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ATLANTIC CITY
(1980, US, 95 min, color, aspect ratio: 16:9, sound: Mono, source: Network DVD)
Louis Malle established his reputation as one of the world’s leading directors in 12 features made over some two decades from Ascenseur pour l’échafaud and Les amants (both 1958) through to Black Moon (1975). Le feu follet (1963), Le souffle au cœur (1971) and Lacombe, Lucien (1974) are all masterpieces and for me among the best films ever made. A French director fluent in English, he made Black Moon in his second language and it was only a question of time before he went to America to try his luck there. Many a great European director comes a cropper doing this, but Malle landed on his feet and made three masterpieces on the spin (Pretty Baby [1978]), Atlantic City [1980] and My Dinner with André [1981]) before the reality check that was the failure of both Crackers (1984) and Alamo Bay (1985) which sent him back to France where he recuperated to make possibly his greatest (certainly his most personal) film, Au revoir les enfants (1987). Perhaps, the thing that made his career so enduringly successful was his determination never to make the same film twice, to always challenge something new and remain open to prevailing conditions. He initially went to America with Pretty Baby firmly in mind, Polly Platt’s evocation of Storyville, New Orleans at the turn of the century being something he absolutely wanted to do. It’s a meticulously prepared period piece that is clearly a labor of love. On finishing it however, a project he had his eyes on fell through and he didn’t have a clue what he would do next. We have Susan Sarandon (his then girlfriend) to thank for introducing him to the play-write John Guare whose script Malle took to. Guare suggested the story be located in Atlantic City, and Malle immediately rushed to make the film within the single year stipulated by his French/Canadian production companies. The process was totally different from Pretty Baby. Where the earlier film was a big Paramount production necessitating a large budget and expensive period reproduction, Atlantic City was shot on the lam almost documentary-style with a tiny crew mostly in available light and locations as they became available with the actors allowed an equally free degree of improvisation. Malle being an accomplished documentary filmmaker used to (even relishing) restricting circumstances, the end result is an unqualified success. The film won the Golden Lion at Venice (a prize shared with John Cassavetes for Gloria) and was nominated for all the big Academy Awards where it should have scooped the lot, the film surely surviving the test of time better than Chariots of Fire, On Golden Pond and Reds.
Key to the film’s total success is the tight script which has its fairly standard romantic/crime plot unravel with unusual fascination thanks to Guare/Malle’s astute paralleling of several layers of life in transition. Within the plot each character is unsettled and each finds a resolution which they deserve. Sally (Susan Sarandon) is a young waitress desperate to succeed as a casino croupier and live the high life in France. Her low-life husband Dave (Robert Joy) has run off with her sister Chrissie (Hollis McClaren) and is the baggage holding her back to her unglamorous origins in Saskatchewan, Canada. His criminal record burned her in Las Vegas and when he’s killed by gangsters looking for the cocaine he stole from them, burns her in Atlantic City, too. Lou (Burt Lancaster) is an ageing former gangster now running a petty numbers racket for himself and his woman, Grace Pinza (Kate Reid), an ageing gangster’s moll/widow who uses him as a servant. Life has grown sour for the pair, she a bed-ridden self-pitying wreck, and he a has-been (never-was?) perpetuating an inflated reputation which she reveals as bogus whenever she gets the chance. Lou is Sally’s neighbor and the heart of the film lies in the developing friendship/love affair between youth and dotage which provides both with an escape. She gets to keep the money made from the sale of the stolen cocaine hidden luckily in Lou’s apartment by her husband, while he gets to not only keep some of the proceeds, but more importantly recover his virility/vitality (his very manhood) by killing the gangsters who come looking to recoup their loss. The film finishes with Sally en-route to France and the hitherto apartment-bound Grace cashing in the last of the coke for $1,000 before the old couple dance off, their love rekindled. The baddies all die and the goodies get new lives.
