The Gamblers

By J.C.

CALIFORNIA SPLIT

Directed by ROBERT ALTMAN

Screenplay by JOSEPH WALSH

All bets are off. George Segal and Elliott Gould, a pair of raveled gamblers, need luck bad. They go to Reno, play big, win even bigger, and come up empty. Granted, there does not seem to be much of promise here, but Robert Altman has made a funny, smart, anxious movie about luck and lowlife.

One of Altman's surest talents is the creation of a whole world, slightly antic and off-center, so that his movies (like McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Thieves Like Us) have a look of surprise, of the familiar transposed in some evasive but still palpable way. Once again he enjoys the collaboration of his excellent art director, Leon Ericksen, who has constructed an entire casino, brightly seedy and lit like a yellow-fever ward, which Altman populates with 24-hour night people. Their faces are ridden with worry, briefly flush with success. Their babble, their half-heard hopes framed in gambler's jargon, are like the running response of some lost congregation. They are Altman's chorus.

Like all his work, California Split (slang for high-low-split poker) has its own bent rhythm. It gives the feeling of having been made with a stoned offhandedness. In fact, there is a relaxed precision governing everything, even Elliott Gould's mumbled throwaways.

Segal's is the more kinetic performance. He plays a magazine writer named Bill Denny, separated from his wife, living out a drifting fantasy of risk and destruction. He hooks up with Gould at a Vegas poker parlor, and the two of them get their small winnings beaten out of them in a fast parking-lot brawl. From then on they become accomplices in misfortune. Gould inhabits some sort of foggy half-world of the hard scuffle, keeping company with a couple of soft-core hookers who serve beer and Fruit Loops for breakfast. Segal likes the style, likes the dead-end quality of the life, and he leaps into it with gusto. Winning is the best way to work out of melancholy, but once Segal and Gould hit big, they crap out.

California Split is a rejoinder to the terse, glamorously tense world of The Cincinnati Kid, where the green felt is turned into a field of honor. It may be the first movie about gamblers that does not require any knowledge of the rules of a game. California Split is about compulsion, not betting, so the conventions are disregarded. There are no looming closeups of nervously shifting eyes, sweaty foreheads and shaky hands. Altman's premise is that getting hooked on gambling is the kind of emotional brinkmanship that is suicide by inches. This knowledge runs through California Split like a cold current and is the source of the movie's stubborn power. "J.C.

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