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!).