The characters’ lives in transition is paralleled in real life with the transition in the lives of so many of the talents responsible for making the film. The deal with Canadian tax shelters stipulating the film be mainly shot in Canada (all the interiors are) and that Canadians be used both in front of and behind the camera, allowed the Canadian actors Kate Reid and Al Waxman (playing the humorous role of the drug buyer) to make the transition into successful careers in American film and TV. It cemented Sarandon’s stardom with an Oscar nomination as well as providing Burt Lancaster with a role of a lifetime (second for me only to his other great patrician role as the Prince in Visconti’s The Leopard [1963]), as like his character, he could finish his life with a flourish. And of course there’s the transition in Malle’s life from France to America. He married the American model Candice Bergen in 1980 quickly after this film wrapped, the wedding following the breakup with Susan Sarandon with great speed! The film was his greatest American success and his marriage led him to tying himself to his adopted country for the rest of his life.
Perfectly mirroring the transition of all the people both inside and outside the fiction is the film’s setting which creates the uniquely seedy atmosphere that compels the attention. Throughout the 70s Atlantic City was a dying place rife with all the problems of urban dereliction. From the shot of the old Traymore Hotel being demolished at the beginning (archive footage from 1971) to the final credit sequence with its radio-like soundtrack hopping from song to song every time a demolition ball crashes into a condemned building, the transition of a city from seedy run-down poverty into a bright gleaming future as legalized gambling was introduced and casinos rose from the ashes, backs the story with uncanny exactitude. The gangster plot replete with cocaine and murders echoes the city gone to seed, while the resurrection of the good characters anticipates the good times to come when the casinos came in during the 80s to completely transform the city. Much of what we see in the film no longer exists, the film fitting exactly into the changing time in which it was made.
Nowhere is this perfect fit between story and location shown better than in the character of Lou, which Lancaster to his enormous credit immediately recognized as a great part when it was offered to him. As a numbers man who used to work for ‘the dinosaurs’ (Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky and Al Capone are all named) he perfectly represents the classic past when Atlantic City was really something in the 1920s, his dignified air and fashion hinting at his past with keen nostalgia, but the seediness now evident everywhere gradually reveals he was actually a nobody, even back then in the ‘golden days.’ He brags to Dave about killing people and about his friendship with Bugsy Siegel, but it’s revealed he never shot anyone and only met Bugsy once fleetingly in a prison cell when the famous gangster was in transit to Leavenworth. Lou’s flakiness is revealed in the journey he takes through the narrative. He starts off emasculated by the old biddy in the bed who gives him small change to run his petty numbers operation. His life ordered by the servant’s bell which brings him to the apartment below to wait on his emasculator to serve meals and walk her dog, his manhood is awakened by the sight every evening through his window of Sally massaging her breasts with lemons to the beauty of Bellini’s ‘Casta Diva.’ The courtship that follows reveals the true nature of the beast. He plays the kind, charming, caring old neighbor who rescues her from the hospital where she’s just identified her husband’s corpse, notifies his folks when he sees she has no money to call Canada, arranges for the body to be sent back there replete with expensive wreath, takes her out to a fancy restaurant for lunch, all of which he pays for with money that’s more hers than his. He escorts her to her new prospective house which she’s thinking of sharing with other trainee croupiers, and then woos her to bed with his confession of watching her evening ritual. It’s all so natural, so genteel, so romantic, so redolent of a gentlemanly past – it’s exactly the class (the culture jump) Sally craves and she falls for it completely. But the delusion is all brought crashing down when he fails to protect her from the two gangsters who have just ransacked her apartment, and she realizes he’s getting his money from the sale of the very drugs her husband stole. For a while the plot turns on chasing the money, Lou seeking to take the proceeds from the drugs out of the city by bus while Sally tries to recover the funds she now claims as her own. Comedy keeps the tone light as Sally pretends to be Lou’s daughter protecting her senile dad to get him off the bus, and in the following sequence when the gangsters confront the couple and Lou shoots them both dead, he buys back her gratitude (he saves her life) and they escape the city together. It’s at this point that the old ‘class’ of the 1920s comes back and Lou lets Sally take most of the money, even giving her the car keys in order to make her first step to France. Lou’s final return to Grace and their claim of the final $1,000 signifies the revival of their relationship, anticipating the same revival in the fortunes of the city also returned to ‘grace’ once the demolition ball has finished doing its damage.
