Desperation hangs in the smoke-filled air of the Crabtree, the run-down Southern California pool hall that serves as the primary setting for director Rob Nilsson’s 1996 independent drama Chalk. The locale is dirty, dank, littered with beer bottles and empty peanut shells. Thanks to the visual style of cinematographer Mickey Freeman, the air looks and feels sickly. It is no wonder that Watson (Edwin Jones), the Crabtree proprietor and a former heroin addict, spits blood or sleeps in his clothes, or that his son Jones (Johnnie Reese) always seems to be sweating. With its dilapidated centerpiece of a pool table, the Crabtree is a place where Watson’s adopted son T.C. (Kelvin Han Yee) can rule the roost hustling pool, but otherwise is terrified to leave. Which of course is at the heart of Nilsson’s metaphor: the pool hustler lifestyle is something almost cancerous and inescapable.

As one pool hustler shares with T.C., “Pool players don’t make as much as volleyball players–even dart players. If you’re not in the top 10, forget about it.” The hustler (played by “The Road Man” Chris McDonald) goes on to lament that as a result of pool, he lost his house, his wife, everything he had.

It’s an interesting perspective. Within the canon of billiards movies, many of which belie a certain romanticism toward the pool hustler, there is none as bleak as Chalk in its outlook on billiards and as hopeless in its portrayal of the player. Characters do not flash wide smiles, or run fancy trick-shots, or talk smack in the hustler’s argot. They play impatiently, the prey desperately on high school kids, and they wait listlessly for action – for opponents who may never materialize.

The main story, which takes a while to emerge from the haze, involves Jones coercing his brother T.C. to play a high-stakes game of pool against a man named Dorian James (screenwriter Don Bajema), who is a ranked professional with some anger management issues stemming from his violent past. (James is so psychotic that one truly disturbing scene has him screaming at his girlfriend to sodomize him with his own cue stick. Arguably, this scene did little to build fans for the film among the larger billiards community. As Freddy “The Beard” Bentivegna wrote in his “Encyclopedia” of Pool Hustlers, “This is evidently how Hollywood thinks a pool hustler bonds with his cue stick before a big match. [This is a] ridiculously insulting movie.”) T.C. only accepts the $10,000 match when he learns Watson is dying and this could be a chance to prove himself to his adopted father. Only later is it revealed that Jones has convinced his father to bet his entire life savings on the game.

The actual match, which consumes the last 45 minutes of the movie, is the first to win seven games in 9-ball. A variety of different editing and filming styles are used, some clearly an homage to Martin Scorsese for The Color of Money, but none succeed in giving this endless scene much life. As the players trade games, the pool drags on. Even the near rape of T.C.’s girlfriend, and the near death of Watson, don’t puncture the droll of the match. Subbing in for Yee and Bajema respectively are real-world pool sharks Billy Aguero and Chris McDonald, but even the expert billiards playing cannot pump energy into the final third of the film, which deliberately moves at an unnecessarily slow pace.

Though the movie has trouble breathing beneath the weight of the Hollywood conventions it tries to avoid, it is refreshing to know its origin. In 1992, Nilsson, who had gained acclaim for his 1979 award-winning film Northern Lights, moved into a transient hotel San Francisco, motivated by a search for his missing brother. There he helped found the Tenderloin Action Group, a free acting workshop for homeless and inner city residents. Within the group, Nilsson discovered a number of promising performers and wrote Chalk with the help of Bajema, his longtime collaborator, around the talents of many of these nonprofessional actors.   In fact, aside from Bajema and Edwin Jones (who plays Watson), the rest of the cast are nonprofessionals.

Chalk is available to buy on DVD from Rob Nilsson’s website Citizen Cinema.

Viewing Enrico Coletti’s 1997 Italian crime drama Il tocco – la sfida (also known as Rack Up or The Cuemaster) is akin to watching a billiards movie mashup, blending recognizable tropes and characters from other billiards movies into a film that, while hardly original, remains nonetheless entertaining, especially given its star, Franco Nero, and its emphasis on 5-pins, a popular form of carom billiards in Italy.

The movie begins with the rules of 5-pins shown on the screen, while a cue stick is assembled and the table is set up, including the standing of the pins. (Ten years later, the Mexican billiards movie Carambola used a similar opening technique to explain the game of three-cushion billiards.)

For those unfamiliar with 5-pins, the game is played with 3 balls and 5 pins. One’s cue ball must hit the opponent’s cue ball and the red object ball to knock over one-inch pins to score points, with white pins worth 2 points each and the red center pin worth 4 points, unless falling on its own, in which case it’s worth 10 points. (Five-pin billiards is closely related to goriziana, or nine-pin billiards, which was the focus of the 1983 Italian movie The Pool Hustlers.)

