1980: "Atlantic City"

                            Atlantic City has often been considered a low-rent Las Vegas, the sleazier younger brother. Or, as Saturday Night Live once jokingly called it, "Las Vegas for Ugly People." While Las Vegas has had a long, storied history and an aura of glamour, Atlantic City is rather unglamorous and neglected in popular culture.
                         Around the late 70's and early 80's, Atlantic City went through a strange limbo period where it went from urban decay to revitalization when they legalized gambling in 1976. It's the main visual motif of Louis Malle's Atlantic City: construction and demolition. Casinos half built and half demolished. It gives off the impression of transformation, but it's a slow change, so what we're given instead is stasis. In a way, I couldn't help but see Lou Pascal as the embodiment of Atlantic City: a man not quite fully formed, a man trying to live up to some ideal (Las Vegas) that he'll probably never reach. He's not a big-time gangster, he's a lowly numbers runner. He wears nice suits like a big shot even though he's just collecting numbers in the slums and presiding over a dead gangster's widow, while waxing fancy on the old days of the "floy-floy." He is not unlike Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront ("I could've been somebody, instead of a bum...") and it is this quest to prove himself that is the main heart of Atlantic City.

                        Atlantic City tells the story of Lou (played by Burt Lancaster), an aging numbers runner, and Sally (played by Susan Sarandon), an oyster bar waitress and aspiring blackjack dealer, whose lives are upended by Sally's dead-beat husband and sister who steal cocaine from Philadelphia gangsters and the consequences that spring from it. In the midst of this conflict, Lou and Sally have a brief romance where, though they dream of different things, they both long for a deeper human connection.
                         The first time I saw Atlantic City, I found it to be a forgettable early 80's film noir (I was a little younger then). Watching it again, I can probably understand why I felt that way. It's not flashy, there's no real propulsive story, and it has a rather understated rhythm that a general moviegoer won't pick up on. It has the outward appearance of a gritty crime drama, but it's light as a feather. It's not cliched film noir, but a deftly-made study of desperate people living in a city going through tremendous change. And unlike most crime dramas, it has a sly comic touch and a cuddly warmness in the center.
                       The movie has two lovely lead performances in Lancaster and Sarandon. Lancaster was always good at being gentle and warm (almost grandfather-like) while also being deeply conflicted (bringing to mind one of his other great performances, The Swimmer). Sarandon's "googly-eyed" (as Pauline Kael once described her) charm and sexiness is on full display here. The movie also has a wide range of supporting characters (a lot of the actors unrecognizable to me as an American viewer because they are Canadian). From the theatrical old widow living in a tacky apartment to the humble old shoeshiner, it gives the movie more texture than just simply showing the two leads.
                       I also thought it was subtly subversive in the same way the Coens' Fargo was in subverting noir tropes. When I look back at old-school film-noirs from the 40's, the characters were all too cool and poseur-like in their cynicism and the cities depicted are perfectly shadowy filmic landscapes.
                   Whereas in something like Atlantic City or Fargo, there's a grimy flatness, a mundane ordinariness that feels more relatable, more realistic, or at least, more attuned to modern sensibilities. Everything is safer and more sanitized now. Atlantic City is not a gangster paradise; it's a town desperately trying to clean up its act (best represented in a sign displayed outside Lou's apartment: "Atlantic City, you're back on the map. Again."). In an absurd comic moment, Susan Sarandon goes to visit her husband's body in the hospital while Robert Goulet is singing for this gaudy fundraiser (he even serenades her while she's in the phone booth). It's as if the tragedies of modern life are butting heads with the image Atlantic City is trying to present. When Lancaster kills those two hoods near the end, the news media makes a big stink about it as if it were the most earth-shattering event in history. I think this movie is very under appreciated for its sly sense of humor.

                    I often think that a second viewing of a film is your real opinion. I really enjoyed Atlantic City the second time around though I sense it might slowly evaporate from my memory again. That's not a knock against the movie itself. Rather, it shows how delicate and feather-like this movie is. It's not about big seismic events, or important figures. It's about tiny, unremarkable lives and the fragility of those lives.