The Color of Money (1986)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
“You must always find something that connects your own autobiography to the subject you’re working on. In this case, it was: what would happen to me if I were stripped of my ability to write? What would happen to Martin if he couldn’t make films? You become sterile, frozen, because you’re denying the very thing that gives you life. That’s what happens to Fast Eddie—he stops playing pool, and it’s killing him. It’s his life, his way of making art; he has to rediscover himself to survive.”
This is how screenwriter Richard Price described The Color of Money, a film born as a synthesis of many different life stories. First and foremost, that of Walter Tevis, the writer behind The Hustler and The Color of Money. After the success of his first two novels (The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth), Tevis spent seventeen years in silence, teaching creative writing at Ohio University and, above all, drinking. In 1980, following his divorce, he abandoned his academic career, moved to New York, and in the four years before his death in 1984, he wrote and published four new novels and a collection of short stories.
Then there are the parallel biographies of Martin Scorsese and Richard Price—their tastes and their shared love of bars and pool halls, quintessentially masculine spaces shaped by a deeply existential view of gambling. And finally, Paul Newman, who pushed for the film and, with a level of professional discipline rare for a star—especially one with significant directorial experience—entrusted it to a filmmaker not only from a different generation but also so confident, meticulous, and defined in his own authorship that he would be entirely unaffected by the actor’s charisma.
In the end, it was a gamble for both. For Newman, it meant handing over a beloved project to a director who would never turn it into a mere tribute (and indeed, under Scorsese and Price, both the interpretation and the narrative shifted significantly). For Scorsese, it was the dual challenge of taking on a sequel and reshaping a somewhat old-fashioned hero like Fast Eddie Felson (and Paul Newman) within the sharply contemporary boundaries of his own vision. In some ways, it was likely a mutual wager on the other’s professional integrity.
The Color of Money that emerged no longer follows the lines of Tevis’s story, yet it remains a tale he would have appreciated, built as it is on themes of defeat, surrender, and redemption. It is maturity watching itself grow young again—or at least regain the unselfconscious enthusiasm of youth. In the end, it is this color, vivid yet undefined, that ultimately triumphs for Fast Eddie over that “fascinating, mystical green rectangle—the color of money.” It marks one of the most determined victories of a loser in recent American cinema.
The film’s ending, with its impeccable romanticism, is undeniably rétro, leading to an ethical and existential awakening that likely has no real-world counterpart today. This kind of heart-driven happy ending seems, at first glance, to contradict Scorsese’s usual pessimism. Some critics viewed it with suspicion, subtly interpreting it as a concession to the box office. More broadly, the film itself was seen as a step back in the director’s otherwise consistently upward trajectory. Given these perspectives, some clarification seems necessary.
A film of flesh – Despite being a sequel, built on someone else’s material (and already mythical in its own right), The Color of Money is unmistakably a Scorsese film. The director did not simply apply his dazzling technical and compositional skill to a subject—however suited to him—crafted by others. He made it entirely his own.
The film contains initiation and corruption, the journey (both metaphorical and narrative), and the male duo reflecting a father-son dynamic. These core elements, for better or worse, have long formed the backbone of Scorsese’s cinema, and here they emerge as the film’s primary narrative structure. That is the essential difference: Eddie and Vincent’s story, from the first frame to the last, is purely an initiation journey—unembellished by philosophical or narrative diversions, devoid of sociological or political commentary, absent of love stories, and stripped of any intricate plot designed to captivate or distract with its resolution.
In its structure, the film is stark, simple, predictable. It has become the skeleton of a movie, a kind of prototype upon which endless variations could be built. This should come as no surprise, given that After Hours is constructed on the very same premise—an abstract framework, a schematic outline of every possible film. The fundamental difference between the two is that while After Hours is a papier-mâché film, The Color of Money is a film of flesh.
It is only in this sense that one might speak of a pause in Scorsese’s artistic progression. With After Hours, he had reached his most rigorous and biting stylization—a vision of reality so unsettling in its metallic coldness that it left no room for imaginary projections. With The Color of Money, he returns instead to the nostalgia of myth, and therefore to its warmth and allure, however faded, however blurred by age. After Hours is more rational and immediate; The Color of Money is more sentimental and steeped in the past. This is why the former is the more perfect film.
A quintessential centripetal work, After Hours is structured around a circularity that allows no escape—it is the negation of illusion, of dreams, of fairy tales, whether they end happily or tragically. The circularity of The Color of Money, on the other hand, is abruptly broken by Eddie Felson’s escape along a solitary, anachronistic path—one that belongs only to the realm of imagination, and particularly to the classical imagination.
However, this is not a clever homage to the past, but rather a sudden jolt—a fleeting regret for a character, much like New York, New York was for a particular cinematic and narrative universe. While that film reconstructed a passionate, spectacular way of making movies—only to chart, through its narrative development, its gradual impossibility—The Color of Money reintroduces a traditional character into contemporary cinema, one who unexpectedly manages to reclaim heroic, albeit outdated, traits.