Franco Nero, the Golden Globe nominated actor (for Camelot), who has since become well-known for his marriage to actress Vanessa Redgrave and his portrayal of the evil general in Die Hard 2, stars as Jesus Barro, an immensely talented 5-pins player, who makes the decision to play in a high profile tournament in order to win enough money to rescue his friend Paco from debt and save Paco’s pool hall from the extortionary grip of local mobster Scalesi (the rather unconvincing Imanol Arias).

However, when Barro is asked to throw the game, pride interferes, and he beats the gangster’s stooge, Wan Yo aka “The Monk.” That foolish decision ultimately results in Paco dead and Barro with a broken hand, ruining his billiards career. (Hark the throwback to the thugs that broke “Fast” Eddie Felson’s thumbs in the 1961 billiards classic The Hustler. Of course, the scene was also recycled 6 years after Il tocco – la sfida in Poolhall Junkies.)

Unable to hold a cue stick, Barro hits the bottle until he observes the waitress from Paco’s pool hall, Andrea Sanchez (Ruth Gabriel, winner of the 1994 Goya Award, the main film award for Spain), make some difficult shots. Realizing she is a prodigy, Barro begins to tutor her in the art of both billiards and hustling, hoping she can win back the bar and revenge his reputation. The set-up is a pretty clear rip-off of Fast Eddie “mentoring” Vince in The Color of Money.

As Barro explains to Sanchez, there is “your classic sucker: he’s got money and wants everyone to know it. Usually loses a lot but pretends not to care. Self-restraint is their priority. They are the easiest to beat… [Pointing at a slovenly player] Never trust appearances. He look like a bum, but underestimate him and he will win your money, even your underwear… [Pointing at a menacing player] Now sharks never look you straight in the eye. They love money, not the game itself. They are bad losers and will probably start a fight. Avoid them.”

But, Barro is also aware that “nobody will bet on a woman,” so he convinces Sanchez to pull a Tootsie, cutting her hair (to look eerily like Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid) and changing her clothes to become a man, since “we are living in a male chauvinistic world of assholes.” Oddly, Sanchez’s voice doesn’t change, though no one seems to notice.

The charade is sufficient to get Sanchez entered into the 32-person Cuemaster (5-Pins) World Championship, in which the winner’s pot is 32 million pesetas (approximately $270,000 in 1997), though the real money is made on side bets (cf. The Color of Money).

Sanchez, who only started playing months ago, is there to compete against real-world 5-pins legends, such as Gustavo Enrique Torregiani, the Argentinian three-time world champion of Italian 5-pins; Vitale “The Terminator” Nocerino, the runner-up to the 1997 World Cup; the “Blue Streak” Giorgio Colombo; and Salvatore Mannone, the 1993 World Cup winner.

Credibility wanes significantly when Sanchez starts beating these champions, moving ever closer to the winner’s circle. The montage of incredible 5-pins shots, including a spectacular eight rail four-pointer, interwoven into the scene more than compensates until the quarterfinals when Barro advises Sanchez to throw the game. With her unconvincing and unimaginative miss, the movie hits its nadir, and has a hard time recovering, even when Barro’s rationale for having Sanchez exit (the little-known “Paragraph 32 of the championship rules”) is revealed, excusing “The Monk” from playing and enabling Sanchez instead to compete in the anticlimactic finals.

More interesting is the film’s ending – an overt reference to The Color of Money (or maybe Rocky III) in which Barro and “The Monk,” both now with clean consciences, can compete one more time to see who is the real best 5-pins player.

Since Il tocco – la sfida is not available to buy or stream, I am extremely grateful to Mr. Coletti for directly sending me a copy of the movie (in English, too!).

For most billiards players, the greatest health concerns stemming from the game are Repetitive Motion Injuries (RMI) in the hand and wrist area, which are caused by the sudden and repetitious application of force (using the cue stick) on the forearms, wrists and hand areas. But, for the players who haunt the post-apocalyptic outback of Hard Knuckle, a 1987 made-for-television Australian movie, the far greater concern is the “Knuckle Table,” on which a botched shot means the severing of the top third of one’s finger.

Within this cinematic dystopia, Lex Marinos directs Steve Bisley (mildly memorable for appearing as Jim Goose in Mad Max) as Harry, a nomad garbed in sand-beaten clothes, with silly pool ball earrings and a pet Chihuahua. Finally sober, he has returned to an unnamed town to reclaim his old motorbike and sidecar from Top Dog, the local pool champion who is oddly unintimidating given his stature and reputation in the watering hole where he resides.

