esrosedotblog

ATLANTIC CITY(1980)

Today's movie; NYT1000Best; Louis Malle; the young Susan Sarandon; Kate Reid in a wonderful character role as a gigolee--the boss of a gigolo who is Burt Lancaster. We miss Burt a lot. He never got a face lift, he played the way he was, and in here he is 67 being about that age and even has bad hair which is his own; badly coiffed. The film is a wonderful exercise in comparing the demise of the old and the birth of the new; the City being a huge backdrop metaphor. If you have spent any time in Atlantic City, you see a lot of fading landmarks. It opens with the big walk-on elephant that used to be at the entrance of the city off the causeway.

Lancaster had a great career and is probably in 5 or 6 of the 1000Best films. He has 88 credits at IMDb. We both had a thing for him as kids; and still do, actually. He did a lot of shirts-off work and had the stuff to show for it; it starts there. Then he grew up with us. He was 20 years older; so we always looked to him. He was one of a few older stars who had the beef. He had been an acrobat; the skills fully on display in a potboiler called THE PIRATE which we still watch from time to time. It is great fun. Even when he was in a bad film he was great (we saw him in THE SWIMMER earlier). And so on.

Back to the film. This is early Sarandon. She glows. Malle must have loved lighting her. She has her shirt off in this film too. Even I know that she has the beef for it too. I mentioned Kate Ried. There is peek at the very young Wallace Shawn. Robert Goulet does a wonderful caricature of himself; a tongue in cheek thing that he never hesitated to do; why we have to like him. There are a lot of really good character roles in this. It is a one man film--auteur; Malle. I give it a 4 on the Netflix5scale.