The Color of Money
Martin Scorsese, USA, 1986o
'Fast' Eddie Felson, the hero of the pool shooter fim The Hustler (1960), hasn't been playing pool professionally for a long time. Instead, he deals in whiskey and, on the side, looks for talent he could train and manage. In the process, he discovers the young player Vincent, who cockily rips off his opponents. Eddie teaches him the art of tactics and travels with Vincent and his girlfriend across the USA. The longer the tour lasts, the more a rift opens up between the two - and the more Eddie's ambition returns to try it again himself at the pool table.
A quarter of a century after Robert Rossen's classic gambling film The Hustler, its leading actor Paul Newman once again gives the pool shark "Fast" Eddie Felson, who in the meantime no longer plays himself but regards players only as investment objects and discovers the talent of an unspoiled newcomer. While the old man tries to make a professional out of the young, the relationship between cynicism and passion is visibly reversed. This development comes as no surprise, but gains profile from the concentration on the personal constellations of the old and the young player. In a virtuoso directorial performance, Scorsese finally derives an ironic-melancholic commentary on youth and age, ambition and calculation, lust for life and resignation. The Color of Money was a commissioned work after and before Scorsese's heartfelt projects After Hours and The Last Temptation of Christ . While the auteur films flopped, the in-between piece grew to become one of the classics of its genre, in part because of the sophisticated camerawork of German Michael Ballhaus (1935-2017), who here worked with Scorsese for the second time and became his permanent cinematographer until The Departed (2006).
Andreas FurlerGalleryo
