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The Gambler

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The Gambler (1974)

October. 02,1974
|
7.1
|
R
| Drama Crime
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New York City English professor Axel Freed outwardly seems like an upstanding citizen. But privately Freed is in the clutches of a severe gambling addiction that threatens to destroy him.

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Sexyloutak
1974/10/02

Absolutely the worst movie.

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Onlinewsma
1974/10/03

Absolutely Brilliant!

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Usamah Harvey
1974/10/04

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

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Arianna Moses
1974/10/05

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

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bkoganbing
1974/10/06

When your bookmaker tells you that you've got a gambling problem, better listen because you really do. Paul Sorvino who goes up and down on the roller-coaster with his best customer James Caan is quite the diagnostician. Caan bets with reckless abandon, but there ain't what George Peppard on The A Team called the 'jazz' without the risk.Caan stars as The Gambler. A professor of English literature and grandson of Morris Carnovsky a self made furniture tycoon Caan has a horrible gambling addiction. The 150 minute running time shows his highs and lows during a spree where he wins and loses some incredible sums. The difficulty in this role is that this man is truly a degenerate individual who uses and abuses people, some of the same people like some of us change our socks. His grandfather, his mother Jacqueline Brooks, girlfriend Lauren Hutton. No one is spared not even one of his students Carl Crudup whom he corrupts. Yet Caan is likable and charming and intelligent. It's what makes his corrupting venality that much more tragic.My first time seeing Paul Sorvino in a substantial role was in The Gambler. The man is a dangerous criminal yet he's also likable, wise and philosophic. He sure diagnoses Caan right. The cast has a few familiar faces like Carmine Caridi as another bookmaker, Burt Young in an extended sequence as a loan shark enforcer and James Woods very briefly as a bank officer.This is one of James Caan's best roles, maybe his best outside of Sonny Corleone, not to be missed.

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JasparLamarCrabb
1974/10/07

An exceptional film directed by Karel Reisz and written by James Toback. James Caan is a well-bred college professor & scion of a wealthy family who also happens to be a degenerate gambler. Owing over $40,000 to a bookie, he gets himself into more trouble when he gambles away the pay back money his mother gives him. Caan is exceptional in what has become an iconic role for him, though it's a bit of a stretch to take him seriously reading William Carlos Williams and Dostoevsky to his class. Nevertheless, it's a serious study of a gambler in way too deep and Toback's script is one his best. The excellent cinematography is by Victor J. Kemper and the supporting cast includes Lauren Hutton, Paul Sorvino, Jacqueline Brookes (as Caan's doctor mother) and Morris Carnovsky. A lot of great character actors are in it too: Burt Young; James Woods; M Emmett Walsh; Vic Tayback.

