The Color of Money (1986)

Official trailer

The Color of Money is Martin Scorsese’s 1986 American sports drama and the sequel to Robert Rossen’s 1961 The Hustler.

The film depicts aging former pool hustler Fast Eddie Felson, now retired from competitive play and working as a liquor salesman, taking talented young player Vincent Lauria on the road to teach him the hustling life. Vincent’s girlfriend Carmen accompanies them as both companion and complication. Eddie eventually rediscovers his own desire to compete and returns to professional pool, including a confrontation with Vincent at the Atlantic City Nine-Ball Classic.

Paul Newman plays Fast Eddie Felson. Tom Cruise plays Vincent Lauria. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio plays Carmen. John Turturro plays Julian. Helen Shaver plays Janelle. Bill Cobbs plays Orvis. Forest Whitaker plays Amos. Richard Price wrote the screenplay from Walter Tevis’s 1984 novel. Touchstone Pictures produced the film on a budget of approximately 13 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 52 million dollars worldwide. Paul Newman won the Best Actor Academy Award for the performance.

Watching Paul Newman step back into Fast Eddie a quarter century later is a pleasure I don’t get from many sequels. Cruise is a live wire next to him, and the pool games crackle. What keeps it from a higher number is that it plays like Scorsese on assignment, polished and professional, with less of his own fire in it than his personal films carry.

Twenty-five years separate The Hustler from The Color of Money.

Few sequels arrive across such real gaps. The Newman performance as Fast Eddie depicts the same character with the accumulated experience that the intervening decades would have produced. The film acts as both standalone production and as continuation. Audiences who haven’t seen The Hustler can engage The Color of Money successfully. Audiences who know the earlier film receive additional content through recognition of how Eddie has changed.

Scorsese directed the sequel after Walter Hill and Stanley Kubrick had been attached at different development stages. The combination of long delay, multiple production turnover, and Scorsese’s eventual involvement produced material that conventional studio sequel development wouldn’t have generated.

The Newman Oscar

Paul Newman had been nominated for Best Actor multiple times across his career without winning. The Academy presented him with an Honorary Award in 1986 partly because of mounting disappointment about previous losses. He then won the competitive Best Actor award for The Color of Money the following year. The dual recognition was unusual. The Academy occasionally presents Honorary Awards to performers who later win competitive awards, but rarely only a year apart.

Newman’s Color of Money performance depicts Eddie Felson at age sixty-one as a man whose talent hasn’t disappeared but whose drive has. The character spent twenty-five years away from professional pool. The performance shows Eddie remembering what he was through encountering Vincent’s young talent.

The Academy recognition acknowledged the particular work of playing the older version of a previously celebrated character. Newman had played the younger Eddie in 1961. The 1986 performance carried the cumulative weight of both productions.

Newman is the reason this film works for me. Eddie’s drive coming back to him as he watches Vincent play is the heart of the picture, and Newman lets that hunger return without ever overselling it.

The Cruise Performance

Tom Cruise plays Vincent Lauria as a talented young pool player whose energy and natural ability contrast with Eddie’s hard-won experience.

The performance combines physical commitment, including significant actual pool playing that Cruise learned during pre-production, with the quality of a young man who doesn’t yet know what his talent will cost him. Cruise was twenty-four during production and at peak commercial standing following Top Gun (1986). The Color of Money gave him serious dramatic material that Top Gun didn’t require.

The Cruise-Newman pairing gives the film real chemistry between an established veteran and a rising star, and the casting let it work as both a Newman vehicle and a Cruise vehicle. The audience that came for Newman got Cruise, and the audience that came for Cruise got Newman. I think Cruise is terrific here, cocky and green in a way he makes likable, and he holds his own in scenes where Newman could have swallowed him whole.

The Scorsese Style

Martin Scorsese directed The Color of Money between After Hours (1985) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

The director treated the picture partly as commercial assignment that would build credit for his more personal later projects. Studios trusted Scorsese with The Color of Money because his work on a major studio sequel showed his ability to deliver commercial product. The trust later allowed financing for the more challenging Last Temptation production.

The film contains distinct Scorsese visual elements, including the elaborate pool game sequences that combine close work on table action with character reaction shots. The pool playing itself becomes cinematic through his coverage choices, and those games are what I most enjoy looking at in the whole picture. Michael Ballhaus shot the film.

Is The Color of Money worth watching?

The Color of Money is an 8 from me because Newman gives it a soul and Cruise gives it a pulse. Eddie Felson twenty-five years on, with his talent intact and his drive gone until Vincent wakes it up, is a performance I’d watch again, and the pool sequences have more snap than a sports drama usually gets.

It loses a couple of points because it plays like Scorsese working for the studio, polished and a little cooler than his own pictures. Watch it for Newman.

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