aldrich in the midst of his late, great Seventies run, 1975's Hustle is a down-and-dirty Klute variant centred on an unlikely romantic pairing. Burt Reynolds is the all-American Phil Gaines, a lieutenant with the LAPD; Catherine Deneuve the French call girl with whom he trysts after hours. (The original tagline? "They're hot." Simpler times.) The pair's arrangement is complicated after the body of a teenage girl washes up on the Pacific shore, her stomach loaded with barbiturates and semen; the official verdict is suicide, but that gets challenged after the cops find a photo of the deceased with one of Deneuve's wealthier clients. As the investigation proceeds, Aldrich - working from Steve Shagan's script - steps back and makes the movie far more about these characters than it finally is about the case. Among a roster of compromised or otherwise complicated supporting characters, whole scenes are turned over to the dead girl's grief-wracked parents (Eileen Brennan and Ben Johnson), mom lapsing into drink, her husband into impotent rage. Round about the time Reynolds and partner Paul Winfield themselves get pie-eyed after an especially tough day at the stationhouse, riffing on Moby Dick and the search for the great white whale, we realise something else is going on here, altogether more existential.

To be fair, Hustle doesn't present as unduly philosophical. What the film actually looks like is a lodestone for a lot of mid-Seventies telly, including Columbo and The Rockford Files: a moustache-less Reynolds, at his most relaxed and likable, seems to be doing a variant of what James Garner was doing in the latter, albeit with the freedoms of an R certificate. Yet Aldrich keeps expanding the scope of the film's own inquiry, pushing beyond the established parameters of the police procedural to pursue a broader idea of L.A. as a town of seekers and searchers, where the hustle that's meant to reel in what you want is often the very thing that gets between you and your dreams - and which, if you're not careful, may finally cost you your life. You spy it most clearly in Aldrich's resonant use of movies: Reynolds takes Deneuve to see the then-voguish A Man And A Woman, which is at least a step up from the porno Reynolds shows the Johnson character, starring the latter's own daughter. We're only a few years away from Taxi Driver and Hardcore, where the death of dreams would be represented by a disillusion with the moving picture itself. With its focus on sex work, stray moments of era-specific racism and sexism, and one very tricky love scene between the leads, it now looks decidedly rough-edged, but Hustle nevertheless holds up as one of the few American films of its time to appear at least as profound as it is sleazy. If you were searching for an example of how the 1970s studio system had been geared to manufacture movies for grown-ups, Aldrich's film would absolutely fit the bill: the dead giveaway is that the Deneuve who'd spent the previous decade working with Polanski, Buñuel and Melville doesn't seem at all out of place in this milieu.

Hustle is available to rent via YouTube.