Stylistically, The Color of Money rejects any nostalgic indulgence. It is a tough, precise, and distancing film that leaves little room for conventional allure. In this sense, it closely resembles The King of Comedy, Scorsese’s most acerbic and uncompromising work. Like that film, it calibrates its color choices and camerawork without the slightest concession to audience expectations. Its shots, before being beautiful (and some are truly stunning), are disorienting—they arrive suddenly and vanish just as abruptly, never to be repeated.
Thus, its visual flourishes become blinding flashes, illuminations of that “artistic sense of life” Richard Price alluded to. Take, for example, the striking slow-motion close-up of the cue striking the ball, releasing a fine cloud of chalk dust, or the overhead shot of the Atlantic City pool hall, its tables gleaming under the lights. These moments are not mere displays of aesthetic pleasure; they are essential to Fast Eddie’s imaginary progression, just as Rupert Pupkin’s dreams were in The King of Comedy.
The return of heroes – Steve Jenkins wrote in Monthly Film Bulletin that The Color of Money is an inverted reworking of The King of Comedy but fails to match its intensity (or that of Mean Streets or Raging Bull) because, unlike those films, its energy is never directed toward an innocence that is perceived as dangerous and unsettling. “Vincent remains essentially a spectacle to observe, while the film focuses on Eddie, who sees himself as a ‘student of human moves,’ detached from the game he is watching.”
Both statements are entirely accurate: The Color of Money is built on the same structural premise as The King of Comedy (a pursuit pushed to the extreme of possessing another’s identity), following a similar triangular dynamic, where the marginal female character virulently seizes control of the game’s rules—at times even leading it. At the same time, however, The Color of Money privileges a single perspective: Eddie Felson’s, who remains on screen almost constantly.
This brings us back to the visual flourishes mentioned earlier and the stunning virtuosity with which the camera, editing, and soundtrack move over and around the pool tables. Though we do not see the film through Fast Eddie’s subjective viewpoint, there is no doubt that every shot and event reflect his evolving psyche.
In this sense, the opening sequence is exemplary—astounding in its synthesis. Entirely built around the gradual emergence of a disruptive element, it presents Fast Eddie Felson as a man who appears at peace, with his white Cadillac and well-tailored suits. Yet, little by little, he senses—almost physically, through the way a ball is struck—the presence of something unfamiliar, something that both irritates and captivates him. The camera draws him in with sudden zooms toward the table where Vincent is playing, weaving a network of glances and hesitations that, in just a few minutes, establish a complex psychology and backstory.
He is the hardened, withdrawn hero who sees in another a reflection of his own youthful potential and flaws.
This dynamic—between the camera glorifying the game of pool and Eddie Felson maintaining his detached stance as a hardened manager—structures and sustains the entire film. Vincent is truly an abstract figure: pure motion, excitement, and energy, a silhouette to be observed, envied, and ultimately corrupted because he is too perfect, too unsettling. He is the embodiment of everything Fast Eddie has denied himself, which is why we almost always see him through Eddie’s jealous, melancholic eyes.
Even Vincent’s triumph—most vividly captured in the scene where he dances around the pool table, a brilliant directorial choice that encapsulates his character—is overshadowed by Eddie’s anger as he trains his protégé in deception. Fast Eddie Felson is the sole focal point, the film’s key to interpretation. His downfall and subsequent resurrection (which Scorsese marks with sudden flashes of the Catholic symbolism he so often employs) signal Vincent’s gradual disappearance from the narrative. For a brief moment, the whistled theme from The Hustler lingers in the background, and Paul Newman, wearing glasses, leaning against the pool table, quietly revives one of his old Actor’s Studio gestures.
In this regard, it is essential to highlight the meticulous subtlety of the performances Scorsese draws from his two leads. Newman plays it entirely under the surface—restrained, avoiding mannerisms, expressing everything through small, awkward movements and a predominantly facial performance: glances, flashes of envy, sudden shifts. Tom Cruise (whose acting abilities no one would have bet on at the time) is all physicality and exaggerated gestures, pure kinetic energy. With a dose of irony and a sharp awareness of the present, he channels some of the traits and excesses that once defined the young Eddie Felson—and an entire generation of actors.
A remarkably subtle study of aging, The Color of Money simultaneously revisits the cinema that, thirty years earlier, had shaped the future of Hollywood—the cinema of Rossen, Kazan, Brooks, and the Actor’s Studio. It shares the same sense of melodrama, the same fascination with character clashes, and the same relentless focus on moral corruption—modernized in its style and inverted in its narrative.
Just as that earlier wave had been a cinema of youth—the first great explosion of young actors on screen—this is a film about an old man. It is all too easy to call it a reflection of old Hollywood observing the new, a lament for the stories and characters of the past, for their capacity for heroism. It is that, to the point of an unusual happy ending. Unusual, yes, but perhaps less anachronistic and sterile than it might seem—at least in strictly cinematic terms.
This return of the hero, now in old age, could also signal a deeper longing to step back into the game, to reclaim skills once abandoned—not just for a certain kind of Hollywood, but for the liberal America behind it.
—Cineforum, n. 264, May 1987
