**½/**** Image A- Sound B+
starring James Caan, Paul Sorvino, Lauren Hutton
screenplay by James Toback
directed by Karel Reisz
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Somewhere near the beginning of The Gambler, we see Axel Freed (James Caan) teaching a college course in literature. Taking his cues from Dostoevsky, he announces that any idiot can say that two plus two equals four, but the man who says that they equal five is riding on sheer will. Whether he knows that the declaration is false or not is irrelevant–he is transcending truth to make his own rules. This deliciously summarizes not only The Gambler itself, but also the whole shaky decade of art-pop that was the Seventies. This was the era in which cartoon heroes jousted improbably with literature and politics and when a torrent of homages created whole films piece by appropriated piece. The Gambler‘s Freed is all too typical of the type, with its literary pretensions mixed in with a helping of macho declarations that could only come from a lifetime of hero-worship at the movies.
Our dear Mr. Freed is at the centre of this narrative, and not for academic reasons: Who would see a movie called “The Professor”? No, the defining trait of our hero’s psychological makeup is a compulsive need to gamble. At the beginning of the film, we watch in horror as he racks up a $44,000 debt in one night at a mob casino; even his friends within the establishment are afraid for his life, knowing full well that he doesn’t have that kind of money. So ruinous is his debt that he is picked up by a collector just to show him what he’s in for, and after he watches him beat a debtor and trash his apartment, Axel gets the point. But the question remains: how will he come up with the cash?
At first, it comes from the unlikely source of his mother. Hoping that it will end her son’s losing streak by guilting him into kicking his gambling habit, she gives him her savings. But since that would effectively end The Gambler, he has to lose it again; taking his shiksa-goddess girlfriend (Lauren Hutton) on a trip to Las Vegas, he blows it on some bad sporting bets. In order to compensate, he lays yet another wager on a football game, which he loses by a tragically narrow margin. With few friends left to call on–his mother has nothing left to lend, and his girlfriend, tired of the midnight visits by bookmakers and debt collectors, has excommunicated him from her apartment–a completely desperate Axel puts his life in the hands of one of his students, who may not be able to deliver in any case.
Now, on paper, this seems like pretty thin stuff: a repetition of gambling scenes that get the incredibly dense protagonist into progressively hotter water. But in the ’70s scheme of things, our hero is not merely a gambler, but The Gambler, a Dostoevskyan gambling machine that tests its manly mettle in the streets and the casinos where he was born to lose. His refusal to quit is translated into a masculine ability to withstand punishment, and as he bets everything he has he gains a sort of indulgence from the filmmakers and the audience as his trials grow ever larger. His ability to suffer at his own hands makes him a martyr, and we envy his plight as he becomes a glorious sacrifice to the god of his own poor judgement.
But this, of course, is inadequate by itself to make a true Seventies picture. No, he must also be either an actual intellectual or found within the scheme of an intellectual construct. If Coppola had Heart of Darkness and Schrader had John Calvin, then Karel Reisz and James Toback–especially Toback–have both the life of Dostoevsky and the teaching of his works with which to score. While one could argue that this might detract from the relentlessly macho pattern of his self-flagellant behaviour, it actually only twists this: his smarty-pantsing activities give that slight hint of feminine sensitivity that he would otherwise lack, making him even more sexually potent than before.
And sexually potent he must be, if only to satisfy requirement number three of the Seventies’ playbook: the presence of a lolling girlfriend somewhere on the fringes. The girlfriend character is crucial to ’70s cinema as both a prop to the hero and a comment on the action that he generates. Her role is strangely paradoxical in that she must make the hero look like a terror with the ladies and vocally shore up all of his less sterling qualities. This means we have blonde and pretty Lauren Hutton, who appears at least ten years younger than does Caan, providing a running commentary on his illogical tendency to gamble until he loses.
The girlfriend has a long and distinguished career in movies of the era: just as Diane Keaton skulked about the edges of The Godfather, with no real role but to be shut out by the ruling patriarch of Al Pacino, so does Hutton in The Gambler. Neither woman understands the man’s behaviour, but then, that’s their function: to make the hero seem embittered when they suddenly try to think for themselves. As Hutton eventually shuts her paramour out of her apartment, she is only completing the circle drawn by all such characters, who are nice to have around only so long as they’re not contradicting the male star.
Having armed the protagonist with some sure-fire sympathy-getters from the male audience, the film returns to the matter of will, and its importance to the hero’s psychological make-up. This is the most crucial aspect of the Seventies hero, the ability to leave his mark on a universe that doesn’t acknowledge his existence; his is a search for something permanent and coherent in the face of an absent god. In The Gambler, Axel Freed is engaged in an attempt to control his fate; his knack for losing only heightens his desire to play, because winning is a means of asserting himself in his life. The only alternative is to shrink away into anonymity.
As with the killers in Badlands, the psychotic cabbie in Taxi Driver, and the obsessive wiretapper in The Conversation, the problem the hero faces is one of how to make himself more than a cog in the wheels of life. The killing and obsessive behaviour of these characters are all attempts to impose order on chaos, and in this sense, The Gambler becomes very poignant. As it becomes obvious that Freed is never going to give up gambling and may very well destroy himself in the future, we see the double-edged sword of the situation where one stays safe and atrophies and where one lives at a murderous cost to himself and others.
It is in this sense that The Gambler is a fascinating artifact. The film is not great enough to do battle with some of the better titles I’ve noted, but it’s pretty good at distilling the mood of a movement into one fairly potent draft. Left with pretensions that are at least as fanatical as the self-destructive behaviour of its lead, it paints a manic portrait of what it must have been like to live under the influence of great books and bad movies at the time of the Seventies gold rush, when cheap stunts rubbed shoulders with priceless moments and the worst of intentions were sent out to fight the dying of the light that we all must face.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Paramount’s vanilla DVD release of The Gambler is a pleasant surprise with respect to the transfer. Presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen (contrary to the 1.85:1 AR reported on the packaging), the image is quite smooth and vivid; source elements are spotless. Some digital video noise reduction (DVNR) seems to have toned down grain, though fine details are none too obscured by its usage. Rare for the studio, the film’s original mono soundtrack has not been remixed in 5.1, but the 2.0 audio on this disc (in English or dubbed French) is perfectly acceptable.
110 minutes; R; 1.78:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Mono), French DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Paramount
