Tag: Karel Reisz

by Kathleen Murphy, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: The Gambler (2)

Written by Kathleen Murphy August 11, 2015

[Originally published in Movietone News 38, January 1975]

The Gambler is a curiously cerebral film in which the play of ideas (particularly literary assessments of the American experience) is transferred from the incestuous séance of the academic seminar to green baize gambling tables. There, those ideas are raised, not as ghosts, but as the highest stakes a man can wager. In California Split Robert Altman used gambling as an excuse for getting at the marginalia, the milieu, rather than as a metaphysical metaphor. Director Karel Reisz and screenwriter James Toback (a professor of English) are clearly after bigger fish—say, about the size of Moby Dick. For like Ahab, Reisz’s gambler bets on himself, his own power or will, to make some impression, to impose some meaning on … what? Perhaps that which resists will: fate or chance, the existential territory that refuses to be enfeoffed by the central “I-am.”

Review: The Gambler (1)

Written by Rick Hermann August 10, 2015

[Originally published in Movietone News 38, January 1975]

James Caan has graduated from the half-wit college boy of Coppola’s The Rain People right into a professorship at NYCC in his latest picture, Karel Reisz’ heavyhanded non-exploration into the befuddled and befuddling id of a compulsive gambler which ultimately becomes knotted up in its own tangle of 19th century existentialism and carelessly applied Nietzschean superman metaphysics. Somehow I was more convinced by Caan’s gentle inarticulateness in Coppola’s movie than I was by the cutely masochistic cool he sardonically exudes in The Gambler, and although he’s still impaling women against walls (shades of The Godfather) and strutting about with the typical Caan machismo which fails to be tempered by his role as a teacher in Reisz’s film, the character of Axei Freed lacks some of the gritty credibility which Caan was able to give to the role of gangster Sonny Corleone. Which may not be so much Caan’s fault as that of Reisz and screenwriter Toback who, instead of trying to develop their character from the bottom up, begin in some metaphysical realm far above his head and pigeonhole his personality in a framework of neatly defined psychological concepts, with the result that Caan’s character reads like a textbook case rather than reminds us of a man.

Review: Who’ll Stop the Rain?

Written by Robert C. Cumbow April 22, 2010June 27, 2020

[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979]

“I’ve been waiting all my life to fuck up like this.” That’s the closest we ever get to the motivation of Vietnam War correspondent John (Michael Moriarty), who suddenly, unaccountably decides to buy two kilos of uncut heroin to smuggle from Saigon back to California, there to sell it at enormous profit. By the time his wife Marge (Tuesday Weld) and his old Marine Corps buddy Ray (Nick Nolte, who with a performance like this under his belt is to be completely and unconditionally forgiven for The Deep) are menaced very nearly to death by the mob (or are they the cops? or are they the mob after all?), it’s too late for John to change what he has got them all into. “I can’t believe I’ve done this,” he tells his bookseller father-in-law (a feisty David Opatoshu), who jejunely replies, “A sense of unreality is no defense.”