As per usual with Malle, this is a film which refuses to be pinned down into any single genre. It’s been described as ‘a love story’ and as ‘a crime film.’ True, there are elements of both, but it’s never wholly one or the other. Instead, it emerges as a film about real life, a point underlined by the perfect blend between character and setting. Atlantic City was this strange run-down mess in the 70s which had a bad reputation for the presence of vice, guns, gangsters, drugs, and the rest. The two gangsters depicted here are nasty 2-D characters we are used to from any number of films, but they feel very real. Similarly, the bizarre mixture of types residing next to each other in condemned buildings also feels absolutely right. Lou and Grace are the ‘soul’ of the city, but when the city never really had a soul to begin with, their flakiness seems perfectly judged. As does the journey taken by Sally from poverty ever-upward, but ever-restricted by a series of barriers, notably a husband she married just to escape Saskatchewan, her sister who ran off with him, and then later (in a delightfully sleazy role for Michel Piccoli speaking English with the heaviest French accent you can imagine) her casino trainer who is all intent on getting into her knickers, and when she’s fired from the program, pimping her to the nearest punter. These are all stories we have seen umpteen times in other plain genre settings, but mixed together and perfectly reflected in the seedy setting, the result is something wholly original, a film unlike any other.
An indicator of how well this film achieves reality by treating genre ingredients in a totally non-generic way can be found in a comparison with Cassavetes’ Gloria, its joint Venice Golden Lion winner. Gloria isn’t a film entirely without merit, but for me it’s an example of a director doing a genre (gangsters), but falling short because he isn’t naturally inclined to this kind of commercial film. It’s too arty to completely satisfy as a gangster piece, and it’s too commercial to satisfy as art – it’s a film which falls between two stools. Add the irritating boy central character and it’s easy to overlook Gena Rowlands’ wonderful performance. Malle’s film on the other hand evinces a wonderfully light, nuanced touch in the way he skips between genre tropes, but never losing sight of the real lives and the central theme. The one scene which does slightly fail on this count is the murder of Dave done on one of those vertical car-park machines which are all the rage here in Japan, but were then fairly new in America. The stalk and the fight to the death is standard genre stuff we’ve seen a million times before, but even here, with the unstable ever-moving setting Malle manages to capture the main theme of the film – the ever-changing transition of both characters and the city which contains them.
A final point which makes this film very special is the humor which inflects all the relationships and flows magically. Watching Zazie dans le Métro a while ago I had serious doubts about Malle’s sense of humor. My faith was restored when I saw Le souffle au cœur and to be sure there are sparks of humor in Black Moon and Lacombe, Lucien, but in Atlantic City the humor flows with a natural consistency which is entirely infectious. It’s not a comedy at all, but as in life comedy comes out of entirely natural situations. All the relationships are beautifully observed from the bickering of Lou and Grace through the foot chemistry of Chrissie and Grace, the father-son banter of Joe and Dave as they take a walk, the tiny encounter in the lavatory between Buddy and Joe as they talk over old times, the would-be romantic rapport of Joseph (Piccoli) and Sally, even the initial encounter between Dave and the nightclub owner Buddy who almost flushes a contact number down the toilet, and centrally of course the wonderful relationship between Lou and Sally which really carries the film. Part of the success comes from tight plotting, part from terrific casting (everyone, especially Lancaster and Sarandon, are just perfect for their roles), but a large part from the generosity Malle allows his actors. They are obviously improvising a lot and he just lets them go while always making sure they are caught in beautifully observed camera set-ups, usually juxtaposed with the city falling down around them. Great use is especially made of the staircase (one of many in the Malle œuvre) outside Lou and Sally’s apartments where several scenes take place, characters going up and down in each other’s estimations. Malle was known for his generosity regarding actors, but I wonder if his willingness to simply let them make their own dialogue in scenes came from the time pressure he was under. From script to completion, the film had to be done in 5 months, and maybe Malle just didn’t have time for re-takes. His experience as a class documentary filmmaker no doubt helped him out here as he went with his instincts and indeed, in interview he has described this film as ‘a documentary.’ But here we must really give more credit than usual to the actors, especially Lancaster and Sarandon who have never been better. I just love the way the film finishes with Lou as high as a kite at having killed and regained his manhood checking into a hotel saying, “A room. For me and my mother.” The look of complete surprise on Sally’s face was no acting for Sarandon really didn’t see that one coming. We see it, acknowledge it and wonder, wow, how great actors can be when allowed to simply go with it.
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