Fast Eddie

Last night I watched the classic flick, ‘The Hustler’ starring Paul Newman. This 1961 melodrama about a small-time pool shark featured some high-stakes ‘stick’, a tragic love story and a lot of smoking. This movie serves as an interesting back story to Martin Scorcese’s 1986 follow-up ‘The Color of Money’ where a much older and wiser Eddie Felson mentors the young and talented nine-ball show-off, Vincent Lauria (Tom Cruise), on how to become a major league pool hustler. Though lambasted as a weak successor to ‘The Hustler’, Newman’s reprisal of the character netted him a Best Actor Oscar that year.