Atlantic City, USA

Plot synopsis:
The opening close-up shot shows a knife slicing lemons. The camera pans out to Sally (Susan Sarandon) washing herself with the lemon juice in front of the window at her kitchen sink in an apartment building in Atlantic City. She is listening to the operatic soprano aria Casta Diva from Norma. From the next apartment, an older man, Lou (Burt Lancaster), is spying on Sally as she bathes.We then cut to a phone booth. A young long-haired man goes in, pretending to make a call, then grabs something in tin foil. This is Dave. Another, tough looking guy with bleach blond hair goes in the same phone booth, obviously to get what was in the tin foil, but can't find it.We then see Dave hitchhiking with a young pregnant woman, Chrissie. They are both dressed like gypsies or hippies. in the background are the marshes of New Jersey and industrial smoke stacks. The two hippies walk through Atlantic City's boardwalk and go into a casino where they find Sally, who works in one of the casino's seafood restaurants. We learn the hippies are Sally's estranged husband, Dave, and her sister, Chrissie. The two had run off together. Sally says she's not going to let them stay with her, but relents.Lou passes them as they enter Sally's apartment. He goes downstairs to Grace's apartment, a woman about his own age who lives in an apartment with girlish pink decor. We find that Lou does errands for her for cash and that they have a combative co-dependent relationship.Back upstairs, Dave tries to kiss his estranged wife, Sally, who gives him the cold shoulder, telling him he ruined her chances of making a life in Las Vegas. He leaves angrily, but sees her purse and steals her wallet from it on the way out.Lou argues with Grace over five dollars. She tells him to steal it. Calling him king of the crooks. He takes the abuse calmly. He takes Grace's dog Peppie for grooming, and while there he asks the proprietress if she has any bets. We see Lou make his rounds as a small-time bookie.Sally is taking classes to be a blackjack dealer. We learn that she is taking French classes and her dream is to go to Monte Carlo and work there as a blackjack dealer.Lou brings the money he has gathered from bets to a man with organized crime connections, Fred O'Reilly, at a bar. Coincidentally, Dave is there to meet with Fred too, hoping to sell the drugs he stole from the phone booth pick-up. Lou watches Dave walk in the back with Fred. Dave shows Fred a plastic bag of white powdered heroin. Fred takes a sniff and says it's very nice. White Christmas. Fred tells Dave to get a leisure suit and lose the hippy look. Dave wants an advance. While Fred takes a piss, he tells Dave he can't do business with him. He gives Dave a card with a number on it, presumably a place he can sell the dope.
Dave chases Lou down on the Atlantic City boardwalk as he walks back to the apartment building. Dave offers Lou $100 to use his apartment for an hour.Lou returns Peppie the poodle to Grace, then leaves with Dave who asks to borrow Grace's scale. The two go downstairs and Dave cuts the white powder with baby laxative on Lou's kitchen table. Dave tells Lou he just turned $2,000 into $4,000. Dave asks Lou to walk him around, but Lou says he can't leave Grace. Dave has Chrissie go into Grace's apartment to rub her feet so that Lou will be free to show him around. As they walk the boardwalk, Lou tells Dave he knew Bugsy Siegel and that he killed people in the past when he worked for the people who worked for the people. He said he would swim in the ocean and come out feeling clean again.Lou and Dave go to a hotel. Dave says he wants Lou to go to room 307 and exchange the drugs for money. Lou asks why Dave isn't coming and Dave says he isn't dressed for it. While Lou is upstairs exchanging the drugs for money, and Dave is walking around. A car pulls up with Fred from the bar and the blond man from the phone booth from whence Dave stole the drugs. The blond man chases Dave into an elevated garage. A chase ensues ending when the blond man captures Dave and stabs him in the chest.Lou stops in a bathroom after collecting $4,000 for the drugs. He bumps into an old friend, Buddy O'Brian, who is now a bathroom attendant. They reminisce about a farcical mass rubber-buying job and Lou tells him he lives too much in the past. As Lou walks home he sees Dave being carried on a gurney into an ambulance.The police come into Sally's hotel and give her back her wallet. She asks where they found it and realizes something has happened to Dave and that it was he who stole her wallet. Sally rushes to the hospital and watches as they pull the blanket over the motionless Dave. When they tell her she can claim the body, she says she doesn't want it and storms out, past Robert Goulet singing a song about Atlantic City surrounded by chorus girls. He's at the hospital doing a benefit. After attempting to call Dave's parents, Sally walks past Lou who is at the hospital as well. He introduces himself as her neighbor and says he's sorry about Dave.
