California Split
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Movie Reviews of California Split
Movie Review: 4 stars would be 4 1/2 stars with missing scenes back in
Summary: 4 Stars
I have really liked this movie for years, but this version is missing some scenes, and I mourn the loss. As I recall from seeing the longer version many years ago, we are missing: more Segal/Goldblum interaction at the magazine office, more gambling scenes during the winning streak (certainly some of the blackjack scenes are gone), and most importantly for me, the great repartee between Gould and the piano lady when Gould has no money to gamble but isn't allowed to watch Segal during the winning streak. In particular, I remember the piano lady saying something like, "Hey, where's my tip jar?" and we assume that Gould took it half-jokingly (and returned it?) as he tries to get some money to gamble. He needs money and not just the Milky Way bar he tries to bet. This is still a Top 250 personal favorite movie (as are several other Altman movies like M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), but without the deleted scenes, I doubt I will feel compelled to watch California Split again for another few years.Movie Review: This lesser known Altman gem should be in your collection.
Summary: 5 Stars
Altman movies are rarely box-office champs--sometimes they are box-office duds. Most break rules but not necessarily in an audience pleasing way. Altman's priority in making films is not in telling a story or giving the audience a roller coaster ride. He makes films to explore ideas and character or just to try something he hasn't done before.
Sometimes he slips and slides all over the place and will turn you off, at other times he get things as right as any artist working in film past or present. What he is doing interests or intrigues him and/or the actors involved--hopefully the audience will appreciate it--but that is never the most important consideration with Altman.
Altman may have been appreciated by film critics, but he rarely had a hit with general audiences and he has never won an Oscar until he was given his honorary trophy in 2006.
In 1974, the subject of gambling addiction was not in the headlines. It was Watergate front and center and politics. Altman's 1975 breakthrough- Nashville was in production and California Split was released to theaters to critical acclaim but audience indifference.
I was hoping the popularity of poker and celebrity poker programs on television would create a little more buzz around the restoration of California Split and it's DVD release a year and a half ago. It didn't happen. This Altman gem, one of his best films, is still not well known. It is not an easy film to categorize. It's not an action film, despite several funny moments it is not a comedy either. It is not one Altman's large multi-character films (Nashville, Short Cuts, Dr. T and the Women, Player, Gosford Park). It's not a romance, not a western, not a thriller, not a mystery who-done-it, fantasy or science fiction. It's a movie about several weeks in the lives of two gamblers. They meet in a Gardena (Los Angeles) poker parlor, run a little bit of a scam, and become friends shortly after they are mugged in a parking lot.
Charlie Waters (Elliott Gould) is a semi-professional small-time gambling man who likes the seemingly care-free lifestyle even though he exists on the brink of constant and nearly certain financial collapse. He doesn't really have very much to lose however. He lives in the apartment of two part-time escort -would-be-prostitutes Barbara ( Ann Prentiss) and Susan (Gwen Welles). They work just enough to pay the bills and are excited that a couple of Johns want to take them to Hawaii on a trip. It's clear all these people are living temporary lives that don't involve any kind of realistic career ambitions.
And then there is Bill Denny (George Segal) who is the editor of a successful magazine and is destroying his upper middle class lifestyle because of his gambling addiction. He is separated from his wife, he is in debt to his bookie and he's becoming more irresponsible towards the duties of his job. We watch him become so obsessed with gambling after meeting Charlie that he tries to sell everything he has--camera, real estate and car to get the stake he needs to play in the big poker tournament being held in Reno, Nevada.
We spend a lot of time with Charlie and Bill as they go on a gambling spree to poker parlors, race-tracks, casinos and bar-rooms. Most of the places are smoky and run-down seedy, either lit with garishly bright cheap fluorescent lights or poorly lit dingy hole-in-the-walls. These places buzz with the activities of drunks, losers, gamblers, thrill-seekers, hangers on, bored housewives and senior citizens, with background music supplied by the jazz-blues ballads of Phyllis Shotwell piano bar style.
