The color of The Color of Money is dismal. I am speaking metaphorically; but even literally, despite good color cinematography by Michael Ballhaus, the color of Martin Scorsese’s new film, about which nothing seems very new, is wrong. Pool halls and the near-slums surrounding them look better in black and white, as Robert Rossen shot The Hustler, to which this is a sort of sequel. Sequels, by the way, seldom look good in any color.
Like its predecessor, The Color of Money is based on a novel by Walter Tevis, with which, I gather, it has next to nothing to do. The former pool wizard Fast Eddie Felson is now a prosperous, middle-aged Chicago liquor salesman, who instructs Janelle, the barmaid he is seducing, in how to hustle customers with an adequate little hooch dispensed from bottles with fancy labels. He no longer shoots pool, merely stakes young hustlers for the lion’s share of their winnings. Discovering a superb nine-ball player in Vincent, a young toy salesman, he proposes to educate this loud-mouthed, swaggering, crowing kid, hellbent on being best, into a successful hustler, which means dumping a few games to come in for the kill—dirtying your game to clean up. To turn the somewhat recalcitrant Vincent into a thorough little crook, Eddie enlists the boy’s girlfriend, the hard-bitten Car-men, who grasps that greenbacks are greener than pool-table felt.
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