School kids on a day trip find a dead woman in Malibu. Call girl Nicole Britton (Catherine Deneuve) and her live-in boyfriend Phil Gaines (Burt Reynolds) have their Sunday morning interrupted when Gaines is called in to the precinct to notify the dead woman’s father, played by Ben Johnson.

Treated with no respect by the police because he and his daughter are nobodies, Johnson’s character, a bitter Korean War vet, launches his own investigation into his troubled daughter’s death. Gaines’ partner (Paul Winfield) also seems to think there is more to the case when he recovers a photo of the powerful Leo Sayers (Eddie Albert) in the woman’s belongings.

Sayers is a gangster/attorney and also a customer of Gaines’ girlfriend. The hard drinking cop wants her to quit and the couple harbor illusions of running away to Rome. Gaines knows the corpse on the beach was a suicide by barbiturate overdose, but goes through the motions of questioning her father, mother (Eileen Brennan) and Sayers, looking for an answer to the misery around him.

Directed by Robert Aldrich and written by Stephen Shagan – a producer on W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings who developed this as a novel with Reynolds in mind for the movie – Hustle was Aldrich and Reynolds’ second collaboration. After entertaining audiences with The Longest Yard, they must have decided to make one for themselves. The film’s nihilistic mood did not translate into success at the box office.

Unlike cop thrillers filled with shootouts, car chases and danger, Hustle attempted to go back to the basics and do somewhat of a character driven piece. Though he drives around in a ‘73 red Mustang convertible, Gaines is a self-avowed man of the ’30s and is disconnected from the modern world, with its corruption and apathy.

Hustle strains so hard to be jaded that it ceases to be believable. It strikes the wrong tone from the start, with Ben Johnson led to the morgue to ID his daughter, only to be treated with inexplicable disdain by cops more interested in a football game. Gaines pours himself so much scotch throughout that even an Irishman would likely keel over. And even though it’s obvious the woman died of an overdose, characters remain convinced a conspiracy is at hand.

I never bought into anything the film was trying to say. Reynolds’ character lives in a lavish hillside home with that reliable archetype, the hooker with a heart of gold. Shagan has no ear for dialogue, forcing Reynolds and Deneuve into supposedly intimate patter about Rome and hamburgers. Reynolds goes through the motions here, smirking to the camera and playing himself, not a cop who works for a living.

The subplot with Ben Johnson bulldogging his way through the red light district seems ordered from another movie and muddles the narrative. Aldrich inserts a couple of haunted flashbacks of the dead woman that are more “what the #@&$*” than dramatic. And instead of antagonists, the script favors a bitter mood throughout, hinting that all the characters have sold out. Fun.

The notable cast includes Ernest Borgnine as a police commissioner, Catherine Bach (pre-Daisy Duke) as the dead woman’s roommate, and Robert Englund (pre-Freddy Kruger) as a stickup man. The film is in such a foul mood I wished I could send it to the closet for a timeout. This is definitely not one of Aldrich’s better films.