BEFORE: I wish I had more of a tie-in for this movie today, in other words, I wish I were in Atlantic City. My wife and I have been going there two or three times a year since 2014 or so. Over time I think we've been to every casino there, except the ones that had "Trump" in their names, and we've been to nearly every buffet in town - I think we're just one shy from hitting them all. Also we've been to every steakhouse we could find there, but obviously we haven't been there in over a year. Yesterday was the day that most pandemic restrictions got eased in New York State, but my wife and I have agreed that for us, the COVID-19 crisis is not officially over until we're sitting in the restaurant at the Borgata Hotel on a Monday morning, enjoying a buffet breakfast, that's one of our most regular stops in A.C. When we're enjoying a full breakfast there, with biscuits and gravy (or in my case, their delicious creamed chipped beef, I swear it's good...) then we'll truly be out of the woods.
This film was released in 1981, though, and I don't imagine that the Atlantic City we know will be depicted here, because that city's been through so much change and development since then. But we'll see...I'm at the intersection of crime and Susan Sarandon for the third day in a row, as she carries over from "Arbitrage".
THE PLOT: In a corrupt city, a small-time gangster and the estranged wife of a pot dealer find themselves thrown together in an escapade of love, money, drugs and danger.
AFTER: This film aired on TCM back in February, and I just had to record it - it's now considered a "classic" by default, directed by Louis Malle back in 1980 - meaning I jumped back 32 years from 2012's "Arbitrage" to this one (then I'm jumping ahead 15 years tomorrow, and another 15 years the next day, and by Father's Day I'll be watching something from 2018, very close to the present.). Susan Sarandon is therefore like the female Donald Sutherland, I can use her as a bridge back to the 1980's or 1970's, assuming there are still movies on her filmography that I haven't seen yet. However, this film is probably the last pre-1980 film she was in that I have any interest in watching.
The film gets a few things right about Atlantic City, from what I've seen - there's such a disparity between the world of the casinos on the Boardwalk and the rest of the city. If you go just two or three blocks further inland, the standard of living drops considerably, and you'll see small houses, some of which look very rundown. It's a bit jarring, especially since most people arriving by car have to drive through the poorer neighborhoods in order to get to the casinos, that can't be great for the city's image, can it? And are those houses populated by people who work at the casinos, or people trying to work at the casinos, or people who lost everything at the casinos, and just couldn't afford to leave town? Some people call Las Vegas "the city where you arrive by plane and leave by bus", so I wonder if Atlantic City should be called "the city where you arrive and then you can't afford to leave"?
Burt Lancaster's character, Lou Pascal, seems to be one of those people, he's been running a numbers game around Atlantic City for years, collecting 50 cents here and a buck there from regular customers who play their favorite number, and yet never seem to win the pot. I never really understand this "numbers" game, isn't it very easy for the person running the game to just pick a winning number that nobody bet on that day? It's kind of like when someone says "I'm thinking of a number", and then if you guess the correct number, they've got the opportunity to say, "Nope, that wasn't it." Right?
Lou also takes care of an elderly lady who lives downstairs and has some kind of circulation problem with her legs - or maybe she just doesn't want to get out of bed, like Charlie Bucket's grandparents. Either way, Lou walks her dog and gets her food and apparently sleeps with her on rare occasions. Hey, that sounds a bit like a marriage, why not make it official? But Lou also has his eye on the woman who lives next door, who shucks oysters at one of the casinos' raw bars, and every night squeezes some lemons on her naked body to remove the seafood smell. She says it's not weird, but him watching her do it from his darkened apartment, that is a bit weird. (This scene was probably the main reason anybody rented this videotape, back in the land of the 1980's, I wonder how many people skipped the majority of the movie and just fast-forwarded to this infamous scene? See also: "Pretty Baby", "Bull Durham", "The Hunger" and "White Palace" - Susan Sarandon probably kept Blockbuster in business for a while there.)
