The Color of Money (1986)

Directed by Martin Scorsese. Starring Paul Newman, Tom Cruise, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Helen Shaver, John Turturro, Forest Whitaker, Bill Cobbs, Keith McReady. [R]

Twenty-five years after The Hustler, “Fast Eddie” Felson is back—he hasn’t picked up in the stick in a long time, but he’s been doing fine for himself selling liquor and staking bets for skilled players. He takes it even further when he encounters a flaky fireball of a young talent in Cruise (along with the kid’s smarter, more level-headed girlfriend played by Mastrantonio), and decides to show him the ropes by hustling on the road on the way to an Atlantic City tournament. A commercial, impersonal effort from Scorsese, but there’s no faulting his commitment to energetic and stylish direction, aided tremendously by Michael Ballhaus’ extravagant camerawork. The cool-headed-mentor-and-brash-student story has been repurposed enough times by now, but it’s still told in an engaging enough fashion here to brush off a lot of the clichéd narrative signposts that the script follows, especially with the main cast being as good as it is; though less trite than the mentorship and big competition angles, a sub-plot involving Felson’s relationship with bartender Shaver is too underwritten to leave much of an impact. Newman won a long overdue Academy Award for the role reprisal, but it’s essentially just a nicely understated movie star performance where he proves that he’s very comfortable inside his own skin and skills. Iggy Pop appears briefly as one of Cruise’s opponents.

71/100