Lou helps her call Dave's parents, when she can't handle the call, Lou talks to them for her. After they get back to the apartment building they each go to their respective apartments. Lou again spies on Sally as she bathes topless at the kitchen sink, spreading lemon juice on her arms and bare chest.Lou goes downstairs to Grace's and sends Chrissie back upstairs. Lou puts on an old jazz record and climbs into bed with Grace who protests, "Lou, whats got into you?" But doesn't resists too much.The next morning, Lou follows Dave's procedure for cutting the drugs in his kitchen while whistling. He arranges for Dave's body to be sent to Dave's parents. He then goes back to the same client from the previous day and gets another $4,000. He visits O'Brian the bathroom attendant and gives him a large tip and tells him to visit a tailor.Lou takes Sally out to dinner. Hes wearing a new suit and pretends to be more wealthy than he is. Sally has to go to work on a house she and some friends are fixing up. Lou takes her. While there, Lou tells more of his history with Grace. That he's protected her for 40 years, since she was a teenager. But she got married along the way. Sally asks if Lou loves Grace. But Lou says he watches Sally. He then tells her, he's been watching her through her window, he then describes in loving detail her bathing ritual involving lemons and soap. Rather than being creeped out, Sally is touched and aroused. She takes off her blouse. And Lou delicately begins to run his hands over her. Presumably they make love (off-camera).As they return to their apartment building, they are accosted by the blond gangster who stabbed Dave. He rips Sally's clothes and breaks her radio and rifles through her purse, looking for the drugs or any proceeds. Lou is held back by one of the blond gangster's associates. As they come up the stairs Grace angrily confronts Lou and Sally, saying men had been ransacking the place. She is especially annoyed by Lou's new suit. "What the hell are you wearing?" She berates Lou and tells Sally in the old days his nickname was numb nuts.Sally's apartment has been ransacked. Lou, who has slipped into his own apartment, begins packing a suitcase. And with shaking hands gathers the remaining dope and a gun.Grace tells Sally it's not the first time Lou has run. He ran when her husband, Cookie, was killed, "so he'll run away now". Sally confronts Chrissie. She admits that Dave and she came to Atlantic City to sell some dope to get money for the baby. She tells Sally Dave went out with Lou the day before. Grace says, "they took my scale." She goes and angrily knocks and his door and sees that he's gone. Sally realizes Lou has been spending the drug money to romance her.Lou visits the client at the hotel and sells him the rest of the dope, except for a last $1,000 worth, since that's all the money the client has. He tells the client to tell Fred to leave the women alone, that what those hoods are looking for he's got.Sally goes to her blackjack dealing class, but is told the manager wants to see her. He says he can't afford to have people with connections like hers working in the casino. He fires her. Sally finds Lou playing blackjack in the casino. As she walks up to him, the blond gangster and his associate are asking him where the money is and they ask him to go outside. Lou won't leave the table. Sally yells at him saying he's playing with Dave's money. He tells her to sit down. She throws a fit. As Sally creates a scene and is forcibly thrown out by security, Lou slips out and gets in a cab.Sally manages to follow him to the bus station and tricks a bus driver into thinking he's her father and she needs to get him off the bus so he can get his medication. She demands that Lou give her the money. As they walk away from the station, the blond gangster and his associate corner them in an alley. The blond gangster holds a switchblade in Sally's face.Lou shoots both gangsters and he and Sally flee in their car. Lou is proud of himself and laughs about killing them." I protected you", he says. She tells him to put the gun down.They go to a hotel and order champagne. Their reverie is broken when they turn on the TV and see a news bulletin about the murders. But the news flash doesn't indicate that they are suspects. So they relax.We then see Grace and Chrissie connecting. Grace tells how she came during the war to Atlantic City for a Betty Grable look-alike contest, but the boardwalk was full of Betty Grable look-alikes. She offers to buy Chrissie a ticket home to Saskatchewan. Lou asks Sally to come with him to Florida where