Betty blue

National Review, Dec 19, 1986 by John Simon

The Color of Money Betty Blue

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 surperb 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 Carmen, who grasps that greenbacks are greener than pool-table felt.

Soon the three of them are off on an odious odyssey through Midwestern poolrooms. Eddie will even grope Carmen while Vincent is playing, to bring out the killer in him, and makes it look as if Vincent will lose her if he doesn't get quickly, crookedly rich. Thus The Color of Money effectively undermines the moral values of The Hustler (1961), where Eddie, upon defeating the repulsive champion, Minnesota Fats, quits the game rather than serve the murderous gangster who wants to control him. These days, though, The Color of Money would not sell if a) it weren't about redemption, however speciously conceived, and b) it didn't have a loud and obnoxious rock score (compiled by Robbie Robertson) to drown out much of Richard Price's catchy, streetwise dialogue.

So we build up to the salvation of Eddie's soul by making him play again, middle-aged and out of practice though he be, with the aim of defeating the monster he has unleashed on the world. This cathartic triumph of Frankenstein over his creature is to take place at Atlantic City's 9-Ball Classic. Aside from the vagueness of why Eddie suddenly changes from Mephistopheles to a combination of Faust and Marguerite, there are quite a few other problems here, starting with the way Eddie regains his greatness. All he needed was a good pair of eyeglasses, which gives the gadget-crazy Scorsese a chance to shoot complicated ophthalmological apparatus in action, not to mention hocus-pocus with focus as Eddie's vision grows hawklike again. This reminds one of nothing so much as those old Hollywood movies where the mousy, yearning secretary needed only to remove her specs to knock her rich, handsome boss dead.

Throughout, the pyrotechnical Scorsese revels in getting Ballhaus to shoot the shooting of pool with ever more resounding pretensions. Director, cinematographer, and sound man pooled their talents, but there is a limit to the ways in which the drama of scattering, colliding, caroming, sinking-into-pockets or not-sinking-into-pockets balls can make the screen explode. By the time breaking takes on the look of cosmic cataclysm (a souped-up version of Laforgue's "Un couchant des Cosmogonies'), blue chalk scatters from cues in slow-motion close-up, and the sound-track roars like an atomic holocaust, the film has shot its wad and ended up behind the eight-ball.

But Scorsese has other tricks in his bag. He will resort to circular pans around the handsome, grizzled head of Paul Newman (Eddie), showing it from every angle except from behind, where time's vandalizing hand has tonsured that noble cranium. It's rather like the renovated Statue of Liberty being shot from a circumvolant helicopter. Another ploy is a sudden cut, as doors fly open, to the Atlantic City pool emporium (a specially built set), made to look, and lighted, like Chartres cathedral; I kept searching for the rose window.

There are some artful but nonsensical plot reversals to keep the interest from flagging, but the two scenes a faire that the plot keeps lumbering toward never come about--for obvious reasons. One is the seduction of Carmen by Eddie, but that would make Eddie--beg pardon, Paul Newman-- look bad, and we can't have that. The other is the showdown between Eddie and Vincent for numero uno. But if Eddie wins, we lose the youth audience; if Vincent wins, we alienate the adult moviegoers, not to mention the fans of Paul Newman, including the Number-One Fan himself. Bad box office, and quite inconceivable in a film that was written in confab by Price, Scorsese, and Newman.

Yet the greatest problem is the cheapness of the notion of redemption. I'm not sure whether the filmmakers think of pool as art or as religion, but one or the other it must be to justify the awe with which it is viewed. The idea that a man can save his soul by sinking these ivory balls, that these smoke-blackened, booze-washed pool parlors are the threshold of paradise, that this insalubrious pursuit (rather than some honest trade) is worth devoting one's life to, I find profoundly repellent. And it takes an anti-intellectual filmmaker like Scorsese to peddle it as a Faustian theme.