The Tricks of the Game

Rating: 7/10 (22 April 2015)

"The Color of Money" is a delayed sequel to "The Hustler" from 1961 which provided Paul Newman with one of his best-known early roles as the pool hustler Fast Eddie Felson. Fast Eddie then disappeared from the screen for a quarter of a century, but in 1984 Walter Tevis, the author of the novel on which the earlier film had been based, published a sequel, and Newman was persuaded to return when this was itself adapted for the cinema. Jackie Gleason's character Minnesota Fats is, however, absent, as it was felt that he would not fit in well with the story.
As the film opens, the now middle-aged Fast Eddie has retired from playing pool and is working as a liquor salesman, until one night he meets Vincent Lauria, a young up-and-coming pool player who reminds him of his younger self. Eddie persuades Vincent and his girlfriend Carmen to go on the road with him. The deal is that Eddie will teach Vincent all the tricks of the game and in return Vincent will give him a cut of his winnings. By "tricks of the game" Eddie does not just mean formal pool-playing skills- Vincent is already a formidably good player- but also the scams and dodges (some of them very ethically dubious) which Vincent will need to be a successful hustler. Eddie's nickname does not just refer to the speed with which he can clear a pool table; he is also "fast" in the sense of slippery or dishonest. His creed is that "pool excellence is not about excellent pool"- it's more about successful gambling. His protégé's success encourages Eddie to make a return to the game himself, and he and Vincent find themselves playing in the same tournament.
Together with Henry Fonda's win for "On Golden Pond" from five years earlier, Newman's "Best Actor" Academy Award for this film is often cited as the prime example of an Oscar given for sentimental reasons rather than on merit. (Ironically Newman, nominated for "Absence of Malice", was one of the actors who lost out to Fonda in 1981). Neither actor had previously won an Oscar, and these films were seen as their "last chance" to win one. In Fonda's case this was quite literally true- "On Golden Pond" was his very last film and he died not long after receiving his award- but Newman made a number of films after 1986, his last, "Road to Perdition", coming as late as 2002. Newman's performance here is certainly good, but I would not rank it alongside the truly great ones he had earlier given in films like "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", "Hombre", "Cool Hand Luke" and "The Sting", or the one he was later to give in "Road to Perdition", all of which were overlooked by the Academy. The award of a sentimental Oscar would not have mattered much had 1986 been a weak year in the cinema, but in fact it was a very strong one, the year of films as good as "Children of a Lesser God", "The Mission" and "Hannah and Her Sisters", all of which contained at least one performance at least as good as Newman's.
The brash, cocky, up-and-coming young Vincent is played by an up-and- coming young actor named Tom Cruise, and in the eighties nobody could do brash and cocky like Cruise. This is not really one of his best performances- he was not to emerge as a great actor until "Rain Man" and "Born on the Fourth of July" a few years later- but at least he is not as annoying here as he was in other films from the period like "Risky Business" or "Cocktail".
The film was described by some critics as an inferior follow-up to "The Hustler", but as it's a long time since I saw that film I won't attempt a direct comparison. It is reasonably well made and acted, but I can't say it's a great favourite of mine, even though I'm normally a big admirer of Martin Scorsese. Part of the reason is that (like most Britons) I know very little about pool. ("A sort of American version of snooker?") This is not, however, the main reason; after all, I don't know much about baseball either, and that has never prevented me from loving films like "Eight Men Out" or "Field of Dreams". I think that the real reason is that it's all a bit passionless, with no tension and no characters with whom the audience can identify. There is never any real dramatic conflict between Eddie and Vincent because they are no more than older and younger versions of the same not very attractive character, and we never really care about who wins their big match. It's not a bad film, but it's not one of Scorsese's masterpieces in the class of "Taxi Driver", "King of Comedy" or "The Aviator". 7/10