Movies Where Poker Reveals Who a Character Really Is

In Thomas Hart Benton’s 1948 painting Poker Night, Blanche DuBois holds up a hand glass, her sister Stella leans over an armchair, and a drunk, angry Stanley Kowalski stands in a white undershirt while Blanche taunts him. David O. Selznick commissioned the picture in 1947 as a gift for his wife Irene, who had brought […]

In Thomas Hart Benton’s 1948 painting Poker Night, Blanche DuBois holds up a hand glass, her sister Stella leans over an armchair, and a drunk, angry Stanley Kowalski stands in a white undershirt while Blanche taunts him. David O. Selznick commissioned the picture in 1947 as a gift for his wife Irene, who had brought A Streetcar Named Desire to Broadway that year. Benton chose the card night, one of the play’s most dramatic moments, and filmmakers have kept returning to the same device, a table where a character’s nature shows before the plot has asked for it.

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

Tennessee Williams considered calling the play The Poker Night, and its third scene is still titled The Poker Night. Elia Kazan’s film keeps that evening intact. Stanley, played by Marlon Brando, drinks through the game and turns on the women in the next room when their radio keeps playing, and in the play he throws the radio out of the window and strikes Stella.

Mitch, played by Karl Malden, leaves the table that evening to talk with Blanche. Stanley treats the game as his territory, while Mitch will walk away from it for a conversation, and a single night of cards gives the audience both men’s temperaments.

The Cincinnati Kid (1965)

In 1965 Norman Jewison set Steve McQueen’s young stud player against Lancey Howard, the aging champion played by Edward G. Robinson, in a marathon game in New Orleans. On the final hand the Kid holds aces full of tens and bets heavily, and Howard turns over the jack of diamonds to show a queen-high straight flush.

The writer Anthony Holden put the odds against a full house losing to a straight flush, heads-up, at 45,102,781 to 1. Howard’s remark afterward, about “making the wrong move at the right time,” tells the audience what separates him from the Kid. The line credits Howard with a sense of timing that the Kid, for all his arithmetic, has not yet learned.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966)

Fielder Cook’s western is built around the annual game that 5 wealthy men hold in a Laredo saloon. Meredith, a traveler played by Henry Fonda and introduced as a recovering gambler, buys in and bets his family’s savings until he faces a raise he cannot match, then collapses at the table. His wife Mary, played by Joanne Woodward, takes his seat, shows her cards to the banker C.P. Ballinger, and borrows $5,500 against them.

The ending reverses what the audience believed about nearly everyone in the room. Meredith, Mary and the boy traveling with them are confidence tricksters working with Ballinger and the town doctor, and Mary is Ballinger’s mistress, Ruby. The rich men’s willingness to take a sick stranger’s savings was the trait the con depended on.

Cool Hand Luke (1967)

A barracks card game gives Paul Newman’s character his name in this prison drama, directed by Stuart Rosenberg. Luke raises on every round until Dragline, played by George Kennedy, folds a strong hand. Luke turns over nothing, and when Dragline objects, he answers that “sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.” Dragline starts calling him Cool Hand Luke on the spot.

The bluff previews everything he does afterward. Luke keeps pushing against the guards with no real leverage, and the guards keep answering with punishment. Kennedy won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the role.

Titanic (1997)

James Cameron introduces Jack Dawson in a Southampton pub minutes before the ship sails. Jack and his friend Fabrizio have put everything they own into the pot of a 5-card draw hand against 2 Swedes, Olaf and Sven, and the prize is a pair of third-class tickets. The scene defines Jack before Rose has seen him, as a man who treats playing poker for a transatlantic passage as a sensible way to decide where he will live next.

He wins with a full house, and Jack and Fabrizio board shortly before the gangway is pulled away. The attitude returns at the first-class dinner, where Jack explains that when you have nothing, you have nothing to lose. The ticket placed him aboard the RMS Titanic, which carried about 2,200 people and 20 lifeboats with room for 1,178, so the risk he accepted so casually in the pub becomes the central danger of the story.

Rounders (1998)

The first scene of Rounders shows its lead losing. Mike McDermott, a New York law student played by Matt Damon, takes his entire $30,000 bankroll into Teddy KGB’s underground club and loses it in a single hand of no-limit hold’em against John Malkovich’s Russian gangster. Brian Koppelman and David Levien, the screenwriters, told a 2018 oral history of Rounders that the script arrived fully formed, and that loss was its first scene.

The hand establishes Mike’s flaw before his virtues. He is skilled enough to beat mid-stakes games and proud enough to risk everything above them, and the rest of the story tests if he can tell those impulses apart.

Mississippi Grind (2015)

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s road film begins when Gerry, an indebted real estate agent played by Ben Mendelsohn, meets Curtis, a younger drifter played by Ryan Reynolds, at a casino poker table in Dubuque, Iowa. Gerry and Curtis head down the Mississippi toward a New Orleans game with a $25,000 buy-in.

Gerry’s compulsion surfaces in stages along the route. He loses everything at hold’em in Memphis, and in Tunica Curtis learns that Gerry has lied to him about his winnings. Each stop shows how much further Gerry will go to stay in the next game.

Molly’s Game (2017)

Molly’s Game, the first film Aaron Sorkin directed, uses its card games to sort the men who sit in them. Harlan Eustice, a careful player played by Bill Camp, loses one hand to a weak opponent and never recovers his discipline, betting until he owes Molly Bloom $1.2 million he cannot pay.

Michael Cera’s Player X is the film’s villain, an unnamed Hollywood actor who enjoys destroying opponents and eventually takes over the game Molly built. When Harlan collapses, Player X lends him the money in exchange for half of his future winnings.

Benton’s Scene Revisited

Benton’s painting also revealed something he had not planned. Jessica Tandy, who played Blanche on Broadway, was offended by the way Thomas Hart Benton portrayed her, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, which now owns the work, still tells that story in its audio guide. A painting of a card night ended up exposing its own artist, since Tandy’s objection is now part of how the museum presents the picture.