‘The Color of Money’: the only Martin Scorsese film that “disappointed” Roger Ebert
As much as filmmakers disparage and dismiss critics, there is no denying that a small handful of members of the dreaded profession have, in fact, helped change cinema. Roger Ebert is perhaps the most beloved and prominent example. Starting in the 1960s, he made a name for himself by writing approachable, entertaining, and, above all, insightful reviews, helping steer his readership toward undiscovered gems and up-and-coming filmmakers.
No director benefited more from Ebert’s work than Martin Scorsese, whose career started at about the same time as the critic’s. Scorsese was part of a cohort of young directors who were taking cinema in a new direction, deepening and complicating protagonists and bringing a host of new stylistic approaches to the medium. For film critics who had been on the beat for decades, this shift was met with scepticism and confusion, but Ebert recognised Scorsese’s talent from the beginning.
“Roger was the very first person, very early on in my life as a filmmaker, to call attention to my work,” the director said in 2022, calling the critic “a man who really made a difference in the history of our art form.” Ebert reviewed Scorsese’s debut feature, 1967’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door and gave it three-and-a-half out of four stars. “I have no reservations in describing it as a great moment in American movies,” he wrote in his review, demonstrating the kind of prescience that few other critics could claim.
Throughout the rest of his life, Ebert continued to champion Scorsese, showering him with four-star reviews almost at every turn. So it was more than a little surprising when he slapped one with a scant two-and-a-half stars. Judging by his review, Ebert himself was the person who was the most taken aback by it.
Upon the release of 1986’s The Color of Money, he wrote, “If this movie had been directed by someone else, I might have thought differently about it because I might not have expected so much. But The Color of Money is directed by Martin Scorsese, the most exciting American director now working, and it is not an exciting film.”
A follow-up to the 1961 movie The Hustler, The Color of Money revolves around pool player “Fast” Eddie Felson (Paul Newman reprising his role) and his relationship with an up-and-comer played by Tom Cruise. As Ebert explained, he didn’t necessarily hate the movie on its own terms. He just felt betrayed as a Scorsese fan that the director should make something so uninspired and derivative.
He described the whole thing as “a disappointment” and said that it flew in the face of everything he thought Scorsese stood for. “I believe he has the stubborn soul of an artist, and cannot put his heart where his heart will not go,” Ebert wrote, “And his heart, I believe, inclines toward creating new and completely personal stories about characters who have come to life in his imagination – not in finishing someone else’s story, begun 25 years ago.”
This was an interesting perspective, and one that would prove incorrect. Although Scorsese hasn’t made any more sequels, he tends to base his films on books, adapting other people’s stories into his own. He clearly has found a way to do this on his own terms, but perhaps it took the failures of The Color of Money to learn how.
The film received tepid reviews, and even though it was nominated for four Oscars, it’s telling that ‘Best Director’ was not one of them.
