I was about five minutes into re-watching “The Cincinnati Kid” when it struck me that I needed to read or re-read director Norman Jewison’s autobiography, or hunt down the recent biography of the Canadian director.

He’s not exactly an obscure filmmaker, with seven Oscar nominations and films like “Moonstruck” and “The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming” in his extensive filmography.

But his fifth feature film, his first “serious” movie, has threads that turn up so often in his later work that one wonders, “What made him such a righteous dude?”

The Toronto native who made the groundbreaking “In the Heat of the Night,” “A Soldier’s Story” and the very impressive bio-pic “The Hurricane” was astutely in touch with America’s shifting attitudes on race. And he made sure his films were ahead of the curve in that regard.

Jewison, a child of the Great Depression, took over a 1930s gambling drama Sam Peckinpah was hellbent on making dark and noirish (he filmed a few scenes in black and white, and was fired) and gently folded “representation” and “inclusion” into it so subtly that one barely notices it today.

Steve McQueen, the emerging icon of Hollywood cool, is the title character, a transplanted-to-New Orleans poker player living by his instincts and wits and occasionally surviving with his fists. And who’s the first person we see him show an interest in impressing?

It’s a Black shoeshine boy who always wants him to stop and “try me.” They pitch coins, and Eric, “The Cincinnati Kid” wins. Always. He smiles, tells the lad “You’re not ready for me, yet,” and keeps his coin.

The film, reset from the St. Louis of the Richard Jessup novel to the more racially-tolerant New Orleans, points us towards The Big Game, a showdown between The Kid and the best player of the day, Lancey Howard (Edward G. Robinson). But this being The Big Easy, Jewison made sure to include jazz singer and actor Cab Calloway at the table. “Yeller” the character is named, mixed in with players named “Pig” and “Ladyfingers.” The mere fact he’s in there, playing cards as equals, gives us a taste of New Orleans and an idea of all the “erased” history movies set in such milieus that Hollywood had served up prior to this.

“The Cincinnati Kid” is an inferior run through the similar milieu and themes of “The Hustler,” an unamusing Depression Era card-game precursor to “The Sting.” The plot sets up a love triangle, a potential cheat, misplaced loyalties and what feels like a low-stakes contest. Win or lose, how will The Kid’s life change?

But its muted colors, quiet tone and some impressive performances lift this classic also-ran into something worth watching.

The Kid wants to prove something — to himself, his peers and to his girl Christian (Tuesday Weld), whom he wants to impress.

“Listen, Christian, after the game, I’ll be The Man. I’ll be the best there is. People will sit down at the table with you, just so they can say they played with The Man. And that’s what I’m gonna be, Christian.”

But McQueen’s too cool to let on that his character is “desperate” for this new status. There’s none of the alcoholic resentment of “Fast Eddie” “The Hustler” in him. McQueen gave performances worthy of Oscars. Most of the time, though, he seemed more determined to define his steely cool image and stick to it.

Karl Malden’s The Kid’s old friend, Shooter, a gambler reduced to “playing the percentages” and trying to keep a seriously mercenary floozy of a wife (Ann-Margret, terrific) interested.

Rip Torn plays the scion of local gentry, a would-be card sharp who isn’t in the same league with The Kid or the legendary Lancey Howard.

Jack Weston seems a tad on-the-nose, cast as the skilled but faintly delusional “Pig,” a guy sure to let you see him sweat. Joan Blondell impresses as the blowsy old broad Lady Fingers, with Calloway and veteran character players Jeff Corey and Theodore Marcuse, and Milton Seltzer playing a note-taking/math-computing “Doc” at the card table. Dub Taylor shows up as a dealer at a lower-rent game early in the film.

The McQueen/Edward G. Robinson dynamic is one place “The Cincinnati Kid” had the potential to best “The Hustler.” The dapper Lancey is more present in the picture, more insidious in the ways he brushes off the challenge of “The Kid,” and gets into his opponent’s head over his love-life troubles — Christian, awaiting a commitment, the married Mebla (Ann-Margret) throwing herself at the possible New King of Cards.

But Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats is a “presence” in “The Hustler,” a mostly off-camera myth, Fast Eddie’s Great White Whale. Robinson is too familiar as an actor and a character in the film to be Larger than Life. The movie needed less Edward G., more Edward G. mystique.

Even the Jessup novel was compared to “The Hustler” and found wanting.

Jewison still makes a perfectly entertaining movie out of a card game, a love triangle and a lot of competing agendas in play with every “fold,” “call” or “raise.” A game about “making the wrong move at the right time” becomes the right movie for Jewison, one that transformed a comedy guy into somebody who’d make dramas a lot better than this, often with a social subtext that couldn’t help but strike a nerve.

Rating: PG-13ish

Cast: Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann-Margret, Tuesday Weld, Cab Calloway, Rip Torn and Karl Malden.

Credits: Directed by Norman Jewison, scripted by Ring Lardner Jr. and Terry Southern, based on a novel by Richard Jessup. An MGM release on Amazon, Youtube and Movies!

Running time: 1:42