The Gambler

James Caan is a self-destructive degenerate gambler in Karel Reisz’s film of James Toback’s script.

This would make a good double feature with California Split, if only to demonstrate what Approach does to a piece of subject matter. As California Split is observational and behavioral, allowing us to watch the characters and draw our own conclusions, The Gambler boldly states its themes (Caan plays a college professor and the story periodically slams to a halt so that he can lecture his students on the film’s themes of Will and Risk and Fear and so forth).

As California Split seems very “slice of life,” with characters caught in everyday, perfectly ordinary scenes, The Gambler self-conciously packs in references to Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Mahler, Beckett (Caan, who is “in a hole” as a gambler, has a first edition of Beckett’s Happy Days on his desk, a play where the protagonist sinks into a literal hole)

A number of the cast members later showed up in Goodfellas, including Paul Sorvino, Frank Vincent and Frank Sivero. Now they play old gangsters, but once upon a time they played young gangsters. 70s Usual Suspects Burt Young, Vic Tayback and M. Emmett Walsh show up, as does a skinny young actor named James Woods, playing, what else, a yuppie bank clerk.