Movie Review: James Caan’s The Gambler

6 years ago
Movie Review: James Caan’s The Gambler
08:03
23 Apr

When I reviewed 2014’s The Gambler it roused my curiosity about the original. The film had the bleak and philosophical tone of Russian novel wrapped up in the pelt of a slick crime caper. And Mark Wahlberg’s binge of self-destruction was thoroughly enjoyable in a somewhat rubbernecking kind of way.

So I didn’t go into to the 1974 original blind. I had the remake on my mind and was aware of its cult status. It seemed like poor form not to go back and do something of a side by side on them together. My suspicion is that I watched them in the right order. The remake is less hard edged than the original, but it does fix some of the problems and benefits from forty years of technological advances in camera, sound and editing.

It was much harder to like the darker, nastier tone of James Toback’s script for the original. Harder, but worth it.



Death Wishes

So, James Caan plays a university professor, Axel Freed, teaching English by day, and gambling it all by night. The plot largely concerns his shenanigans as he tries by turns to pay back his debts, and to lose every penny he already owes. The debts are owed to suitably dangerous people to dangerous people and incurred throughout the movie at roulette, blackjack, and a series of disastrous college basketball games.

As well as James Toback’s script, we have Karel Reicz on as director, and James Caan starring in the Marky Mark role, alongside the perfectly tolerable performances of Lauren Hutton, Carl Crudup and a brief appearance from a very young James Woods.


Prickly and Bleak

Overall the film works. Caan’s performance is excellent as a character that is even more prickly and unlikeable than Wahlberg’s. He abuses his girlfriend emotionally and intimidates her physically and ends up in a satisfying and slightly grotesque sort of way, far darker than expected even for a film that rags on about death wishes and sticky ends.

From the get go, the director Karel Reisz makes sure you know this is not the romantic world of The Cincinnati Kid or the comedic world of California Split – he leads strong out of the gate: the fifth word of the script is ‘cunt’ at a time when the censors were just beginning to cope with the grubbiness of post-sixties cinema.

It’s in the world of gambler as an archetypical addict on a nineteenth century will to power trip. This is not the reality for most people who have done serious time at the tables, and very few of us have the over-literary lens of Axel Freed to gaze through, but the gambling montages when they come are fun to watch and the sense of desperate addiction coming off the very exposed decolette of Mr Caan is pretty compelling.

I would recommend, but perhaps not as strongly as I would the remake.


Articles 283

Jon is a freelance writer and novelist who learned to play poker after watching Rounders in year 9. He has been giving away his beer money at cards ever since. Currently he is based in Bristol where he makes sporadic donations to the occasional live tournament or drunken late night Zoom session. He ...Read more

Comments

You need to be logged in to post a new comment

No Comments found.