Although the film has plenty of humorous moments, it depicts a bleak world inhabited by desperate people, who dress at their best like used-car salesman (from the 70s). There is an anarchy at work with their lifestyles where schedules and times are built around an after-hour world of gambling and long poker games. You can almost understand the initial attraction to this rebellious sort of un-disciplined lifestyle, but we discover it's a sad, lonely, repetitious life--even for those who win more than they lose. Most of the time the characters front and center and to the sides are not having fun as they play and gamble.
Everyone lives for the next deal, the next pot, the next roll of the dice, the promise of tomorrow. The gambling fever is insatiable inside Charlie and Bill who create side bets based on naming all seven dwarfs. Their friendship is intense but based only on their gambling exploits and pushing themselves to do more gambling.
This leads to the big stakes poker game in Reno. It is peopled by the kind of traveling professional gambling character types we've seen on television poker shows. However, we aren't sure whether we want Charlie and Bill to win. We know losing will be devastating, but they might be able to recover from it--You aren't quite sure what would happen if they win !!!
The film is full of small details. Elliot Gould and George Segal play well off each other seeming to ad-lib quite naturally all of their dialogue (much of it was actually written by Joseph Walsh). There's a road-trip breeziness to much of the film but at times it conflicts with some of the almost brutal doses of reality that are doled out to the characters at various times. We realize these characters will suffer through nearly any indignity provided that just pass the `hurdle of hurt' is another game, another bet, another hope of a win.
The film does have a truly terrible strained scene, that seems dropped into the film from some other universe. It involves the sudden introduction of a pair of transvestite `dates' of the girls Charlie lives with(for one 5 minute too long scene). Actor Bert Remsen humiliates himself with full commitment playing an old nervous transvestite (he does a great job). It's a mis-fired comedic bit that calls too much attention to itself. It feels completely artificial in a movie that had seemed utterly real previously. Thankfully the scene is not very long and the movie goes right back to being as honest and authentic as it had been before.
What distinguished this film from any other about addiction is that we are not given a morale lecture or morality lesson. There's no heavy message. We can see for ourselves how sometimes the life-style is `fun', how often it is desperate, and how it is not something to aspire to. Win or lose, there's good and bad for these characters. Who can forget Charlie recklessly trying to finagle a few bucks for himself when he is being robbed at gun-point or the look on Bill's face when he realizes he may at least temporarily be on a good luck streak?.
And ignoring the transvestite scene, there's not a Hollywood type of manufactured moment in the entire film. As we get close to a movie moment, something authentic and realistic keeps it from going into the manufactured realm. In fact it turns out the movie is one of Altman's most personal. He had a gambling addiction, he identified completely with these characters which is why he wrestled the project away from up and coming Steven Speilberg (who had t.v.'s Duel and the feature Sugarland Express under his belt at this point). That left Speilberg free to do JAWS!!!
Oh and look fast for Jeff Goldblum.
DVD STUFF
California Split is presented in an anamorphic transfer with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. The film has been digitally restored but film stock imperfections and lens limitations can not be fixed.. One of the important advances Altman played with during production was the 8 track recording of sound on the set. The full 3.0 Dolby Digital soundtrack provides a vast improvement over previous video incarnations. There's a lot of over-lapping background chatter going on and you may have to train yourself to hear it (the subtitle feature does cover some of this ).
The best extra is the feature-length commentary track recorded by Robert Altman, Elliot Gould, George Segal, and writer Joseph Walsh (who we see in the film playing Segal's bookie Sparky). It's not a great commentary session but it is fun listening to the group clearly enjoying watching the film and talking about it together.
Also included are some trailers.
If you are already an Altman fan and somehow are not familiar with this film, buy it and add it to your collection.
