Know when to hold 'em

Another of the movies that showed up on one of the streaming services -- I think Pluto TV since they seem to have a whole bunch of Paramount stuff -- was the original 1974 version of The Gambler. Apparently it got a remake about a decade ago, but I never heard of the remake. Anyhow, I sat down to watch the 1974 version so that I could do a post on it here.

James Caan plays Axel Freed, a man who you'd think could have at least a comfortable life, if not the most glamorous life. He's a professor of English at what is probably the equivalent of CUNY (City University of New York), New York City's equivalent of a state school or what would be SUNY (State University of New York) campuses in the rest of the state if the main schools in the system were still calling themseves SUNY. He's the grandson of a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, Grandpa Lowenthal (Morris Carnovsky), who worked hard and succeeded in life, growing old as a wealthy man.

The only problem is that Axel has developed a fairly serious gambling addiction. Now, this was in the early 1970s, when the legal gambling was in Las Vegas, while any other gambling was illegal and as a result controlled by crime syndicates. I don't think that Atlantic City had even started building the new set of casinos yet. So he has to place bets with bookies such as Hips (Paul Sorvino), who are underlings for the Mob. The Mob makes its money partly on worse odds and partly on usurious interest rates to repay the loans, and Axel is to the point where he's pretty badly in debt to them. Hips personally doesn't dislike Axel, but he's got a job to do which is to get that money.

Mom (Jacqueline Brookes) has too much of an emotional attachment to her son, unlike Grandpa, who has the good sense not to "lend" the money to Axel to pay off his gambling debts since Grandpa knows it'll turn from a loan to a gift. Mom is either too stupid to realize this or too much of an enabler, so she gives a substantial portion of her retirement savings to Axel. Axel then goes off to Las Vegas with his girlfriend Billie (Lauren Hutton), where he first wins back the money to pay off his debts, and then doesn't know when to quit so he winds up losing all his money.

But, there is still one way Axel can pay back that debt. One of Axel's students is the star of the college's basketball team, and the mobsters will write off Axel's debt if Axel can get the student to shave points -- that is, not deliberately throw the game since everybody still wants to win, but play just badly enough so that the favored time wins by a closer margin than the betting line has said the final margin would be. But can Axel really ever escape his debts...?

The Gambler is another of those movies where I can see why other people liked it. However, if you don't like the Axel character because you want to reach through the screen and shake him like Bette Davis did to Miriam Hopkins in Old Acquaintance, you're probably going to have a much tougher time with The Gambler. Unfortunately, I found myself in that latter camp. The ending also has what to me felt like a bit of an epilogue that came out of the blue and didn't work for me.

So The Gambler is definitely another one of those movies that you're going to need to watch for yourself and draw your own judgment on.