Harry learns quickly that he can no longer simply challenge Top Dog to a billiards match. Rather, he has two options. His first option is find an agent, who will put up the minimum $2000 in stake-horse money only then to take 80% of the winnings. His second option is to challenge his opponent to a game on the Knuckle Table, which has a nondescript black domino perched atop it. Players must pocket their balls (all 17, marked with a mix of letters, symbols and numbers) without toppling the domino. If the domino falls, then the player must forfeit the top-third of his finger to a blood-crusted set of pincers, hinged to one end of the table. (This is why friends often ask one another, “Show me your hands!”) Fortunately, a player can resume playing, albeit with a distinctively smaller digit.

Opting to avoid the Knuckle Table, Harry recruits Eddie, a 13-year-old urchin, who may in fact be kin, to be his agent, but is still unable to play Top Dog until he works his way to the top. Though Harry beats his immediate opponent, Pedals, an acquaintance from better days, he is subsequently mugged, and his penury forces him to take his billiards-playing on the road to earn some money through hustling.

In one of the few enjoyable scenes, but one that is also a blatant rip-off from The Hustler, Harry pulls into some urban shanty, where he pretends to be hammered and make an “impossible” shot, thereby duping the regulars to bet their savings if he can repeat it, which, of course, he does.

But, Harry’s next attempt to hustle falls short when he pulls into a more upscale bar with near-topless go-go dancers and a white pool table bordered by glow lights. There, an opportunity to play is thwarted by the arrival of Top Dog, who has been shadowing Harry ever since his exodus from the pool hall. Top Dog, however, had also unwittingly insulted the bar proprietor, and for a brief moment, the only satisfactory resolution appears to be a de-fingering on the Knuckle Table.

Financial problems notwithstanding, Harry helps rescue Top Dog, an act of kindness which benefits him later in the movie when the two nemeses finally do have their billiards match, ironically on the Knuckle Table. That game, unfortunately, like so many other parts of this inane film, makes little actual sense, as Harry willingly sacrifices a digit to remove the domino from the table, and then purposefully scratches at the end, ceding the game to Top Dog.

Hard Knuckle seems to be aiming for a Mad Max meets The Hustler vibe. Instead, the post-apocalyptic setting never feels very uninviting or threatening. (Hell, Top Dog is heckled by a kid with a pea-shooter.) And, the billiards lack cinematic quality, suspense or realism. As one blogger noted, even the Knuckle Table, so prominently featured on the movie’s artwork, is only used twice in the film, and both times, the losing player seems to resume the game unaffected. Toward the end of the movie, Harry says, “Are we going to play pool or are we going to piss around?” Yeah, Hard Knuckle provides an answer…and it’s not about playing pool.

Hard Knuckle is only available to watch on VHS.

What is it about a pool hall that seems to instigate unbridled paroxysms of rage, extended periods of bedlam, and brutal bouts of barbarity, at least in the imaginations of filmmakers, screenwriters and producers?

Scene from Gangster High (2006)

In their defense, the linkage is not totally unfounded. In a five-year study done by the Research Institute on Addictions at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the researchers found that “bar characteristics that are related to the occurrence of violence included: smokiness, noise, temperature, dirt, darkness, crowding, poor ventilation, the presence of competitive games (e.g., darts, pool), bouncers, and more male than female employees.”[1] On the other hand, a more recent study from 2012 revealed that among the “hot spots” for barroom aggression, the pool-playing area accounted for just 4% of the incidents of violence, as opposed to on or near the dance floor (31%), at the bar (16%), or at tables (13%).[2]

Yes, there’s a scintilla of veracity underlying the pool hall free-for-all, but it’s hardly significant enough to warrant all the attention it generates on the silver screen. Nonetheless, movies abound with pool hall pandemonium. Perhaps, it’s the butcherly utility embodied in a cue stick, 59 inches of tapered wood, that can be used to whack, jab, puncture, impale, skewer, bonk or bludgeon. Or, maybe it’s the spherical perfection of a billiards ball, hardened with a phenolic resin, that invite the amateur pugilist to wield it for all sorts of sanguinary purposes.

In any event, if there’s a pool table in a movie (especially one that is otherwise not about billiards), it’s likely going to be ground zero for some kind of mayhem and melee. Thus, I present the TOP 10 BILLIARDS BRAWLS of all time. Let the countdown begin:

10. Out for Justice.   In this 1991 thriller, Steven Seagal plays a Brooklyn cop hell-bent on revenge after his best friend is murdered. Part of tracking down the killer involves frequenting a pool hall where the local patrons are not forthcoming with essential information.   This prompts Seagal to unleash the whup-ass, starting with a towel-wrapped cue ball, followed by some (cue) stick fighting and a pool table judo takedown.

