Atlantic City (1980)
A Film by Louis Malle
DVD5 | ISO+MDS | NTSC 16:9 (720x480) | HQ Scans (Cover + DVD) | 01:43:36 | 4,34 Gb
Audio: English AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: English
Genre: Crime, Romance | Nominated for 5 Oscars + 23 wins | Canada, France
A Film by Louis Malle
DVD5 | ISO+MDS | NTSC 16:9 (720x480) | HQ Scans (Cover + DVD) | 01:43:36 | 4,34 Gb
Audio: English AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: English
Genre: Crime, Romance | Nominated for 5 Oscars + 23 wins | Canada, France
Burt Lancaster stars as Lou, an aging mob flunkey, barely making a living in Atlantic City. Susan Sarandon plays Sally, a casino croupier whose husband Dave (Robert Joy) steals a large supply of drugs from the mob. When he is killed, the narcotics pass to the unwilling Sally. Lou, in the midst of longtime affair with middle-aged gangster's widow Grace (Kate Reid), falls for the much younger Sally, becoming her savior by killing the mob thugs sent to shut her up. The killings serve a therapeutic value for Lou, proving that he hasn't lost his old panache.
IMDB
Eclectic, pacy and hard to categorise, it's part crime thriller, part love story, part fairytale, and part a gentle, generous examination of certain dying aspects of American culture. Lancaster turns in the performance of his career as the ageing petty crook, running a numbers racket, indulging in nostalgic delusions about his past experiences in the Big Time with Capone et al., and finally getting a chance to discover true self-respect when he gets involved with a young hippy who's stolen a stash of coke from the mob. Between the gripping and beautifully staged action sequences, Malle contrasts the rather sad and slightly seedy lives of various loners with their romantic dreams of success, wealth and fame, while never treating his characters with condescension or contempt. Witty, warm, but never sentimental, it also benefits from being set in the fading glories of the resort town of the title: grand seaside facades behind which lie more mundane realities, surrounded by decay and demolition.
Richly sad portraits of wasted American lives, filtered through a European sensibility. Burt Lancaster, in a masterful performance, plays Lou, an aging small-time criminal who hangs around Atlantic City doing odd jobs and taking care of the broken-down moll (Kate Reid) of the deceased gangster for whom Lou was a gofer. Living in an invented past, Lou identifies with yesteryear's notorious gangsters and gets involved with sexy would-be croupier, Sally (Susan Sarandon), and her drug-dealing estranged husband (Robert Joy).
Aided by a superb script from playwright John Guare, director Louis Malle (PRETTY BABY, AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS) pulls off a minor coup here, celebrating his wounded characters even as he mercilessly reveals their dreams for the hopeless illusions they really are. He is exceptionally well served by his cast and his location–a gone-to-seed resort town supported, like the principal characters, by memories of glories past.
Burt Lancaster won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of a conniving salesman-turned-preacher in 1960's Elmer Gantry, but his best performance was arguably in his role as Lou Pasco, an aging small-time gangster in Louis Malle's Atlantic City. Lancaster brings to the role a great, endearing physicality, a sense of presence that is convincing in its character-created self-delusion. Lou is a man for whom the past is his only consolation, but it is a past that is largely a figment of his own imagination and years of dreams-turned-lies.
The film's backdrop is the titular New Jersey resort town, which was in the midst of a major transformation following the official legalization of gambling by the state of the New Jersey in 1976. Once known as the "Queen of Resorts," whose boardwalks in the 1920 and '30s was the place to be seen for Hollywood royalty and gangsters alike, it had been in steady decline since the end of World War II, slowly deteriorating until the sudden burst of multi-million-dollar construction following the legalization of gambling. At one point, we see an old, proud hotel being torn down to make way for a gaudy new casino, and it is an apt visual metaphor for the complete transformation that was occurring at that time, as the ocean-side city morphed from a once-ritzy resort island to a Disney-fied tourist trap.
In such a world, there is little room for men like Lou. But, as the film makes clear by the end, there has never been much room for men like him, two-bit hustlers and con men who talk big and dream even bigger, but ultimately accomplish very little. They exist in the margins, and although Lou puffs himself up with stories about "the old days," when he was cellmates with Bugsy Siegel and "worked for the people who worked for the people" like Al Capone, he is more marginalized than ever.
Even as the city he has called home for decades deteriorates and is reborn into something entirely different, Lou refuses to leave or change his "old school" ways. He remains in stasis–literally frozen in time–while the city evolves, leaving him even less room than before. "Now it's all so damn legal," he complains at one point. "Howard Johnson is running a casino." His sense of the past is so nostalgic that it blankets even those things that haven't changed. "You should've seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days," he says wistfully, as if the good old days of guns and racketeering somehow changed the ocean itself.
Lou lives in a seedy old building that is scheduled to be torn down, and he spends his days running small-time numbers for quarters and taking care of Grace (Kate Reid), the feisty widow of a long-deceased gangster for whom Lou used to work. At night, he watches a young woman named Sally Matthews (Susan Sarandon) wash her arms and torso with lemon juice to take away the fish smell from the oyster bar at which she works during the day. After work, she takes classes on running a blackjack table, her head filled with dreams of dealing her way to Europe.
Ironically, Lou finally gets his chance to be a high-roller when Sally's husband, Dave (Robert Joy), rolls into town. Months earlier, he had run away with Sally's sister, Chrissie (Hollis McLaren), a sweet and affable, but painfully simple, young women who is eight months pregnant by Dave. Dave has stolen a package of cocaine back in Philadelphia, and he enlists Lou to help him sell it. He gets in Lou's good graces by claiming to have heard of him in Las Vegas–that he is "the person to see" in Atlantic City–and Lou is so desperate to believe such a story about himself that he buys it wholesale, despite its obvious fabrication.
When something happens to Dave, Lou is left holding thousands of dollars in cash and more cocaine to sell, and he immediately dives into the situation, buying a new suit, impressing Sally with his spending, and strutting with a new form of confidence, the confidence that has always been in his dreams, but never his reality. Of course, it's still a fantasy–Lou's money is the product of happenstance, and it will run out even if the Philadelphia gangsters who track Dave to Atlantic City don't get it back first.
The screenplay, written by playwright John Guare (Six Degrees of Separation) is ultimately not about plot mechanics–what Lou will do with the cocaine or if the gangsters will ever catch up with him or even if he and Sally will end up together are of little importance. Instead, he and director Louis Malle focus on Lou's character and how these events allow him to finally be–if only for a short while–the man of his dreams. Atlantic City, as the city itself promises, is about the fulfillment of dreams, although the ironic twist is that the fulfillment itself is something of fantasy itself, powerful, but fleeting.James Kendrick, QNetwork
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