Boardwalk

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

ATLANTIC CITY

Directed by Louis Malle

Screenplay by John Guare

The highest pleasure Atlantic City has to offer is a little essay on fastidiousness by Burt Lancaster. That is not a quality one automatically associates with a star who was once the most macho of leading men. But in the past decade, working with such daring directors as Bertolucci, Altman and Visconti and on such underrated genre pieces as Ulzana 's Raid and Go Tell the Spartans, Lancaster has become a resourceful and wide-ranging character actor. Here he is playing Lou, a small-time crook who seems to feel neatness just might count in the battle to keep his withered dreams intact. You can practically smell the blue rinse in his hair; the pressing of a tie, the caressing of a whisky glass, the sniffing of a wine cork become incantatory gestures. They are supposed to ward off the new tawdriness of the gambling casinos, which is replacing the old salt-water-taffy funk of the boardwalk town. While the wrecking balls swing all around him, Lou complains that even the ocean isn't what it used to be.

The second highest pleasure of Atlantic City is Susan Sarandon, whose fate, up to now, has been to be the best thing about oddball movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Malle's earlier Pretty Baby. Here she is Sally, a clam-bar waitress who is as determined to escape her past as Lou is to recapture his Loonily, she aspires to be the first female dealer in the casino at Monte Carlo, and her plucky struggle to keep the panic pushed down inside her when her former life reaches out to reclaim her is played with the subtle clarity one associates with Sarandon's work. There is a core of strength in her, even when she is playing losers, a lack of guile and artifice that is extremely appealing. She evokes sympathy without asking for pity.

The forces threatening to pull Sally down are represented by her former husband Dave--played by a young Canadian actor named Robert Joy, who is the punkest punk to show up on the screen in a long time--and her hugely pregnant sister (Hollis McLaren), who is now living with him and spouting flower-child irrelevancies. Dave has in hand a stash of cocaine he has scored off the Mob, which is in hot pursuit. If the drugs, and this rotten kid, represent danger, they also offer opportunity. The coke is fungible: it can be converted into a ticket to France for Sally--the opportunity, finally, to act the big-time operator for Lou, who becomes her mentor and protector.

In the narrowest sense, their alliance works out all right. No one is more surprised than they when they actually manage to get some of what they have dreamed of having. But like everyone else in this richly peopled movie, Lou and Sally fail to make any but a transitory connection. Constantly pulled back into their all-consuming fantasies, they have time and energy only to glance off one another.

True to this vision of life, the movie has an unemphatic vagueness about it. It observes the ambiguous gesture, records the half-formed thought, very well. But Malle and Guare seem more amused than engaged by the piece, and one finally begins to long for a firmer narrative, some truly dramatic conclusions to the scenes. Even so, a fresh spirit is moving in Atlantic City, something unbeholden to other movies. That and the pleasures its performers offer make it catch in the mind, where, one suspects, it may linger a while. --By Richard Schickel

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