At night he looks out the window, longingly, at Susan Sarandon\u2019s Sara. She\u2019s an oyster house waitress from Saskatchewan who dreams of being a blackjack dealer in Monaco. Every evening she bathes herself with lemons to get rid of the seafood smell from work, listening to opera and blissfully oblivious to her neighbor\u2019s prying eyes. By this point in his career Malle was already an expert at managing, shall we say, questionable material<\/a>, so Lancaster\u2019s leering comes off not as lecherous but rather a sad lament for his long-lost youth and a yearning for all the promise of Sarandon\u2019s supple, fresh-faced beauty. Her wide-eyed gaze has seldom been put to such poignant use, and the film plays upon our old movie memories of Lancaster\u2019s dazzling athleticism and a virility that sometimes bordered on self-parody. Yet here he is now at age 67, putting on his most elegant robe before sneaking peeks at a young girl\u2019s tits in the window across the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scripted by playwright John Guare, Atlantic City<\/em>\u2019s delicate wisp of a story is pretext for Lou\u2019s momentary return to the big time. Sara\u2019s small-time crook of an ex-husband has just blundered into town with her pregnant sister in tow, as well as a stash of stolen heroin. Through a variety of misunderstandings, Lou comes into possession of the purloined smack and before you know it he\u2019s wearing a snazzy new white suit, fancying himself Sara\u2019s guardian, protector and possibly more. As the sign says: \u201cYou\u2019re Back On Top. Again.\u201d Of course, we\u2019ve already gathered that Lou isn\u2019t so much a has-been as a never-was \u2014 a former Mafia errand boy with delusions of grandeur. But Lancaster was never more moving onscreen than when he was lying to himself, and there are shades of his shattering performance as John Cheever\u2019s The Swimmer<\/em> in Lou\u2019s tall tales of his glory days. \u201cYou should have seen the Atlantic Ocean back then,\u201d he rhapsodizes, hilariously, as if the sea were somehow now diminished like everything else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Put together on an astoundingly short schedule, Atlantic City<\/em> was originally supposed to be an adaptation of Laird Koenig\u2019s novel The Neighbor<\/em>, until Malle read the book and didn\u2019t like it very much. The Canadian tax shelter funding scheme required that a film (any film) be shot before the end of the year, and since it was already August, Malle\u2019s girlfriend Sarandon put him in touch with her pal Guare, whose most recent Broadway play, Bosoms and Neglect,<\/em> had closed after only four performances. Malle was taken with the idea of Atlantic City as \u201cthis absurd place with nothing but buildings going up and buildings going down\u201d so Guare built that into the screenplay\u2019s central conceit. It\u2019s a city of melancholy dreamers constantly revising and reconstructing their identities, whether the small town girl from Saskatchewan who wants to deal blackjack in Monaco, or the elderly dog-walker peeping Tom who thinks he\u2019s a gangster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s a gentle, easygoing spirit to the film that I worry keeps it from being remembered as well as more tough-minded tales from the same era. Shot with sharp attention to decaying buildings in the background with a foreground full of forward progress, Pauline Kael described the filmmaking as \u201cextraordinary, though in a way that doesn’t hit you on the noggin.\u201d With his usual wry reserve, Malle makes a study of the crumbling old tourist traps against the antiseptic new corporate emporiums, the margins bustling with colorful characters like Michel Piccoli\u2019s blustery cardsharp and the director\u2019s future My Dinner with Andre<\/em> star playing a mispronunciation-prone waiter, billed as \u201cWally\u201d Shawn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lou Pascal, in his snappy white suit reminiscing about \u201cFlat Foot Floogie with the Floy Floy,\u201d is essentially a very silly man, smitten with a girl four decades his junior because maybe she\u2019s the only person in town young enough to buy his line of B.S. \u201cTeach me stuff,\u201d she asks with a voice that sounds more like a purr. (I\u2019d say Sarandon\u2019s never been sexier, except Susan Sarandon is always this sexy.) Lou may be a fool, but the movie regards him with great generosity, and Lancaster suffers the story\u2019s indignities with a steely gravitas. \u201cI am a lover,\u201d he announces, with a pride that pulls your heartstrings out, and in that moment we understand why she wants so badly to believe him.\u00a0 “Atlantic City” is now streaming on Kanopy<\/a> and available for rental or purchase<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/atlantic-city1-1024x696.jpg\")
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