Altman's incredible attention to detail is something to go back and savor in this little masterpiece--and I'm talking here about background detail, how everyone in the frame whether at the center or out of focus in the background is part of the scene we are watching; how we hear conversations going on just outside of the one we are supposed to be paying attention to which consists of realistic over-lapping, impossible to edit and manipulate moments that are created by actor, writer and director trusting each other completely. It's a difficult thing to do this on a creative AND technical basis. The Altman mise en scène is what sets him apart from every director working today. The fact that in most of his films several scenes are constructed to play out in real time and are mic'ed and photographed to create the kind of ambience and feeling you would have if you were sitting in the same place the characters are is nothing short of a remarkable almost incomprehensible difficult achievement. It goes beyond even what Scorcese dares to do in his best movie scenes.
Movie Review: "You don't throw oranges on an escalator!"
Summary: 5 Stars
The last Robert Altman film I saw was O.C. and Stiggs (1987), which was an interesting affair, destined for failure (it failed spectacularly), given there were three, separate forces at work there...the studio, who wanted a stupid teen comedy, the writers, who wanted something more closely akin to the original scathing and subversive material, and then Altman himself, who despised the teen comedy format and decided to do a satire. My point is, a film like that was completely wrong for Altman, where as California Split (1974) was completely right...well that sounds a little weird...but I think you get my point, especially if you're familiar with Altman and his movies. Produced and written by Joseph Walsh, who also appears in the film as a bookie named Sparkie, and directed by Altman, who definitely had the hot hand in the 1970s with such films as MASH (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Nashville (1975), the film features George Segal (The Hot Rock, Fun with Dick and Jane) and Elliott Gould (MASH, Little Murders, The Long Goodbye). Also appearing is Ann Prentiss (The Out-of-Towners), Gwen Welles (Nashville, Nobody's Fool), Jeff Goldblum (Silverado, The Fly), in one of his earliest, pimply faced roles, Bert Remsen (Brewster McCloud, Nashville), and Edward Walsh (no relation to the writer), whom I recognize distinctly from the Robert Quarry 1970 film Count Yorga, Vampire, a Brudah, the Count's thuggish valet.
The film begins in a legal card parlor, where we learn the ins and outs of high/low draw poker. This was an exceptional sequence if only because the sly way the information was related, which serves to lay down a very strong foundation for the rest of the film. During this time we meet the two, principal players in Bill Denny (Segal) and Charlie Waters (Gould). Both men come from very different places (Bill works for a magazine while Charlie is what I'd call a professional hustler), but both share a love for `the action', meaning they're both saddled with a gambling monkey on their backs. The two men meet while sharing a game of cards, as another player accuses Charlie of cheating, claiming Bill, who was dealing, was in on it...from here the men develop an instant camaraderie, both recognizing their common interest. They hook up with Charlie's ditzy roommates (who happen to be female escorts), Barbara (Prentiss) and Susan (Welles), and the four engage in fun and games. Soon after Charlie disappears (he ends up at a dog track in Tijuana), while we learn Bill is in debt up to his eyeballs with a bookie who is deeply interested in collecting. Out of desperation, Bill sells all his possessions (the ones with value, at least), as he's planning on going to Reno and score big. Right around this time Charlie shows up, and the two men decide to partner up...things get a little crazy from here on, as Bill's in the zone, but luck can turn quickly, and streaks can sour...will Bill and Charlie break the bank, or leave flat busted? It's like they always say, you win some, and you lose some...
If you're not familiar with Altman's films then you should know they don't so much focus on a plot, but more so on the characters, and few do character driven films as well as Altman, at least in my experience. This is an excellent film, and both Segal and Gould are wonderful. Bill is a working man, drawn to the action like a moth to a flame, trying to balance the various aspects of his life until the fallout of his passions begins to catch up to him. Charlie, on the other hand, is more open and accepting of his desires, as gambling is his work, only taking on conventional jobs when he's in need of working capital to continue gambling. Most of the time he's able to get by off his winnings (and charm), carrying him over to the next game. The two men eventually hook up and Bill is drawn into the excitement of gambling as a profession (if you've got the skills, it can be done). The characters, while often strange, felt very authentic (in a seedy sort of way) and completely human. Another aspect that works so well in this film is the strong script. My favorite give and take comes not from the main players, but two incidental characters in a bar. Bill's in a bar, pondering the desperation of his situation (you know, the thing with the bookie), and there's some trashy, loudmouthed broad griping about how her fufu dog dumps on her floors, along with her displeasure towards her current surroundings...
