The Great Movies III

How did the Resistance fighters feel, risking their lives for a country that had officially surrendered? What were their rewards? In 1940, Melville says, the Resistance in all numbered only six hundred. Many of them died under torture, including Jean Moulin, the original of Luc Jardie. Kessel: "Since he was no longer able to speak, one of the Gestapo chiefs, Klaus Barbie, handed him a piece of paper on which he had written, Are you Jean Moulins?' Jean Moulin's only reply was to take the pencil from Colonel Barbie and cross out the `s."'

might have thought Atlantic City was more of a fantasy had I not lived for several weeks circa 1970 in a hotel near Sunset Strip named the Sunset Marquis. It is now a luxury hotel of the same name, but at that time a room was $19 a night, and the residents included Tiny Tim, Van Heflin, and Elaine May. You dialed room service, you got Greenblatt's Deli. A scrap-iron dealer named Jack Sachs presided as the "mayor" from his poolside efficiency. He ran the cocktail hour as his personal salon, supplying whiskey to the circulating population of show-biz folks Jackie Gayle, Roy Scheider, Harold Ramis-on their way up, down, or sideways.

A similar establishment provides the location for Louis Malle's Atlantic City (1980), which takes place in an apartment house near the Boardwalk. It's slated for demolition, and all around are vacant lots filled with rubble and the sky-cranes of new construction. Every exterior shot seems to have a background of debris being shoved out of upper windows, or bulldozers clearing vacant lots.

In this doomed building live three people: an oyster-bar waitress named Sally (Susan Sarandon), an aging numbers runner named Lou (Burt Lancaster), and a widow named Grace (Kate Reid), who came to the city forty years ago for a Betty Grable lookalike contest and depends on Lou to run her errands, some of a sexual nature. She lives in an apartment so filled with photographs, stuffed animals, feather boas, geegaws, silk festoons, and glitz that you might think it is a fantasy, but not me, because I saw Tiny Tim's apartment one morning when the maid left the door standing open.

Lou claims to have been big-time in Vegas in the old days, "a cellmate of Bugsy Siegel," no less. Now he walks a daily route through Atlantic City's urban decay, taking twentyfive-cent bets on the numbers. It's implied that a stipend from Grace keeps him afloat. At night he stands behind the blinds of his darkened apartment and watches as Sally engages in an after-work ritual. She cuts fresh lemons and caresses her skin to take away the shellfish smell.

Later, after they know each other, Lou confesses that he used to watch her. She says she knew there was somebody, but didn't know who. "What did you see when you looked at me?" she asks. He describes her ritual in great detail, and when the camera cuts back to her, she has opened her blouse, as if his words were stage directions.

Into this closed world come two loose cannons, Dave and Chrissie. Dave was once married to Sally, then ran away with Chrissie, Sally's younger sister. They're a better match, equally spaced out; Sally on the other hand wants to succeed. "Teach me stuff," she asks Lou at one point.

She's taking lessons in blackjack from a casino boss (Michel Piccoli). Dave has stolen some drugs in Philadelphia, wants to sell them in Atlantic City, and has a contact named Alfie (Al Waxman) who runs a permanent poker game in a hotel room. Gangsters from Philadelphia inevitably come looking for their drugs and for Dave, who becomes dead. Chrissie becomes the confidant of Grace, Lou inherits the drugs and makes the deals, and then he buys himself a new white suit and sets himself up as a knight in shining armor to protect Sally from the guys who killed her ex-husband.

There is nothing particularly new in this screenplay, written by the playwright John Guare, and assembled from drugs, colorful characters, a decaying city, memories of the past. What makes Atlantic City sweetand that's the word for it-is the gentleness with which Lou handles his last chance at amounting to something, and the wisdom with which Sally handles Lou. Lou wants to take the drug money as a gift from the gods and recreate his glory days. The question is, were there really glory days? A gangster as important as Lou claims to have been should be, by now, either rich or dead.

Lou is not a letch. He has dignity, the same kind of instinctive aristocratic self-regard that made Lancaster's performance in Visconti's The Leopard (1963) so authentic. When you embody dignity, you don't need to play it. There is a moment in the hotel room with the poker players when he casually uses the side of his arm to brush away someone who invades his space. And a moment when he says quietly to another man, "Don't touch the suit."That he can seriously see himself as the lover of the much younger Sally is more plausible when he uses the word "protector."