Atlantic City movie review & film summary (1980)
For Lancaster's character, the association with Grace begins with the fact that she needs Lou to survive. To conceal her desperation, she insults and criticizes him like a diva, and he sees right through her. Grace the aging beauty (and perhaps retired whore) finds a natural rapport with Chrissie the hippie, who believes in reincarnation and foot reflexology. They're far apart in age, style and beliefs, but they both construct fantasies to wall off the grim reality surrounding them.
As for Lou and Sally, there is something tender and subtle going on. Neither was born yesterday. Both have dreams. Both have lived with disappointment. Even though they could be lovers, they have no future together, and maybe no future separately. They don't need to say this to each other. When he helps her, it is because she needs help, and equally because he needs to help. His payoff is not living happily ever after, but in having an eyewitness who knows that at least once during his descent into obscurity he stepped up to the plate and acted as he thinks a man should act -- a man like the men he admires, who may have been criminals but were powerful and respected. The movie does not deny reality; it ends with what must happen, in the way it must happen, given what has gone before.
Ten years after his death, Louis Malle is the subject of a tribute at Facets Cinematheque in Chicago. The nearly complete retrospective includes films ("Au Revoir les Enfants," "Lacombe, Lucien," "Murmur of the Heart," "Damage") that are as good or better than "Atlantic City," but which are surprisingly not in print on video. The British critic Philip French, who knew Malle since his first film, thinks "Atlantic City" is the best of his American projects, although I would choose "My Dinner with Andre" (1981), and Stanley Kauffmann thinks "Vanya on 42nd Street" (1994), Malle's last film, is the only successful film of a Chekhov play.
When I told a French film official last autumn that I had just seen and admired "Elevator to the Gallows," I received not a smile but a scornful "pffft!" Perhaps Malle alienated his countrymen by moving to America, by marrying Candice Bergen, by taking on so many American stories ("Pretty Baby," "Alamo Bay"). Malle did not follow his New Wave origins into ideological extremities, like Godard, but like his German contemporary Fassbinder frankly desired large audiences.
What's interesting, even with a seemingly commercial project like "Atlantic City," is how resolutely he stayed with the human dimension of his story and let the drug plot supply an almost casual background. Here is a movie where reincarnation is treated at least as seriously as cocaine, and the white suit even more so.
"My Dinner With Andre" is also in the Great Movies series, and Ebert reviews many other Malle films, including "Elevator to the Gallows." There are also 1972 and 1976 interviews with Malle.
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