On Screen: The Color of Money

The young punk looks up from the practice pool game he’s been shooting by himself and sees the nattily dressed fat man studying him. “You ever play?” the punk asks tauntingly, well knowing whom he’s addressing. “Once in a while,” smiles the fat man, sketching a self-deprecating gesture with his cigarette. “I’m the best there is, Fats,” boasts the youth. The fat man sheds his coat and rolls up his sleeves with frightening economy. “Let’s shoot pool, Fast Eddie.”

The setting was a dreary New York City pool room, but the hoofbeats of Rustum and Sohrab could be heard in the distance. What we were about to see was the most successful effort to date to portray epic combat in a modern urban setting. The antagonists were Paul Newman as Fast Eddie Felson and Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats. It was 1961 and the movie was The Hustler, directed by Robert Rossen.

For me, at age fourteen, the film was a revelation. Until then, the American films I had seen were plush affairs; even in the westerns, heroes had a knack of not collecting dust as they scrambled down wind-swept dunes. But The Hustler was made too early to have four-letter words on its soundtrack, it possessed the texture and anger of four-letter words. A scene in an all-night cafe really looked as if it was taking place at two in the morning: the waitress moved as if she were under water, and the sneer on her lips seemed sewn on. When the hero learned that the woman he was after was an alcoholic (but the characters didn’t say “alcoholic,” they said “lush”), he didn’t put on a concerned look and try to reform her; no, he bought her a bottle, hooked an arm around her neck, and propelled her toward bed. At the same time, in the pool-shooting scenes, Rossen portrayed a drive for excellence in the competitors that was downright Homeric. Minnesota Fats was the old King of the Hill and Fast Eddie was every Achilles who elects to live gloriously and die young. They were lowlifes but they were archetypes, too. In fact, The Hustler seemed the product of some absurd but fruitful collaboration between Carl Jung and the editors of the New York Daily News.

But even then, I sensed that The Hustler wasn’t quite a great film. True masterpieces are winged visions, and The Hustler was a shade too enamored of its own grunge and a little too schematic in the way it identified and deployed the forces of good and evil battling for its hero’s soul. To wit: Young Punk meets defeat at hands of Old Master not because he lacks skill but simply because he is a punk. Then he matures through love and its losses. His mistress commits suicide because Eddie allows himself to fall prey to a loanshark Mephisto (George C. Scott). His heart hollowed out by pain and his veins filled with icewater, our hero returns to the scene of his defeat and beats Minnesota Fats soundly, but also refuses to give his gangster backer a cut of the money won. Scott lets Newman escape from New York uninjured but warns him not to play pool again in any major city. Thus Newman has both proved his skill and punished himself for destroying his lover. He had had his moment of glory when he sees how transient that glory really is. Ah, the bleak irony of it all.

But never mind. It wasn’t this bush-league Greek tragedy guff that audiences responded to and remembered. Rather, it was the perfectly observed milieu, raffish characterizations, and unforgettable images: George C. Scott, alerted to the arrival of a talented newcomer, looking up from his card game like a shark scenting blood; Gleason fastidiously washing his hands and scenting himself in the middle of a forty-eight-hour match; Murry Hamilton as a degenerate blue-blood billiards player conveying his character’s homosexuality simply by the way he holds his cigarette; Scott doing a sideways rumba up to Piper Laurie at a smoke-filled party in order to whisper obscenities in her ear and instantly recovering his cool when she throws her glass in his face. With the give-and-take among these vivid characters, The Hustler was electric and free-flowing. Like a pool player on a roll, the movie never choked. It occupies a permanent place in the imaginations of moviegoers.

Therefore, I’m afraid the classic film will be used as a club on its sequel, The Color of Money. That would be a shame, for it’s not without significance that the new film isn’t called The Hustler II but has a title all its own. For it has a texture and outlook all its own, too. Director Martin Scorsese, asked by David Letterman if the film wasn’t a blockbuster, simply contemplated his own knockles. “Aw, c’mon,” whined Letterman, “say it’s a blockbuster.” But it isn’t, and Scorsese knows it. (Of course, I’m not referring to box-office returns.) The Color of Money is a very fine film, but compared to The Hustler it seems cramped and crabbed. While The Hustler was a film composed of one vivid personality clash after another, Color seems to be taking place behind Paul Newman’s eyes.

Now in his fifties and living somewhere on the northwest coast, Eddie Felson apparently wasn’t broken by being banished from the poolroom by George C. Scott. He has simply turned into Scott, but a more amiable, expansive version of that two-legged shark. He no longer plays pool, and, though he provides backing for some young hustlers, doesn’t even gamble much on the game. He is an all-round entrepreneur, always ready to seize the main chance. His earlier lust to be King of the Hill has been planed smooth into an appetite for comfort. The change seems to suit him. He dresses well, speaks with rough wit and incisiveness, drives an expensive car and enjoys an easeful liaison with an attractive bar proprietress, to whom he also peddles liquor. Fast Eddie is sliding through life like butter.

This slide is interrupted by the entrance of Vincent (Tom Cruise), whose genius at pool is not the result of monomania, as it once was with Eddie, but is rather an offshoot of a general aptitude for all games. Since he has no head for gambling, his tough girlfriend, Carmen (Mary Ellen Mastrantonio), looks after him. But she doesn’t understand the subtleties of hustling. Felson moves in.

