With the recent passing of Piper Laurie and the upcoming release of the long-awaited and critically acclaimed Killers of the Flower Moon, I’d thought I’d look back at The Color of Money released on this day. Martin Scorsese directed this movie back in the mid-1980s when he was going through a down period.
As I mentioned in a previous post, his 1976 movie Taxi Driver, which he’s recently discussed, was a favorite of John Hinckley, who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981 because he was obsessed with Jodie Foster. For a while Scorsese had considered getting out of filmmaking. Even though Robert DeNiro had helped him beat his cocaine addiction to make Raging Bull, the filmmaking process on that movie along with the toll of the high-profile flop New York New York and the concert film The Last Waltz left Scorsese exhausted in the early 1980s following some health issues including pnuemonia at one point.
He made The King of Comedy, a comedy-drama about a desparate (and possibly demented) aspiring stand-up comic, played by DeNiro, who kidnaps a popular TV late night host, played by Jerry Lewis, to appear on his TV show. The movie was a bigger disappointment than New York even though it was well received by critics. Scorsese made the dark comedy After Hours to get back into the groove, but he often felt he made Color of Money as “hired labor.” Even worse, his good friend and late film critic Roger Ebert wasn’t too impressed with the movie.
And while the movie gave Paul Newman a well-deserved Oscar for his performance as “Fast Eddie” Felson in his autumn years, it’s Tom Cruise who shines as the young cocky arrogant pool wizard Vincent Lauria. Vincent is one of those guys you go to school with but didn’t hang out. He didn’t do much in the ways of extracurricular activities but was all-around a nice guy and you had classes with him and go along. Then, a few years after graduating you find him hanging around in a bar when you come home from college for the holidays. You just need to get away from the family so you head to the local dive because now you can legally buy a beer and you see him there hustling some locals at the pool table.
Cruise was 23 when he made Color of Money and Vincent is one of those guys who’s in his early 20s who’s moved out of his parent’s house “now that he’s a man” in with an older woman who wouldn’t have looked at him years earlier. Carmen (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) functions mostly as Vincent’s manager as she arranges for chumps he can beat easily in 9-ball for a $20 bill a game. Carmen is slightly older and works as a waitress as Vincent’s day job is working at a children’s toy store where he wears a black T-shirt with his name across the upper top. They live in a flop apartment, have sex a lot, have arguments a lot. Carmen gets control her boyfriend and Vincent gets to brag about dating “an older woman.”
Eddie notices Vincent in a bar after an associate, Julian (John Turturro), asks to borrow some money but quickly loses it. Realizing that Vincent is too cocky for his own good and it’s only a matter of time before he meets the same fate that happened to him in his youth, he offers to be a “stake horse” for Vincent. In The Hustler, Eddie’s fingers were broken following a pool game and later a big gambler played by George C. Scott ruins his reputation in the big-time pool halls. There’s a 9-ball tournament coming up in about two months that Vincent can win as long as Eddie helps him out.
Despite having a huge fight with his girlfriend, Janelle (Helen Shaver), Eddie takes Vincent and Carmen on the road with him throughout the Mid-West as they work on hustles and cons. Unfortunately, Vincent is too cocky at first and uses the balabushka Eddie gives him to hustle a town’s key player, Moselle (Bruce Young), out of just $150. However, Eddie was wanting to get a few grand out of him.
Along with Carmen, Eddie and Vincent work on ways they trick people into putting up money or having Vincent appear to be a novice at first then coming back and winning big. Eventually, Eddie gets too cocky himself and takes the balabushka to a pool hall where he’s hustled by a jovial man, Amos (Forrest Whitaker in one of his earlier great roles.) Amos, at first, appears just to be a regular guy, but as Eddie pounds the alcoholic drinks, he realizes Amos is a hustler and a damn good one as he loses hundreds not realizing he had been training Vincent to be the type of hustler Amos is.
Eddie gives Carmen and Vincent several thousand dollars and tells them he wants to part ways. Vincent gets angry at Eddie and damages the stairwell to the pool hall before he walks away disgusted at Eddie. Vincent is a hothead and his interactions with Carmen show it’s heading to Splitsville one day. Carmen and her previous boyfriend burglarized Vincent’s parents and stole several item. She even wears a nice necklace that belonged to his mother. Carmen says they met at the police station and he’s too ignorant to put two and two together that the necklace is his mother’s.
Naturally, the movie ends at the 9-ball tournament in Atlantic City, N.J., on the Boardwalk as Eddie works his way back on top and getting his eyes checked out, so he can get better glasses. The two of them end up being paired together in a match. However, despite a good game by Vincent, Eddie wins. Initially excited he won and Janelle is there with him, Eddie later discovers that Vincent blew the game because the odds on him went down. He defeated leading big-timer Grady Seasons (real-life professional pool player Keith McCready) in a pairing and the odds against him, even if he went to the finals, wouldn’t have been much.
So, Vincent bet against himself, threw the match and walked away with $16,000, but is making more hustling other players in the pool halls during the nights. This mirrors something Eddie told Vincent earlier about how people can loses earlier in the tournaments and make more hustling people at the clubs later on. But Eddie realizes he also got hustled by Vincent and Carmen and he didn’t get Vincent’s best game. So he forfeits his semi-final match giving Vincent the $8,000 that was Eddie’s “cut.” Later in a private match, they play for the money as Eddie is confident that he’s back in the game again after a long hull.
