Mad Fantasy

By R.S.

THE GAMBLER

Directed by KAREL REISZ Screenplay by JAMES TOBACK

One of the inescapable commonplaces of popular psychology is the belief that compulsive gambling, like alcoholism, is a disease and its victims are more to be pitied than censured. Clinically speaking, that view makes good sense. But dramatically it is something of a downer.

So step right up and meet Axel (James Caan), the gambler as existential hero, a man determined to risk not only money but the love of family, a good woman (Lauren Hutton) and self. Why?

Because, it would seem, he has read too much Dostoyevsky. From literature's most famous betting freak he has learned that the essence of heroism lies in seeking out risks you do not have to take. In Axel's case, recklessness takes the form of exercising a willed belief that Harvard and ten is a credible basketball bet.

This way, of course, lie only madness and despair, but that is all right with Axel, since he has had all the boring advantages-a well-to-do family, a proper education. Indeed, when he has a few minutes to spare from the morning line he teaches literature in a New York City college. He knows-oh God, does he know-what he is doing. He is nearly consumed with self-awareness.

As we meet him, he is dropping $44,000 in what used to be known as a "gambling hell." The rest of the film is devoted to his efforts to settle this debt before the Mob settles his hash. That should be an easy matter-Mom, after all, has 44 grand which our boy obtains through brief cajolery. But paying off the bad guys is just too simple for a self-made Dostoyevskian man. He must risk the bundle in Las Vegas (where he doubles it), then lose it all on some unwise basketball bets. He finally settles the matter by getting his favorite student -a black -to shave points in a game, then expiate that sin by provoking a black pimp and whore to punish him unwittingly in a switchblade battle.

Somehow it is all too neat, this balancing of the moral books, just as Axel's character is too contrived for the movie to be emotionally gripping. We are too aware of Writer Toback's undigested intellectual debts as well as his rather adolescent romanticizing of his subject. Nor has London-based Director Reisz (Morgan, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) fully absorbed any of the milieus through which The Gambler moves. Most of the time he seems to be taking snapshots for an album to be called something like "Colorful Habits of the Natives."

As for Caan, he is too trim and cool ever to make us believe that he is more interesting than any other spoiled child. To be sure, he is attempting a difficult thing -acting out the role of gratuitous self-torture -but his performance is never really as vertiginously mad as it should be. The whole film is just a fantasy about going crazy, a fantasy never for a moment in danger of becoming the genuine article. sbR.S.

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