Pool hustling is a curious way to make money because it depends both on great skill and on a willingness to suppress that skill. The hustler must lose many nickles and dimes so that people can be suckered into playing him for many dollars. Since the urge to win is like a fever with Vincent, Felson’s task is to curb that urge and make the kid deliberately lose. The main dramatic motion of Color is toward the crisscross of teacher and student. Vincent finally does learn to hustle, but Eddie catches the kid’s fever.

Overage, eyesight failing, reflexes shakey, Eddie, turning Vincent over to Carmen, embarks on a cross-country pool odyssey that will hone his skills before entering a championship tournament in Atlantic City. By the time he gets there, he is a match for most of the talent in the room. But he knows that Vincent, also present, is the best. However, can he now get a real game out of Vincent, who is all too ready to throw any match in order to manipulate the odds in his own favor? Felson is facing his own Frankenstein monster.

There are several reasons why Color offers less easy gratification than The Hustler.

Scorsese doesn’t seem to be the student of pool that Rossen most definitely was. In The Hustler, the rhythms of play were varied: single, lovingly detailed shots were interspersed with easier, more briskly achieved ones. Routine performance followed breathtaking stunts precisely for the sake of giving you time to catch your breath. Sometimes we were allowed to study a spread of object balls on the felt and we could see how difficult, how impossible, the shot seemed. Then the ferrule slid between fingers, tip made contact with cue ball and . . . the shot was made. Released from its tension, the audience jumped with excitement. Color, on the other hand, shows many spectacular shots being made but all in a headlong rush; nothing is prepared, studied, or savored. We get no idea of the difficulties being surmounted. In fact, Scorsese often uses trick photography to show the balls racing about the felt seemingly of their own volition and disappearing into the pockets of their own accord. Does Scorsese think he is thus conveying to us the magic of the game? Surely real pool magic is in the method of the players, not the mere results of the play. Or is it an asceticism in ex-seminarian Scorsese that tempts him to treat the skills and appurtenances of pool as just so many toys to be dispensed with so that he can touch the spirit of his hero by focusing as often as he can on Paul Newman’s face?

Considering the subtle acting instrument that face has become, I concede that the temptation must have been great. Newman doesn’t just dominate this film, he saturates it with Felson’s energy, greed, fear, and self-loathing. Tom Cruise does well, and not the least of his accomplishments is the way he keeps reminding us that Vincent, for all his flakiness, is basically a middle-class kid, easy to embarrass, easy to shock. But Cruise is interesting when he is most kinetic, while Newman holds our interest even when, or even especially when, he is absolutely motionless. There is a scene in which Vincent, drunk on impending victory, goes wild in a pool hall and swings a cue stick around like a baton twirler going over the top. Felson, sitting spellbound on the sidelines, watches Vincent, sharing the excitement, remembering his own days of glory, dreading the fever that is mounting within him and taking him over. Newman seems to hold the pith of the scene somewhere within his tensely cupped hands.

In The Hustler, conflicts were enacted between Eddie and the various vivid, manipulative personalities around him. In Color the conflict is mostly inside Eddie. Besides benefitting from Newman’s quiet bravura, Scorsese skillfully uses his camera to capture the motions and rhythms of his hero’s mind. Early in the film, the camera several times pans quickly from Felson’s face across a crowded room, then suddenly zooms in on an object or person that Eddie is focusing on, then pans quickly back to him as he figures out how to manipulate what he’s just spotted. Thus the camera mimics Eddie’s entrepreneurial vision. After Felson’s change of heart, the camera stays more tightly on him, moving with him as he goes deeper and deeper into his obsession with the game. Though this allows us to catch the vibrations within Eddie, some viewers may sense an attack of claustrophobia coming on. We apprehend the turbulence Eddie’s obsession gives rise to, but, because of Scorsese’s indifference to pool, we get no feel for what ignites and nurtures the obsession. Scorsese invites us into Eddie Felson’s pain but shuts us out of his joy.

The Color of Money is an interesting sequel to The Hustler precisely because it is a reversal of The Hustler, both in style and in the ethical significance of the story it tells. While The Hustler was hot and expansive, Color is cool and recessive. The earlier film reveled in the game through which a moral drama was enacted; Color‘s creator seems so wrapped up in his hero’s agony that he practically ignores the game. In The Hustler, Eddie was bound to lose the first game because he was loud-mouthed, nasty, and overconfident; his character collapsed under pressure. But he was equally bound to win the later duel when he entered the pool hall with sober demeanor, moral purpose in his eyes, repentance in his heart. His victory seemed a foregone conclusion, like a demonstration of the Protestant work ethic. At the end of Color we don’t know if Eddie can defeat Vincent, and Scorsese is telling us it doesn’t matter. “I’m back!” Eddie announces firmly as he makes the opening break in the film’s last shot, and Scorsese lets us know that while Felson may or may not be back professionally, he is most certainly back spiritually. Intention is all. Though Color is doing well at the box office, I can’t help wondering how audiences are responding to Scorsese’s refusal to give them a grand-slam Rocky Balboa victory.

The Hustler was for raffish Protestants. The Color of Money is for Catholics. Extremely ascetic Catholics. In fact, it’s the only movie I know that a stylite might come down off his pillar to attend.

Author

  • Richard Alleva

    At the time he wrote this review, Richard Alleva was a free-lance writer living in Washington D.C. He still works as a film critic for publications such as Commonweal today.

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