Atlantic City (1980)

In the early days of this blog, TCM ran Atlantic City, and since it was on late and didn't yet have a DVR, I stayed up late to watch it. It wasn't on DVD, so I didn't really want to do a review. It got a DVD release at the end of last year and a Blu-ray release a few years back. And since TCM ran it as part of 31 Days of Oscar, I decided to record it to do a post on here.

If you know your old movies, you'll know that Atlantic City, NJ was a beach resort for people from New York City and Philadelphia to get away to. With the post-war prosperity making transportation to more distant places easier, places like Atlantic City (or the seaside resort in a British movie like The Entertainer) declined in popularity such that by the time this movie was released in 1980, the city was in serious decline with old resorts being imploded. The city and state legalized gamblng and new casinos sprung up to make the city what it is today, but as we see the opening of the movie, we get a montage of the city in flux, including an old guy Lou (Burt Lancaster) lecherously leering at the younger woman in the apartment across the courtyard, Sally (Susan Sarandon), as she washes herself off with lemon juice to remove the stench from the casino oyster bar.

Sally is trying to make something of her life after what has been a difficult life, learning to become a casino dealer under the watchful eye of Frenchman Joseph (Michel Piccoli), but as for Lou, he's too old to make a new start. He's been running numbers even though that's becoming less profitable with the new casinos. He supplements this meager earning by being a sort of kept man for faded beauty queen Grace (Kate Reid), who came to the city to escape her own dead-end past, only to get married, become a widow, and get stuck with her dog in the apartment in the floor below Lou and Sally.

Their lives are about to intertwine, and not in a good way. Over in Philadelphia, a scruffy man enters a phone booth where he's just seen a drop for a transfer of a block of cocaine take place; apparently the intended recipient is supposed to come by in a few minutes to pick it up. But this scruffy man, Dave (Robert Joy) swoops in and picks up the cocaine first, which seems like a mighty stupid thing to do except that he really needs the money, having a pregnant girlfriend Chrissie (Hollis McLaren). Dave and Chrissie make their way to Atlantic City.

Why? It turns out that Dave is Sally's estranged husband. And Chrissie is Sally's sister! Imagine a complicated life. Unsurprisingly, Sally has no desire to see Dave, a chancer who wants to stay with Sally long enough to sell off the cocaine. This is where Lou gets involved, as Dave offers Lou a substantial sum of money to hid the cocaine in Lou's apartment since the bad guys who are obviously on the lookout for whoever stole their cocaine are less likely to suspect Lou. Chrissie, meanwhile, helps Grace with Grace's sore feet, which also helps bring Lou and Sally together.

As I said, those bad guys already know that Dave took the drugs, and sure enough, they're going to find him. When they do, they bump him off, leaving Lou to decide that he's going to sell the drugs himself since he's got nothing else to live for anyway and this might allow him one last chance at glory.

Atlantic City is a wonderful movie, thanks to pretty much every part of the movie-making process. Director Louis Malle was really helped out by having the actual city being at this point in its development, when it was in flux, much like New York in all those films I like to describe as taking place in a city just before Gerald Ford told it to drop dead; Atlantic City just had a few more years to decline further. The presence of Robert Goulet in a cameo at a hospital opening adds a really nice touch to the sense of the city's decay.

Even though idiots trying to sell off drugs that aren't theirs is a story that's been done in several movies (well, I suppose you might want to add in those movies where people wind up with the drugs through no fault of their own such as Wait Until Dark), the way the story is told in Atlantic City works very well because of the ability of Malle and the screenwriters to include more realistic sex and violence with after the end of the Production Code.

But you also really have to credit the acting for making Atlantic City the fine move that it is. Lancaster gets a better role than he'd had in a long time, and milks it for all it's worth, while Sarandon does very well as the woman trying to make a better life. Joy is suitably creepy, while Reid is also quite good playing a former beauty.

Atlantic City is a movie I can give an extremely high recommendation to. I just wish it showed up on TV more often.