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We are accustomed to seeing sequels to surprise hits get churned out like clockwork year after year until the law of diminishing returns has been violated repeat offender-style (Police Academy and Saw, anyone?) There are numerous instances of successive parts of movie series being shot at the same time, both to save on cost and to ensure that eager fans get pumped up and don’t have a chance to come down from their Neo/Hobbit/McFly high. What isn’t as common is for a significant amount of time to pass between first and second parts. I have focused on only a couple of such cases over the past 60 columns (The Two Jakes and Escape from L.A. come to mind).

As I wind up two full years of the most notable part twos and look ahead to a third, I have decided to mark that passage of time by focusing on the passing of time...in movies. For the next several months, Chapter Two will hone in on second installments that took anywhere from 13 years to nearly 30 years to finally hit the big screen. Several of the sequels are adaptations of books that themselves took a long time to come to fruition. (Hence, a reasonable explanation for the lapse of time.) What can you expect?

Larry McMurtry source material and multiple appearances by Jeff Bridges, for starters. There are Academy-Award winning performances that have defined an actor or actress, and roles that became so closely entwined with a particular actor that it was both blessing and curse simultaneously. We begin with a Chapter Two 25 years in the making that brought its lead actor his first and only Oscar after receiving seven nominations (he would go on to receive another two, and several honorary Oscars before his career was over).

If pool shark Fast Eddie Felson isn’t the defining role for Paul Newman - I would actually accord that honor to his seriocomedic portrait of washed up hockey player/coach Reggie Dunlop in Slap Shot - it provides an apt encapsulation of the blend of heartbreaking gorgeousness, cocky attitude, stubborn demeanor, and wounded pride that marked his career. Coming on the heels of his first nomination (for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1959), his role in The Hustler kicked off a decade that would see him play titular characters as memorable as Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Lew Harper, and Butch Cassidy, and get additional nominations for the first two of those performances.

Fifty years after its release, The Hustler still strikes me as one of the more unconventional Best Picture nominees of all time. Yes, it’s in black and white and is an adaptation of an acclaimed novel, but it feels so otherworldly in certain moments that it doesn’t quite fit the requirements of “Oscar bait” and moves at such a deliberate pace and with such a hushed and muted tone for much of its 135 minute length that it certainly doesn’t qualify as a crowd pleaser, and yet it succeeded on both counts in 1961. The key dramatic moment - a marathon pool session between Felson and legendary player Minnesota Fats - has passed with barely the half hour mark cracked and what follows, even with more than a few twists of the plot thrown in, feels like epilogue in a way.

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