I don't even really have time to get into the weird geometry of that apartment building - how Sally and Lou can be next-door neighbors, yet she's got windows in her apartment facing in every direction, and his living room window is far enough away from her kitchen window so that he gets such a great view. With most apartments, you'd share a wall with your neighbor, and that's it, you wouldn't be able to have two windows between you with a direct line of sight - I'd just like to see the floor plan for the building before I believe this, that's all.
Sally's trying to transition from oyster shucker to blackjack dealer, and I feel her pain (I'm about to try to transition from movie theater usher to well, just about anything else). Her plans get thrown out the window, though, when her wayward husband, Dave Matthews (no, not THAT one...) shows up at her door with his pregnant girlfriend. There was some trouble between Sally and Dave back in Vegas that doesn't get explained, but now he's made a score, he's stolen some cocaine from a dealer's drop-point in Philly and he's going to try to sell it in Atlantic City. Sure, why not, that's a plan that couldn't possibly go wrong, now, can it? He enlists the help of Lou to cut the cocaine and fraudulently double its value, while avoiding the thugs from Philly who are looking for him. Again, sounds easy enough, what could go wrong?
You're probably guessing that things DO go wrong, but old Lou is there to pick up the pieces, keeping the money for himself while appearing to be a helpful guy, and making his move on Sally. But he can't even protect her from being beaten up by the gangsters, because nobody expects this old man to do anything of consequence - he's just a walking pile of stories from the old days, but in a nice new suit that he bought with somebody else's money. His relationship with Sally can only last as long as she doesn't figure out the truth about him, and when she does, he's back to rubbing that old lady's feet.
It seems some things are never meant to be - Lou wants to move to Florida, but Sally has her sights set on working in Monte Carlo. This is what's called an impasse, and every relationship may have one - sometimes it's only by avoiding making definite plans that a relationship can survive. But then not making plans can lead to that "I'm stuck here" feeling, and that can be deadly for the relationship, too. Let's face it, we're all doomed and destined to be alone in the end, or at least sometimes it just feels that way. That's not the feeling I usually get when I visit Atlantic City, but maybe that rang true back in 1980. We can sometimes avoid that ominous feeling of dread and doom by, say, eating at a nice casino buffet. Just saying. Now, how soon before we get buffets back?
I'm just reading now about legalized gambling in Atlantic City, I always think that it's been around much longer than it has - there were plenty of resorts in A.C. during the 1960's, but gambling wasn't legal there until 1976, and the first casino opened in 1978 - so when they released "Atlantic City", casinos had only been operating for two years - and there was basically just Resorts and Caesar's at first. They filmed parts of this movie in Resorts, a hotel/casino that my wife and I have stayed at several times - it was our go-to hotel for our first few trips, because they had a cheaper room rate if you arrived on Sunday and stayed until Tuesday morning. (Most people come for the weekend, arriving on Friday night and leaving on Sunday.). So it makes sense that Sally was trying to become a blackjack dealer, they were probably still hiring at that point, trying to staff the new casinos.
This is another one of those films on that list of "1,001 Movies to See Before You Die" - I'm up to 440 of them seen now. Not too shabby...
Also starring Burt Lancaster (last seen in "Elmer Gantry"), Kate Reid (last seen in "Equus"), Robert Joy (last seen in "Desperately Seeking Susan"), Hollis McLaren, Michel Piccoli (last seen in "Topaz"), Al Waxman (last seen in "The Hurricane"), Sean Sullivan, Angus MacInnes (last seen in "Elstree 1976"), Moses Znaimer, Wallace Shawn (last seen in "Book Club"), Harvey Atkin (last seen in "Guilty as Sin"), Norma Dell'Agnese (ditto), Louis Del Grande, Cec Linder (last seen in "Goldfinger"), Sean McCann (last seen in "Naked Lunch"), Robert Goulet (last heard in "Gay Purr-ee"), John McCurry, Eleanor Beecroft, Connie Collins.
RATING: 5 out of 10 Betty Grable look-alikes
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