Atlantic City

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Europeans have always delighted in introducing America to itself. (I am thinking of de Tocqueville and Nabokov.) There is something very valuable about seeing ourselves through the eyes of others. In Atlantic City, assumptions about the American way of life, the American dream and the America reality, circa 1978, are examined through the artistry of master French film director, Louis Malle (Murmur of the Heart (1971), Pretty Baby (1978), Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987), etc.)

The film begins with a shot of Sallie Matthews (Susan Sarandon at 34) at the kitchen sink of her apartment squeezing lemons and rubbing them on her arms, her neck, her face as Lou Pasco (Burt Lancaster at 68) watches unbeknownst to her from across the way, the window of his apartment looking into hers. She works at a clam bar in a casino on the boardwalk, which is why she smells like fish, which is why she is squeezing lemon on herself to get rid of the smell. She is taking classes to be a blackjack dealer. Her dream is to go to Monaco and deal blackjack in one of resort casinos and perhaps catch a glimpse of Princess Grace. She listens to French tapes and achieves...an amusing accent. He is a has-been who never was, a pathetic old numbers runner well past any dream of his prime, pretending to be a "fancy man" as he picks up a few extra bucks waiting on an invalid woman.

Enter a hippy couple with all their belongings on their backs. It turns out that he is Sallie's estranged husband, a deceitful little guy who has found a bag of cocaine that he intends to cut and sell; and she is Sallie's not too bright sister, very pregnant. They need a place to stay and have the gall to impose on her.

Both Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon were nominated for Academy Awards for their performances, as was director Louis Malle and writer John Guare for his script. But none of them won. This was the year of On Golden Pond with Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn taking the Oscars while Warren Beatty won Best Director for Reds. (Best film was Chariots of Fire with Colin Welland winning the Oscar for his original screenplay.) Nonetheless, Lancaster and Sarandon are outstanding, and they are both beautifully directed by Malle. Lancaster in particular demonstrated that at age 68 he could still fill up the screen with his sometimes larger than life presence. The familiar flamboyance and sheer physical energy that he displayed in so many films, e.g., Come Back, Little Sheba (1952), From Here to Eternity (1953), The Rose Tattoo (1955), Elmer Gantry (1960), to name four of my favorites, are here properly subdued. He moves slowly and is easily winded. He is a sad, cowardly old man whom Malle, to our delight, will miraculously transform.

Sarandon's performance is also one of her best, on a par with, or even better than her work in Thelma and Louise (1991) for which she was also nominated for Best Actress and also did not win. She is an actress with "legs" (this is a pun and an allusion to an inside joke about her famous other attributes–nicely displayed in Pretty Baby--over which perhaps too much fuss has already been made!)--an actress with "legs," as in a fine wine that will only get better with age. She, like Goldie Hawn, Catherine Deneuve and a few others, have the gift of looking as good (or better) at fifty as they did at thirty.

Louis Malle films are characterized by a tolerance of human differences, a deep psychological understanding, a gentle touch and an overriding sense of humanity. Atlantic City is no exception. What Malle is aiming at here is redemption. He wants to show how this pathetic old man finds self-respect (in an ironic way) and how the clam bar waitress might be liberated. But he also wants to say something about America, and he uses Atlantic City, New Jersey--the "lungs of Philadelphia," the mafia's playground, the New Yorker's escape, a slum by the sea "saved" (actually further exploited) by the influx of legalized gambling in the seventies--as his symbol. He begins with decadence and ends with renewal and triumph, and as usual, somewhere along the way, achieves something akin to the quality of myth. Even though he emphasizes the tawdry and the commonplace: the untalented trio singing off key, the slums semi-circling the casinos where Lou sells numbers, the boarded-up buildings, the sad, tiny apartments about to be torn down, Robert Goulet as a cheap Vegas-style lounge act, etc., in the end we feel that it's not so bad after all.

I should also mention Kate Reid who played Grace, the invalid, ex-beauty queen widow of a mobster, who orders Lou about. She does a great job. Her character too will be transformed.

If the late, great Louis Malle was running the world the gross transgressors would surely get theirs and the rest of us would find forgiveness for our sins, and renewal.

Louis Malle, his cast, and his location really put this one over. It's well above the routine. Malle knows how to tell a story conventionally, without screaming shock effects or outsize explosions or in-your-face directorial banner headlines. When a pistol is fired, it doesn't boom like dirty Harry's. It simply pops unobtrusively. It all flows along smoothly. And it's aptly titled. The story is as much about Atlantic City as it is about the residents and visitors we meet. It's like a Robert Altman movie except that it has a fascinating narrative that draws us in.

We see the city first. A decrepit faux urban setting whose good days are long in the past. (Woodrow Wilson used to summer nearby.) It was called "the lungs of Philadelphia." It boomed as a summer resort before commercial airlines vulgarized travel and brought Miami and Bermuda within easy temporal reach of the Northeast corridor. The older apartment buildings, the ones with Queen Anne towers, are being demolished, to be replaced by the casinos that everyone assumes will bring prosperity back. (They never did. The money stayed in the casinos or went out of state.) But those sturdy old brick palaces were built to last and the apartments we see are shabby but cozy too. People have made nests in them over the years. The residents have accomodated their existences to the frames of the places they live in. People work in oyster bars, or run numbers in the falling-apart rubbish-strewn black neighborhoods. They can, if they have the money to do so, dine in reasonably good restaurants or stroll on the boardwalks, and we can almost hear the hoofbeats of yesteryear.

