The kindness of strangers

The kindness of strangers

I would have considered “Atlantic City” more of a fantasy if I hadn’t lived for six weeks in 1970 at the Sunset Marquis, a hotel near the Sunset Strip. It is now the luxury hotel of that name, but then it cost $19 a night and its guests included Tiny Tim, Van Heflin and Elaine May. Call room service and you got Greenblatt’s Deli. A scrap iron dealer named Jack Sachs ruled from his poolside efficiency apartment as the “mayor,” running cocktail hour as his personal salon, dispensing whiskey to such show business drifters as Jackie Gayle, Roy Scheider and Harold Ramis on their way up, down or sideways.

Louis Malle’s “Atlantic City” (1980) is set in a similar establishment near the Boardwalk an apartment house that is ready for demolition. All around are vacant lots filled with rubble and sky-cranes of new construction; every exterior shot seems to have a background of debris being shoved out of upper windows or bulldozers clearing vacant lots.

Three people live in this building: Sally (Susan Sarandon), who works at an oyster bar; Lou (Burt Lancaster), an aging numbers runner; and Grace (Kate Reid), who came here 40 years ago for a Betty Grable look alike contest and depends on Lou to run her errands, some sexual. Her apartment is so filled with photographs, stuffed animals, feather boas, geegaws, silk festoons and glitz that you might think it’s a fantasy although not me because I saw Tiny Tim’s apartment one morning when the maid left the door standing open.

Lou claims to have been big time in Vegas in the old days: “A cellmate of Bugsy Siegel.” Now he walks through Atlantic City’s urban decay each day taking 25-cent bets on the numbers; I’ve always thought that a stipend from Grace keeps him on his feet. At night he stands behind the blinds of his darkened apartment and watches as Sally comes home from work, cuts fresh lemons and caresses her skin to take away the shellfish smell.

Later, after they know each other better, Lou tells Sally he used to watch her. She says she knew somebody was doing that but didn’t know who. “What did you see when you looked at me?” she asks. He describes in great detail her ritual with the lemons, and when the camera cuts back to her after he has finished speaking she has opened her blouse, as if his words were stage directions.

Into this closed world come Dave and Chrissie two loose cannons. Dave ran away with Sally’s younger sister Chrissie after having been married to Sally; they’re a better match for each other, equally spaced out (Sally wants to succeed). “Teach me things,” she asks Lou at one point.

A casino boss called Michel Piccoli is teaching her blackjack. Dave steals drugs in Philadelphia and wants to sell them in Atlantic City, where he has a contact named Alfie (Al Waxman) who runs a permanent poker game out of a hotel room. The gangsters from Philadelphia come looking for their drugs and for Dave, who winds up dead. Chrissie becomes Grace’s confidant, Lou inherits the drugs and makes the deals, then buys himself a new white suit and sets himself up as Sally’s knight in shining armor against the guys who killed her ex-husband.

This is not an especially new screenplay by John Guare, the playwright, assembled from drugs, colorful characters, a decaying city, memories of the past. What makes “Atlantic City” sweet and that’s just the word I want is that Lou is gentle with what may be his last chance ever to amount to anything, and Sally is wise about Lou all along. He wants to take the drug money as a gift from the gods so he can re-create his glory days; were there really glory days? A gangster as big as Lou claims to have been would be rich or dead by now.

Lou does not come on like one of these cheap old letches. This guy has dignity. You know how Burt Lancaster was so great at embodying dignity? In Visconti’s “The Leopard”? Once you’ve embodied it that well you don’t have to play it anymore.

Watch him in that scene in the hotel room with those three poker players: Some guy invades his space so quietly Lou brushes him away with the side of his arm without even moving his head. Or when he says so quietly to another man: “Don’t touch the suit.” And when he finally gets around to telling Sally that she could use him as her protector if she wanted but wouldn’t she rather try him out as a lover?

His dreams seem within reach when he does protect her. The giveaway is that he’s so elated when he defends her from the knife attack by two hoods: No real gangster, no buddy of Bugsy Siegel’s, no former hit man for Al Capone would be as excited about defending Sally against a couple of bums in an alley. But his childlike delight at his own unexpected behavior is part of the same man who really believes Bugsy Siegel and Tony Accardo are walking around loose and admires Henry Hill for doing all that time.

Louis Malle (1932-1995) was one of the pioneers of the French New Wave. He alternated between fiction and documentaries, France and the United States. His first feature, “Elevator to the Gallows” (1958), grew right out of the 1950s Frenchnoir period that also produced Jacques Becker, Jean-Pierre Melville and those late Jean Gabin movies. They were more like elegies than adventures. In Becker’s “Touchez Pas au Grisbi,” after dinner with his old pal who has done nothing but get him into trouble for 40 years, Gabin gives him a toothbrush and pajamas.

In relation to Lancaster’s character, he ties Grace because she needs Lou in her life. She insults him like a diva and criticizes him to hide her desperation and he can see that. Chrissie the hippie who believes in foot reflexology and reincarnation finds a common ground with grace the aging beauty (and probably retired whore). They are very different in terms of age, style and beliefs but both of them create illusions so as not to face the harsh reality around them.

With Sally and Lou things are gentle and subtle. Neither of them was born yesterday. Both have dreams; both have lived through disappointments. They could be lovers but there is no future for them together or apart maybe. They do not need to say this to each other. When he helps her, it is because she needs help and also because he has a need to help.

His payoff will not be living happily ever after but having an eye witness who knows that once during his fall into obscurity did he step up to the plate as what he considers a man should act such men being those criminals whom he admires for their power and respectability. The movie does not deny reality; it ends with what must happen, how it must happen given what has gone before.

Ten years after death Louis Malle is being honored with a tribute at Facets Cinematheque in Chicago. The almost complete retrospective features films (such as “Au Revoir les Enfants,” “Lacombe, Lucien,” “Murmur of the Heart,” “Damage”) that are equally good or better than “Atlantic City” but surprisingly not on video prints.The British critic Philip French knew Malle from his first film feels ‘Atlantic City’ is his best American project while I would go for ‘My Dinner With Andre’ (1981), and Stanley Kauffmann thinks Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) is the only successful film of a Chekhov play by Malle.

Last fall when I told a French film official that I had just seen and liked ‘Elevator to the Gallows,’ he didn’t smile but said ‘pffft!’ It’s possible that perhaps Malle moved to America, married Candice Bergen, took so many American stories (“Pretty Baby” “Alamo Bay”) may have alienated his countrymen. Godard took his New Wave origins into ideological extremes but not Malle who like Fassbinder wanted big audiences without denying them his German contemporaries.

What’s fascinating even in what appears as commercial project like “Atlantic City” is how determinedly he sticks to the human side of his story and lets an almost incidental background be provided by the drug plot. So here we have a movie where at least reincarnation is treated with seriousness equal to cocaine if not more and white suit even much more so.

In addition to ‘My Dinner With Andre’ being one of the Great Movies series Ebert also reviews several other Malle films including “Elevator to The Gallows.” There are also interviews with Malle from 1972 and 1976.

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