Dumpy Broad: `What the f*** am I doing in this dump anyway? You should've seen the place where I was last night. It was real classy.'
Straight-Faced Bartender: `Any chance you could go back there?'
Now that in and of itself is a classically beautiful comeback, and if the exchange ended there it would have been fine, but the line that follows, from the oblivious dame, is the cherry on top...
Dumpy Broad: `No, classy places don't open this early.'
Now it sounds like she was giving a shot back, but in reality, she made the last statement as a matter of fact (as she saw the facts), completely in the dark that the bartender had given an appropriate shot with regards to her initial comment. By the way, the bartender in this sequence was played by Jack Riley, who should be familiar to fans of The Bob Newhart Show as the perpetually morose Mr. Carlin. All in all I thought this was a great film, and if you're an Altman fan, you really should try and catch this one.
The picture quality on this DVD, presented in widescreen anamorphic (2.35:1), looks very clean, yet slightly fuzzy...something inherent in a number of films from the 1970s. It wasn't perfectly clear, but then neither were the characters, so perhaps it was intentional. The Dolby Digital 3.0 audio comes through very clean. As far as extras, there isn't a lot, but there is an entertaining commentary track featuring director Altman, writer Walsh, along with stars Gould and Segal. Also included are some unrelated previews for the films Easy Rider (1969). Big Night (1996), and The Company (2003).
Cookieman108
By the way, the title of my review comes from a sequence near the beginning when Charlie sort of talks a woman out of betting on a horse at the track to which she had a good feeling about, only to win big himself on said horse. The woman discovers what happened, and angrily begins lobbing oranges at both Charlie and Bill, who are riding the escalator, Bill completely unaware of Charlie's actions, starts throwing them back. The complete quote features an expletive, one I doubt Amazon would let me post, so to get the rest, see the film...it's worth it...
Movie Review: Running Hot.
Summary: 5 Stars
I was pleased to see that Robert Altman directed this film, and it probably explains why it is devoid of that cheesy seventies feeling you get from productions which were its contemporaries. The setting of the film takes place in a Bukowski-esque world made up of call girls, gambling, horses, and all the anarchy one would expect. Their lives are someplace you would not mind visiting, but are nowhere you would like to live.
California split accomplishes quite a bit as it successfully depicts a fast moving, male friendship which captures the adrenaline junkie mentality of many a compulsive gambler. The word "action" is referred to again and again, and the lust for action is what drives behaviors which are inexplicable to the rest of us. Personally, Elliot Gould is as good here as he was in M.A.S.H. In fact, this might be his best performance ever. He is the yin to George Seigel's yang. He is in constant motion. Gould takes off to Tijuana after a dream involving the city, and thoroughly lives for the moment; whereas, Seigel is not able to escape his life even for a day. He has roots and responsibility while Gould is on a conveyer belt to who knows where. This difference goes far in explaining the film's ending. This one is a bittersweet ride that's more fun that bitter. You definitely will enjoy it as it has aged like Bordeaux.
Movie Review: Love to Gamble
Summary: 5 Stars
Amen I love to gamble. Gambling thrives on the fine line between intellect & superstition. Chronic gamblers know the odds. At the same time they believe the next hand of cards will be better than it should be. In "California Split," gambling jaunts seem like a good move away from personal lives which make less sense. Eliot Gould is the same wonderfully funky character that he was in "The Long Goodbye" And there's that rarest of all birds, a happy ending ("Long Goodbye" also has a happy ending if you truly love the world's smallest harmonica)