What modern Atlantic City is to its brassy past, Burt Lancaster is to his own history. He stalks the streets in his overcoat, wearing the only tie he owns, mutters things about how important he used to be, once having shared a cell with Bugsy Siegal. He used to have to kill people once in a while, he tells a young man confidentially. He always felt bad about it afterward and used to take a long swim in the ocean to feel clean again. "I never saw the Atlantic Ocean until today," says the kid. Lancaster turns around and looks out to sea and waves expansively. "You should of seen the ocean then," he says. "The Atlantic Ocean was really somethin' in them days." His glorious career, it turns out, has about the same epistemological status as that of the city he hasn't been outside of for the past twenty years. The Atlantic Ocean was really somethin' in them days. What a line! And Lancaster handles it well too. He's no Crimson Pirate here, just a quiet older guy with curly white hair trying to make a buck by running errands for small-time hoods, and trying to sell a silver cigarette case, a memento of his past, for "a double sawbuck." He looks exactly right too. Not "old," exactly, but well aged, like a mature burgundy. His generously featured face hasn't drooped with the passage of the years. His eyebrows are dark and set off his surprisingly gentle eyes. He doesn't clip off the terminal contours of his sentences, as he did before. It's a splendid performance.

His performance is matched by that of the other principle actors. There are some quietly amusing episodes between him and the woman he takes care of. (There is also a pretty gruesome lethal stabbing, although without blood.) Only the villains are one-dimensional villains. Susan Sarandon is marvelous as the young oyster-bar employee who wants to become a casino dealer, even if it means putting up with hits from the oily French guy who teaches the fine art of dealing in a school run by the casinos. He smokes with a cigarette holder and sounds like Charles Boyer, the swine. What a fine actress she is. Even here, dressed in threadbare clothes, her skirts around her ankles, wearing clumsy boots, her hair a mop of Scottish red, she fixes a viewer's interest when she's on the screen. She's as vulnerable under those oyster shells as Lancaster is when he discovers he can't protect her from the villains. And the two of them have a tender love scene together, and later a more raucous good time. In the end they go their separate ways -- Lancaster back to his destiny, and Sarandon in search of hers.

The characters in the film bounce around at first, at odds with one another, or simply unaware of the others' presence, but Malle draws them together into a community whose welfare we finally come to care about. It's a fine movie.

This film has a great script (John Guare), brilliant direction (Louis Malle), and two stars (Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon) at the top of their form. The dialogue is witty in the old Hollywood style, and delivered by the entire cast, particularly Lancaster, with singular panache. A classic. Surely there will be a DVD.

The setting and the characters are just right for each other. Atlantic City is undergoing a transformation, with new casinos and hotels dotting its shoreline while a few blocks in, out of the tourists sight, the full time residents live in what's left over from the past. Louis Malle captures it all with this story about a retired small time member of the local organized crime syndicate (Burt Lancaster) who comes into a small fortune worth of stolen cocaine when the guy that stole it (Robert Joy) is killed by the dealers who meant to buy it in the first place down in Philadelphia, and are now hot on his heels as well. Back in the life, though unwittingly, he sells the coke to an ongoing poker game in one of the suites in a new hotel, bit by bit, and falls into the romance of his dreams with young Susan Sarandon, whom he watched every night from his hotel room as she bathed her breasts with lemon juice in her room across the way. Like the refurbishing city its set in, he feels rejuvenated and in one instance even fearless in the face of the ruthless Philly dealers. The film put Lancaster back in the limelight for a while, and refreshingly so. Its gritty realism and characters, especially Joy, who makes an excellent hippie con-man, marked the end of an era of that realistic 70's urban crime drama genre that deftly mixed romance with drugs and violence, and portrayed the underworld, mostly minus the cops, so well.

Set in 1970s Atlantic City in the early days of legalized gambling, we find a young woman (Susan Sarandon) working in the fish section of a casino restaurant while learning to be a card dealer. At the same time, an elderly, small-time hood (Burt Lancaster) is stuck taking care of a gangster's widow (Kate Reid). Sarandon's husband and her younger sister ran off together and unexpectedly reappear looking for a place to stay. Her sister is now pregnant and her low-life husband is trying to sell drugs stolen from a big-time dealer in Philadelphia. Sarandon's husband meets Lancaster in a bar while trying to set up a deal to sell the drugs, and he convinces Lancaster to be his "mule." Lancaster and Sarandon being neighbors -- with her brother in law as the mutual acquaintance -- are brought together and become involved in more trouble than they ever thought imaginable.

The refreshing aspect of this motion picture is that it avoids the typical Hollywood pitfall where character development and dialogue play second fiddle to car chases and stunt scenes. In Atlantic City the odious characters and sticky situations are secondary to the development/relationships of the lead characters. This is the first excellent performance on film of a young Sarandon, and one of the finest performances of Lancaster's distinguished career.

This film has been butchered on cable, VHS, and laserdisc. Please let's have a quality remaster on DVD in widescreen format.