This is where the movie ends and some have criticized it for being anti-climatic but I think it’s the end of Eddie’s story and only the beginning of Vincent’s. Things would never work out with him and Carmen and my guess is eventually he notices that the necklace is his mother’s. He’s too protective of her at times getting upset when she’s in a pool hall with mostly black men. He’s very controlling getting mad when she goes across the street to buy cigarettes rather than at the bar. Because of his youth and arrogance, after Carmen leaves him and he tries to do the hustling on his own.
And that’s where he gets into more trouble. He probably even gets in trouble with the law maybe for a hustle that goes wrong. Faced with his own jail time, Vincent joins the military service. He discovers that along with his ability to play pool well, he is a good shooter. Vincent joins special forces or another covert outfit and becomes very tactical with his weaponry. Angry and bitter withj the betrayal by Carmen and how Eddie cut him loose, combat changes Vincent. He becomes more angry and violent.
However, realizing that he doesn’t want to stay in the military, Vincent does his time for Uncle Sam and decides to go into the private sector as a hitman, thus becoming the hired assassin in Michael Mann’s 2004 gritty thriller Collateral. It’s mentioned that Vincent has been doing this for six years and since the movie is set in the middle of Winter, it’s probably 1997 when he started being a professional. There’s a 10-11 year gap between the end of the events of Color of Money where Vincent could’ve been in the military. You can notice similarities between the two other than the fact their hair looks the same. However, in Collateral, it’s turned grey obviously as war and life events have age Vincent.
We don’t know much about Vincent in Collateral. He has a knack for blending in and tells cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx) he really doesn’t like big cities like Los Angeles where the movie is set. He says the problem is people aren’t friendly enough and talks about hearing about how a person died on metro rail train and no one noticed. Vincent is very skilled in marksmanship as he usually fires center mass at people, which implies tactical and/or SAS training.
Vincent is a fan of jazz music and Mann and Cruise came up with a backstory that Vincent was from the Chicago area, possibly the southside as there is the Checkerboard Lounge there and his father was a fan of the music. Eddie is a liquor salesman in Chicago. Vincent in Money doesn’t seem like the type who would stray too far from home in his early 20s. He lies to Max and says he killed his father but says his father had a drinking problem and died from it. Following his father’s death, Vincent may have decided to leave the military.
It’s mentioned that Vincent’s mother died when he was young in Collateral. But Carmen has stolen his mother’s necklace. It’s possible when Vincent still talks about his late mother in the present tense even though she died years earlier, the way people will talk about their late spouses as if they’re still married. Since his real father was an alcoholic, it may explain why Vincent feels so betrayed by Eddie wanting to part ways three-fourths in Color of Money. He sees Eddie as a father figure and now Eddie is ditching him.
It may also be why he is attracted to Carmen because she’s older in a Freudian way, even though Carmen is only a few years probably. In real life Mastrantonio is only about four years older than Cruise, but at Vincent’s early age in Color of Money, it might seem she’s more mature. She obviously takes more control even getting upset when they get the wrong order at a restaurant while Vincent seems to be the type who would just eat it anyway. Seeing the necklace brings back memories and attracts Vincent to her.
When Max has to go visit his mother, Ida (Irma P. Hall) who’s in the hospital, Vincent goes with her and buys some flowers telling Max he should get his mother some flowers. However, Ida doesn’t like the flowers when she thinks Max bought them but says she loves them when she sees that it was Vincent. The scene with the flowers shows that Vincent maybe still grieves for the mother he never got to know as well. And like Ida, I know a lot of women who don’t want flowers but I don’t think Vincent is able to understand that.
Getting away from Chicago in his 20s may have made Vincent in Collateral get a distaste for metropolitan areas, the way people who work in New York City want to live in the New Jersey suburbs or Long Island. Cruise as Vincent in Collateral is a cold, calculating killer. However, he’s able to appear friendly at times, but behind the facade there is nothing there. When he has to help Max out when the cab dispatcher is busting Max’s balls over damage one of Vincent’s targets made falling out a motel window, Vincent is quick to say he’s an assistant U.S. Attorney and cites the law.
Being trained by Eddie and Carmen to appear as a simpleton in pool halls has worn out on Vincent and hes learned to pretend to be people he’s not whenever the need arising. Also one of his targets is a U.S. Attorney Annie Farrell (Jada Pinkett Smith) so Vincent may have decided to use that as he was looking over the information on a flash drive he was given. Also, being a hitman has made Vincent study the law so he knows how to do things in towns and cities without being detected.
Of course, this is just a fan theory and I didn’t realize it until earlier this year. I’m a big fan of both movies but never made the connection. It could just be an odd coincidence. But since Color of Money is a sequel to The Hustler, it’s been rumored that the Jason Statham character who Vincent bumps into in the Los Angeles airport terminal is Frank Martin from The Transporter movies. So you have the three Transporter movies tied to the Fast Eddie Felson Saga.
I know people are growing tired of shared universe. The Scream and View Askew movies apparently exist in the same universe as Jay and Silent Bob (Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith) have a cameo in Scream 3. The Predator movies are tied to the Die Hard movies, which are also connectd to the Alien movies as well as the 1985 movie Commando and the 1991 movie Ricochet as Mary Ellen Trainor’s Gail Wallens also appears in the first Die Hard. Even the fictional Morley Cigarettes brand have appeared in numerous movies and TV shows over the years including the original Psycho, Platoon, The X-Files, The Walking Dead and Friends among others. Do all of them appear in the same universe?
While part of the allure of Vincent in Collateral is that we don’t know much about him, if you connect him to Color of Money, you can see how he became the cold-blooded monster he is.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 