The Gambler<\/em> is part of the Criterion Channel\u2019s new program of gambling movies<\/a> (it\u2019s also streaming on Amazon Prime<\/a>), alongside such all-timers as Bob le flambeur, The Hustler, House of Games<\/em>, and California Split<\/em> \u2013 which came out in 1974, the same year as The Gambler<\/em>\u2019s release. And of the 18 films included, those two seem to best understand the psychology of the compulsive gambler, and within that, his inherent nihilism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Axel is already \u201cdown\u201d when we meet him \u2013 indeed, one of the film\u2019s best qualities is the sense that we\u2019re joining this story already in progress, so it immediately immerses us in this world, and expects us, to some extent, to figure things out on our own. He has, according to Hips, \u201cthe worst luck I seen in 15 years,\u201d and he\u2019s currently down $44,000. Does this give him pause? Prompt him to reflect on his life and the choices he\u2019s making? No. On his way home from a gambling den, he stops and tries to hustle up $20 on a street basketball bet. (Unsurprisingly, he loses.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n But that\u2019s how addicted he is to the dopamine hit of winning \u2013 or losing. This is not a guy who needs to hustle for bread; he comes from a well-to-do Upper West Side family, and has a solid gig as an English professor at City College. (When Rupert Wyatt remade the movie in 2014 with Mark Wahlberg in the lead, some chortled that he wasn\u2019t credible as a professor, but to be fair, Caan isn\u2019t exactly the academic type either.) But that job, like his familial relationships and his romance with shiksa knockout Billie (Lauren Hutton), is secondary. His only real interest is gambling, and his only other activity, as he tells her, is \u201cgoing hunting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHunting what?\u201d she asks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCash,\u201d he replies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That hunt takes him to his mother (Jacqueline Brookes), and they play out a script they\u2019ve presumably gone through more than once; \u201cI probably won\u2019t even need it,\u201d <\/a>he lies to her, and one thing The Gambler <\/em>knows, and knows well, is the language of liars. It also knows the language of addiction, the single-mindedness that becomes so prevalent in a person, you can see it in their eyes, darting away to think about a fix, even in the middle of conversations that will enable that very activity. It\u2019s not surprising to learn that Caan was himself in the thrall of a cocaine addiction while crafting this, one of his finest performances; he\u2019s more exciting in The Godfather<\/em>, perhaps, or more melancholy in Thief<\/em>, but I\u2019m not sure he\u2019s ever been more present<\/em> in a movie, more urgently thinking and plotting and alive onscreen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reisz, a Czech-born filmmaker who burst out of the British kitchen sink movement (his debut film was Saturday Night and Sunday Morning<\/em>), was making his American debut, and his sense of time and place \u2013 New York in the mid-\u201870s \u2013 has a similar, razor-sharp attentiveness to detail to other \u201ctourist\u201d portraits of the city, like Schlesinger\u2019s Midnight Cowboy<\/em> and Passer\u2019s Born to Win<\/em>. And he fills out his scenes with a steady stream of ace character actors, including not only the terrific Sorvino but Burt Young and Vic Tayback (both far scarier than their later, teddy bear images might lead you to believe) and very early appearances by James Woods and M. Emmet Walsh (with dark, but still thinning, hair).<\/p>\n\n\n\n But this is ultimately a character study, and an uncommonly intimate one. The script is by notorious scumbag James Toback (and as with most of his work, its issues with gender and race are a lot<\/em> to unpack) \u2013 like Axel, a well-off Jewish kid with a teaching gig and a gambling addiction. That kind of inside perspective can\u2019t be faked, any more than it can be explained; when his mother hears the amount he owes and asks, not unreasonably, \u201cHow is that possible,\u201d he answers accurately and simply: \u201cWell, I gambled and I lost.\u201d It\u2019s not a choice he makes. It\u2019s a fact of his life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that\u2019s the harrowing thing about the great gambling movies, about this and California Split<\/em> and Owning Mahowney <\/em>and Mississippi Grind<\/em>: you know, with absolute certainty, that their protagonists are going to keep risking it, in spite of everything they\u2019ve been through, in spite of their proximity to injury or even death, in spite of how easy it would be for any of the rest of us to just pay off the debt and walk away. And they\u2019re going to keep risking it because when that risk pays off, yes, it is thrilling. You get it. You get how and why they chase that high.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow do you feel?\u201d Hips asks near the film\u2019s conclusion, when things have finally evened up for Axel. And in response, he\u2019s stone-faced. He doesn\u2019t feel much of anything. It\u2019s The Gambler\u2019<\/em>s variation on the ending of California Split<\/em> \u2013 it\u2019s not the winning that makes him feel alive. It\u2019s the losing, and in that, the danger, the desperate scrounge trying to scrape things together. He escapes death at that moment, and so, he goes looking for it somewhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The picture\u2019s producers, Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, would find their own jackpot two years later with Rocky<\/em> \u2013 another kind of \u201870s character drama, and one that would prove instructive in the kind of movies that were going to make money from here on out. The two films\u2019 endings couldn\u2019t be more divergent; for that matter, neither could this one and the aforementioned 2014 remake. By that time, the kind of bummer conclusion the original Gambler<\/em> was willing to subject an audience to was not only implausible, but impossible. The remake imports the end of Rounders<\/em>, rather than grapple with what Toback and Reisz and Caan wanted to leave us with: a closing image of casual danger and, in that, chilling depravity. \u201cThe Gambler\u201d is streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/a> and Amazon Prime<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/gambler2-1024x576.jpg\")
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