The Color of Money turns 40 this month. Paul Newman plays pool hustler Fast Eddie Felson, pulled out of retirement by the itch to back a new talent, and finds him in Tom Cruise's brash, undisciplined Vincent Lauria. Martin Scorsese only took the project on after Newman called him directly and asked him to direct it, and he rebuilt the script from Walter Tevis's novel rather than lean on footage from the original film.
What makes the film worth marking isn't really the pool. Newman first played Eddie twenty five years earlier in The Hustler and lost the Oscar for it, then went on losing the category five more times across the next two decades. Taking the same character back up here finally won him the award, and he didn't even turn up to collect it, having long since decided that showing up was the thing jinxing him.
Scorsese treats the table the way he treats everything else, tight on the felt and the break rather than pulled back to make it look tidy. Two professional players, Mike Sigel and Ewa Mataya Laurance, coached the cast, and Cruise ran most of his own shots instead of handing them to a double, which is why the matches still hold up. The film sits at 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, better than its reputation as the minor half of a two-film story suggests.
Jackie Gleason turned down a return as Minnesota Fats, uneasy that the character would feel like an afterthought in a script built around Eddie and Vincent, so the rematch here belongs to Newman alone. Forty years on, that performance is still the reason to put this one back on.
