In 'The Gambler,' James Caan stakes his swagger against the house
In 'The Gambler,' James Caan stakes his swagger against the house
The late actor embodied masculinity for a generation, but it was always more complicated than it seemed.
When James Caan makes his first appearance in 1974’s The Gambler, he’s wearing a form-fitting collared shirt buttoned only halfway down and opened up into a “V,” the great tufts of light brown chest hair popping out as majestically as a peacock’s plumage. Audiences were familiar with Caan’s linebacker frame, especially as he’d played football players in both Francis Ford Coppola’s lovely 1969 drama The Rain People and Brian’s Song, the 1971 TV weepie that won him an Emmy. And, of course, Caan’s performance as Sonny Corleone in Coppola’s The Godfather in 1972 had sealed his image as a man’s man—tough and fiercely loyal, but also impulsive and violent, without his brother Michael’s cold-blooded shrewdness. Everything about Sonny—and seemingly about Caan—was right there on the surface.
Or was it?
Caan helped define masculinity for a generation, but this was the generation of film school brats like Coppola who sought to question everything that Hollywood had been doing before they arrived. There would be no such thing as uncomplicated masculinity. Even Burt Reynolds, in the same year Sonny Corleone tried to steamroll his adversaries in the New York mob scene, led a group of weekend warriors to disaster in Deliverance, largely because of his arrogance and braggadocio. For Caan, though, projecting confidence and strength was only the baseline of performances that he would then color with hidden vulnerabilities, like the brain-damaged ex-athlete of The Rain People, or self-deprecating wit, like the con artist in Honeymoon in Vegas. Even when playing a role defined by meat-and-potatoes swagger, like his safecracker in Michael Mann’s 1981 heist classic Thief, Caan explored the limits of that type of man—and the limits of a world that couldn’t abide by his straight-shooting code.
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In The Gambler, Caan found his Five Easy Pieces, playing a role that unpacks the contradictions and inner turmoil of a man who exists in two worlds at once, neither comfortably. In Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson stars as a blue-collar oil rigger who’s revealed to be a secret sophisticate, running from his roots as a piano prodigy from a wealthy, intellectual family. In The Gambler, Caan is close to the reverse: Axel Freed’s a public sophisticate from a wealthy, intellectual family who’s a secret degenerate after hours. That’s not to suggest an equivalency between oil rigging and gambling, but both represent curious deviations from what might be expected from these men. Why trade a life that others would find enviable for one that’s so full of uncertainty and humility?
On that question, Axel turns to Dostoevsky. Lecturing to his literature class—always a cue that you’re about to get the themes of the film expressed out loud—Axel quotes from Notes From Underground: “Reason only satisfies man’s rational requirements. Desire, on the other hand, encompasses everything. Desire is life.” With that philosophical girding, Axel frequents the underground gambling halls of New York City, where he gets the action he wants from the sort of characters who will break your arms if you can’t pay your debts. In the opening scene, Axel is running so poorly at the tables that Hips (Paul Sorvino), the friendliest of his mob benefactors, calls it the worst luck he’s seen in 15 years. En route to running up $44,000 in borrowed losses, Axel insists on placing multiple $2,000 bets on “black” in roulette, even after he’s been told that wheel has been running “red” all night. It’s a telling moment. He seems to want to lose.
The fact that Axel does have a financial backstop calms his creditors somewhat, but does the opposite for him. He appeals to his mother (Jacqueline Brookes), a doctor, for the money and accompanies her like a scolded child as she makes large cash withdrawals at two different banks. But for Axel, the whole point is to operate without a net, and he immediately beelines to the nearest roadside pay phone to place three $15,000 bets on college basketball games. And while waiting for those results, he takes the cash he has on hand and flies his girlfriend Billie (Lauren Hutton) to Vegas for a night of high-roller tables and a suite overlooking the Strip. He goes on an intoxicating heater, only to chase it with the inevitable hangover.
Though vividly directed by Karel Reisz, a Czech-born British filmmaker making his first film in America, The Gambler is perhaps more properly credited to its writer, James Toback, who was making his semi-autobiographical debut. Toback’s romanticization of aberrant behavior would be a consistent feature of his work, with films like the excellent 1978 drama Fingers (which he directed), the Oscar-nominated Bugsy (which Barry Levinson directed), and a series of indie provocations in the late ‘90s and early ‘aughts, like 1997’s Two Girls and a Guy, 1999’s Black and White, and 2001’s Harvard Man. Toback’s high-minded fuck-ups have lost much of their intended raffish charm, however, in light of hundreds of allegations of sexual harassment. (He has denied those allegations, but 395 women contacted the Los Angeles Times about Toback’s behavior—not exactly a he-said/she-said situation.)
Toback would offer versions of Axel his entire career, including an entire film, Harvard Man, built around a major plot point in The Gambler, when Axel persuades one of his students, a basketball star, to shave points for the mob. But Caan is, to put it kindly, a more persuasive actor than Harvard Man’s Adrian Grenier, and his Axel is a fascinating enigma in that he doesn’t seem to know himself any better than we do. He talks to his students about the value of chasing the irrational thought that two plus two could equal five if you try hard enough to will that outcome into existence. But when his mother tells him, “Unless you come to terms with why you’re doing this, no money is going to get you out,” Dostoevsky can’t really save him anymore. The literary nobility he’d attached to his behavior starts to seem like pretentious window-dressing. The darker truth is that he’s simply a common addict.
It’s a credit to Caan’s charisma that we never feel like abandoning Axel, even as he makes terrible choices and mistreats the people closest to him, who all hope vainly that he can live up to his best self. Even the student who agrees to Axel’s point-shaving scheme seems to do it more for pity than profit: He can see his professor is in trouble and respects him enough to bail him out. Caan probably couldn’t have played a thoroughly despicable character if he tried—his gangster in Dogville, for one, makes the bloody climax seem morally justifiable—but he was also willing to look bad and bring himself low, and to expose the limits of masculinity. Axel is a tough guy to the end, actively inviting the violence that’s visited upon him when his luck (and his resources) finally run dry. The enigmatic smile Caan flashes in the final shot says it all: As he examines the bloody slash a pimp’s switchblade has left on his face, Axel has lost everything and everyone, and he’s hit the bottom rung. This is the life he has desired.