GOLDEN GRAHAMS

Editor-at-Large Jamie Graham unearths underrated classics…

THIS MONTH

The Color of Money

Most months, this column is dedicated to curios and obscurities that you might not have heard of, but boy, do they deserve seeking out. Some months, though, I reserve the right to plump for a more well-known title if I feel it’s sorely underrated and deserving of reappraisal.

And so I give you Martin Scorsese’s masterful road movie set in the diners and motels, bars and pool halls of East Coast America. Sure, Paul Newman won the Best Actor Oscar for reprising his pool shark from The Hustler, ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson – but that’s usually attributed to the Academy voting sentimentally given his previous six nominations with no return. And while the film sees a young Tom Cruise play pool prodigy Vincent, by turns naïve and cocky, lovable and annoying, it was Cruise’s other 1986 movie, Top Gun, that made him a star.

The Color of Money is an exceptional sports drama that never gets mentioned when critics discuss Scorsese’s finest work. Labelled as ‘almost formula’ by Roger Ebert, and ‘one of the biggest disappointments of 1986’ by his colleague, Gene Siskel, its reputation hasn’t even particularly grown over time – when Indiewire last month published a list of the 100 Best Movies of the 1980s, The Color of Money wasn’t on it.

Probably it’s because the film is dismissed as one that Scorsese did for the studio. And so it was: Paul Newman liked Raging Bull and approached him to direct (hilariously, ‘Michael Scorsese’ was the name on Newman’s letter; Scorsese was often confused with the director of The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino), and Scorsese took it on to see if he could work with stars, on a studio budget. He considered shooting in black and white until Touchstone Pictures talked him out of it. And he admitted that The Color of Money had ‘a little more hope in [it] than my earlier pictures’.

So yes, a studio movie. But what a studio movie. Scorsese brought in novelist Richard Price to rewrite the script and together they fashioned a story in which Eddie, now a part-time liquor salesman, takes Vinnie under his wing to teach him the art of hustling. ‘Pool excellence is not about excellent pool,’ Eddie says, and together they work a series of smoky, rundown pool halls en route to a tournament in Atlantic City. Felson is moulding Vinnie into a Xerox of his younger self, and the two essentially swap places, with hard-bitten Eddie rediscovering his love of the game and super-enthusiastic doofus Vinnie becoming all about the money.

Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, was one of the few who was on the money, calling it ‘a stunning vehicle… a white Cadillac among the other mainstream American movies.’ There’s thrilling artistry in Michael Ballhaus’ trick-shot camerawork. The editing of Thelma Schoonmaker is as explosive as Vinnie’s break shot. And the soundtrack (Robbie Robertson, Eric Clapton) leaves most movies for dead.

As for the finale, Ari Aster said it best when I interviewed him for Beau Is Afraid, and somehow got talking about The Color of Money: ‘The ending is so radical. He completely defies the genre.’ Now how many studio movies can you say that about?

JAMIE WILL RETURN NEXT ISSUE… FOR MORE RECOMMENDATIONS, FOLLOW @JAMIE_GRAHAM9 ON TWITTER