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jzappa
1974/10/08

Karel Reisz's The Gambler opens with a problem. Axel's incredulity that anyone could draw so many worthless poker hands uninterruptedly has led him irrevocably $44,000 into debt. He doesn't have it, but it's been a big-time game, and he must find it somewhere or be in profound trouble. The way Axel resolves his dilemma is only somewhat challenging. He sponges the money from his doctor mother.However then it's time to contend with his real problem, some overpowering urge within him that won't let him repay the money. He needs to lose, to experience threat, to put himself in jeopardy. He needs to gamble away the five figures on even more unpromising bets because in a way it isn't gambling that's his fixation: It's peril itself, borne out of a neurotic will to force his own reality."I play in order to lose," he tells his bookie at one point. "That's what gets my juice going. If I only bet on the games I know, I could at least break even." But he doesn't want that. In one scene, he's taken to staking he doesn't have on college basketball games chosen virtually without discrimination from the sports pages.And yet Axel Freed is not just a gambler, but a dreadfully complex man in his mid-thirties who earns his living as a university literature teacher. He teaches Dostoevsky, William Carlos Williams, Thoreau. But he doesn't give the impression he teaches their works so much as what he extracts from them to substantiate his own fixations. One of the students in his class has Axel worked out so totally that she always has the answer he's looking for, when he asks what a quote means. They're saying, as Axel interprets them, to take chances, to put the self in the line of fire.The death of the romantic era of heroes seems to preoccupy him. Before modernism's misanthropic upshot, he could've put himself to the test more honestly. His grandfather came to America destitute, fought and killed to prove himself, and still is a man of mammoth vigor at the age of eighty. The old man is reputable now, but the tale of his formative years beguiles Axel, who declaims it lyrically at the eightieth birthday party.Axel extracts nothing from 1974 to test himself against, though. He has to find his own hazards, to incite and tempt them. And the greatest danger in his life as a gambler is that behind his affable bookies and betting buddies is the pitiless company of the Mafia, the guys who take his bets like him, but if he doesn't pay, there's nothing they can do. "It's out of my hands," his crony Hips makes clear. "A bad gambling debt has got to be taken care of." And that adjoins an further aspect to this James Toback-scripted drama, shot at a time when lead James Caan was fighting his own cocaine addiction, which starts as a study of Axel Freed's personality, expands into the story of his world, and then pays off as a thriller. We become so very held by Axel's troubles and threats that they seem like our own. There's a scene where he sits in the bathtub and listens to the climactic minutes of a basketball game, and another scene where he sits in the bleachers and watches a fixed game while a pair of hired guns look on, and these scenes have a characteristic of tension that Reisz makes all the more genuine because he doesn't colonize the rest of his movie with stock characters.Axel Freed, as played by Caan, is himself a wholly persuasive personality, and unique. He doesn't have roots in other gambling movies or even from other characters he's played. And the people around him also are individual, distinctive creations. His mother, Jacqueline Brooks, is an experienced, self-supporting person who gives him the money because she fears for his safety, and yet sees that his problem is deeper than gambling. His grandfather, excellently played by Morris Carnovsky, is capable of meaning by his manners why he intrigues Axel so. The assorted bookies and collectors he encounters aren't completely Mafia pigeonholes in the sense that they enforce more in grief than in anger. Only his girlfriend falls short of feeling very authentic. Here's still another display of the failure of contemporary movies to give us fully developed female characters under thirty.There's a scene in this otherwise very powerful film that has James Caan on screen all by himself for two minutes, locked in a basement room, waiting to meet a Mafia boss who will possibly order his legs broken. In another movie, the scene could've felt too long, too eventless. But Reisz, Caan, and screenwriter James Toback have built the character and the movie so compellingly that the scene is not only effective, but effective two ways: first as tension, and then as character unraveling. As we look into Axel's imprisoned eyes we see a person who is terrified to death and yet obstinately prepared for this moment he has brought down upon himself.

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copper1963
1974/10/09

Gritty James Caan (Axel Freed) vehicle about addiction and its spillover into a pool of stark consequences. Hard to classify movie: Is it a dark drama or a complicated character study? It's a little of both, really. Caan, sporting hip clothes and a fresh perm, has everything a bachelor could wish for in life. He has a beautiful girl friend, doting, rich parents and a prestigious career. But there is little in life that can halt his appetite for gambling. Nothing. It's his true love. The movie straddles a New York underworld filled with loan sharks, violent thugs and pimps. On the bright side of the fence, however, is a world of family, love and literature. The film embraces the civil things in life: books, art, classical music. "Axel" (the perfect name for a failed hustler) and his mother even play the very civilized game of tennis, just before he hits her up for some cash. Later on in the film, he takes her to Coney Island for a swim. Their relationship is a solid one. She's a doctor--and her need to repair her broken son is evident throughout the picture. His father is a different story: a sell-made man, he doesn't understand his son's choice of girl, friends, career or lifestyle. Paul Sorvino is excellent as a collector of gambling debts, who admires Axel and his love of the arts. He has a soft spot for him, but that doesn't stop him from taking a swing at him. Axel blocks the punch (something rare for this character type) but not the reason for the blow. The location shooting in New York is spot on. The scenes at C.C.N.Y. stand on their own. They will make you check out the classics the next time you visit the library. I'll bet Axel's last dollar on that one. Promise.

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