Forty years after its release, Martin Scorsese’s film starring Paul Newman and Tom Cruise looks like a remarkably prescient portrait of a world where every skill becomes a commodity and every experience an asset to be monetised.
Martin Scorsese premiered The Color of Money in New York on 8 October 1986, bringing together Hollywood legend Paul Newman and rising star Tom Cruise in an unlikely sequel to Robert Rossen’s 1961 classic The Hustler. Released in cinemas in Italy in February 1987, the film revisited pool hustler Eddie Felson 25 years after the events of the original, finding him far removed from the game that once defined his life.
Now working in the liquor trade, Eddie, played by Newman, rediscovers his passion for billiards after meeting Vincent Lauria (Cruise), a brash young player whose extraordinary talent is matched by his boundless confidence. With Vincent’s girlfriend, Carmen (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), involved in the scheme, Eddie takes the pair on a tour of American pool halls, exploiting Vincent’s skill and seemingly inexperienced manner to deceive opponents and make money.
But Vincent’s arrogance and a humiliating double defeat — including Eddie’s unexpected loss to Amos, played by Forest Whitaker — expose the tensions beneath their partnership. When the alliance falls apart, Eddie returns to serious competition, entering a major tournament in Atlantic City, where he comes face to face with Vincent once again. Teacher and pupil are ultimately forced to settle a question that goes beyond the pool table: which of them has truly turned talent into power?
A portrait of an America ruled by money
Written by Richard Price and based on another novel by Walter Tevis, published shortly before the author’s death, The Color of Money arrived at a pivotal moment in Scorsese’s career. The director had recently endured the commercial failure of The King of Comedy (1982) and the initially misunderstood brilliance of After Hours (1985).
Yet the sequel was anything but a nostalgic return to familiar territory. Scorsese transplanted Eddie Felson into a radically different America, one shaped by the money, conspicuous consumption, ambition and predatory instincts of the 1980s.
Eddie represents a generation that understands the value of experience, patience and deception. Vincent, by contrast, embodies the brash energy of a younger generation for whom talent, spectacle and success appear inseparable. For him, skill is not simply something to master; it is something to display, exploit and turn into profit.
Pool becomes a metaphor for constantly shifting power relationships, in which even experience can be sold and ability matters only insofar as it generates financial returns. The film’s journey through motels, highways, bars and gambling halls constructs a portrait of America’s margins, where money serves both as the reward and as the ultimate measure of individual worth.
Newman versus Cruise: two generations of Hollywood
The contest between Eddie and Vincent therefore represents more than a rivalry between two pool players. It reflects a clash between two visions of America, two eras of cinema and two generations of performers.
Newman was an icon of classical Hollywood, embodying the authority and experience of an established screen legend. Cruise, meanwhile, was an emerging star who would go on to become one of the defining faces of Hollywood over the following four decades.
With remarkable instinct, Scorsese positioned himself at the fault line between these worlds. His direction reveals a filmmaker deeply in love with cinema’s traditions but compelled to confront the changing rules of an increasingly commercial industry.
The film was conceived as a commercially oriented production for Touchstone, Disney’s more adult-focused label at the time. Yet its mainstream ambitions did little to blunt the radicalism of Scorsese’s approach.
Instead, he transformed the film into a kinetic exploration of desire and competition. The camera darts around the pool tables, while the incisive editing of longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker fragments and reassembles movements, glances and trajectories. Michael Ballhaus’s cinematography alternates aggressive colours with bleak, shadowy environments, capturing both the exhilaration and desolation of America’s overlooked corners.
A strong soundtrack by Robbie Robertson, featuring contributions from Eric Clapton, Robert Palmer and Mark Knopfler, reinforces the film’s unmistakably 1980s identity. What might have appeared to be a compromise between artistic ambition and mainstream entertainment instead becomes a sharp instrument for examining how talent itself is commodified.
A film that anticipated the present
The Color of Money received four Academy Award nominations, including one for Newman as best actor, which he won. It was not nominated for best picture or best director.
At the time, the film’s deeper significance was not fully recognised. Viewed today, however, it looks like a remarkably clear-sighted prediction of the world that was to come. Scorsese dismantles the logic of spectacle from within, using Hollywood’s own commercial machinery to expose a culture in which every skill can become a commodity and every experience an asset to be monetised.
The film remains compelling not merely because of its critique of ambition and profit, but also because of its sheer cinematic energy — a quality that, in an era increasingly dominated by the relentless production and consumption of entertainment, feels ever more precious.
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