9. Velvet Smooth. The blaxploitation era of the 1970s produced many landmark films and iconic characters, including Superfly, Coffy, and Shaft. But, Velvet Smooth (played by Johnnie Hill) would not even crack the top 100. This 1976 low-budget dud has some of the worst choreographed fighting to appear in Technicolor. And while the billiards scene is so (unintentionally) bad, it earns a place on my list as one of the few movies to feature a woman meting out a cue stick drubbing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiADJJKG3zY

8. Ninja Holocaust. This little-known, questionably-named, 1985 Hong Kong martial arts spectacle is likely light on plot, dialogue and other film-making indispensables. Still, the brawl that occurs around a snooker table is notable not only for the rapid-fire dispensing of the combatants, but also for the innovative use of a snooker ball as a temporary gag that is ultimately swallowed (?!) right before the ingestor is impaled on the taxidermied horns of some unfortunate ungulate.

7. Dead Presidents. The Hughes Brothers’ 1995 follow-up to their inaugural landmark film Menace II Society didn’t win favor with critics, but the pool hall scene, backed by James Brown’s “The Payback,” has all the visceral wallop of its predecessor. Anthony (Larenz Tate) and Cowboy (Terrence Howard) play a disquieting game of 8-ball that ends with Anthony becomes uncorked and beats Cowboy bloody with a cue stick all over the floor.

6. Force: Five. This 1981 action flick stars Chuck Norris BFF Richard Norton as a martial artist leading a team of martial artists on a rescue mission to save a senator’s daughter. After defeating an opponent in 8-ball, Norton quickly goes Australian-nutso when it appears his opponent will welch on a bet. Like Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, Norton uses the pool table as his playground for round kicking opponents and even makes smart use of a billiards rack to disarm an attacking cue-sticker. How Norton could shoot stick with that throwing star dangling from his neck I’ll never know.

5. The Krays. In the 1960s, Ronald and Reggie Kray were twin crime lords of London. The story of these underworld kingpins was brought to life in this 1990 biopic, starring real-life twins Gary and Martin Kemp. Known for ruthless acts of violence and intimidation, the Krays turned a snooker hall blood-red with their cutlasses in the graphically memorable “Say Thank You” scene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbhHWIiSOds

4. Mean Streets.   Martin Scorsese’s iconic 1973 masterpiece about the daily violence of living on the streets of Little Italy should be mandatory viewing, ‘nuff said. That said, the ruckus that ensues when Johnny Boy (Robert DeNiro) insults the pool hall proprietor is cinematic, hand-held, perfection, with a single camera darting among the pool tables as they become props in a feral, claustrophobic fight sequence that includes Johnny Boy hopping mad onto a table, waving off his attackers with kicks and cue stick. The full scene, choreographed over the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman,” is available to watch below.

3. Rush Hour. In 1998, Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan starred as a pair of ill-matched cops, and in the process, launched a film series that collectively grossed about $850 million. In the original installment, Jackie Chan, a stranger to American culture and argot, begins a pool hall conversation with four poorly-chosen words, “What’s up, my nigga?,” thereby igniting a billiards ruction, complete with all the signature Jackie Chan acrobatics audiences love. Hopping over and under tables, parrying with cue sticks, clubbing with cue balls, this scene has it all.

2. Gangster High (original title: Pongryeok-sseokeul). Clocking in at more than seven minutes, the pool hall massacre in this 2006 South Korean film pivots from the hyperkinetic, with cue sticks clashing and feet flying, to the near balletic, with one man avenging his fallen comrade through a gruesome series of pool stick maneuvers. Heightening both the beauty and the tension is the switch to black-and-white, while Mahalia Jackson’s gospel spiritual, “Trouble of the World,” plays over the scene.

1. Carlito’s Way. “It’s magic time. After you see this shot, you’re going to give up your religious beliefs,” says Carlito (Al Pacino) in Brian De Palma’s award-winning 1993 crime drama. Pretending to set up one of his “famous trick shots,” Carlito uses the mirrored sunglasses of his opponent to see the gunman behind him, while he rockets a billiard ball, perched atop a cue chalk, into his opponent’s face. Now that’s a pool hall fight scene and getaway to remember!

So, there’s my Top 10 list of Billiards Brawls. Of course, there are a number of great pool halls skirmishes that didn’t make the list, but are nonetheless worthy of honorable mention, including Hard to Kill (1990), Boondock Saints (1999), Black Dynamite (2009), Trainspotting (1996), Code of Silence (1985), Die Bad (2000, South Korea), and Road House (1989). See a scene that should have made the cut? Let me know what movie would be on your Top 10. Otherwise, stay safe. You never know what might happen to you in a pool hall.

[1]       http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/918856-federal-study-bar-fights-tend-happen-darker-dirtier-bars-frequented-heavy

[2]       Graham K, Bernards S, Osgood DW, Wells S. ‘Hotspots’ for aggression in licensed drinking venues. Drug Alcohol Rev 2012;31:377–384