he has friends. She is leaning towards doing it. Then a police sketch of Lou is shown on the TV and Sally realizes it wouldn't work.In the morning Lou takes the telephone in the bathroom and calls Grace and admits the murders. He says he wishes Grace could be there. He is strangely proud and we realize he had never actually killed anyone before, contrary to what he had told Dave earlier on the boardwalk.While he's on the phone, Sally gets up and goes through his wallet. She takes most of the money. Lou peeks out the bathroom door and sees her doing this, but doesn't say anything. She makes up a story about wanting to get pizza, saying shell bring some back. As she's walking out the door, he tells her don't forget to ditch the car, indicating he knows she isn't coming back. She drives away, listing to a radio program about the wines of France.Lou asks for a taxi back to Atlantic City, looks at the paper the man was reading about the murders and tells the man that he did it. Grace sells the last $1,000 worth of dope to the client at the hotel, as she walks away, Lou takes her arm. They walk down the boardwalk together with smiles on their faces. The camera pans up to a wrecking ball slamming into a hole in a hotel being demolished as the end credits rolll.

Tags: neo noir, murder

Review:
Burt Lancaster gives an astonishing performance aching with melancholy in this lovely, quiet little film by Louis Malle.
He plays a one-time gangster (in his own mind at least quite a big shot) who, like the city that gives the film its title, isn't what he used to be.
Susan Sarandon, in an early-career performance, plays a woman who works in one of the casinos and whose life intersects with Lancaster's because of a drug deal her no-good husband was involved in.
The two don't ever become friends exactly, but they each get something from the other until the sad ending, when Lancaster realizes that there isn't a place in his life for Sarandon, and that there may not be a place in the world for him.The film is a low-key character study that completely satisfies, and gives Lancaster perhaps his last great role.Grade: A.
They can, if they have the money to do so, dine in reasonably good restaurants or stroll on the boardwalks, and we can almost hear the hoofbeats of yesteryear.What modern Atlantic City is to its brassy past, Burt Lancaster is to his own history.
In Atlantic City, assumptions about the American way of life, the American dream and the America reality, circa 1978, are examined through the artistry of master French film director, Louis Malle (Murmur of the Heart (1971), Pretty Baby (1978), Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987), etc.)The film begins with a shot of Sallie Matthews (Susan Sarandon at 34) at the kitchen sink of her apartment squeezing lemons and rubbing them on her arms, her neck, her face as Lou Pasco (Burt Lancaster at 68) watches unbeknownst to her from across the way, the window of his apartment looking into hers.
They need a place to stay and have the gall to impose on her.Both Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon were nominated for Academy Awards for their performances, as was director Louis Malle and writer John Guare for his script.
Even though he emphasizes the tawdry and the commonplace: the untalented trio singing off key, the slums semi-circling the casinos where Lou sells numbers, the boarded-up buildings, the sad, tiny apartments about to be torn down, Robert Goulet as a cheap Vegas-style lounge act, etc., in the end we feel that it's not so bad after all.I should also mention Kate Reid who played Grace, the invalid, ex-beauty queen widow of a mobster, who orders Lou about.
Set in 1970s Atlantic City in the early days of legalized gambling, we find a young woman (Susan Sarandon) working in the fish section of a casino restaurant while learning to be a card dealer.
Not only do Lancaster and Sarandon excel, but so does director Louis Malle.Malle makes this almost a modern-day film noir with the grittiness of the characters and the setting, when Atlantic City looked its worst.
"Atlantic City" is a great film where the setting is just as rich and complex a character as the people traversing its streets (and boardwalk).
Louis Malle delivers one of the most understated directorial turns working with a delightfully witty script (that has many great lines, like the one above) and a great cast (Lancaster perfect in a comeback role, Sarandon stunning in one of her early great performances).
Louis Malle captures it all with this story about a retired small time member of the local organized crime syndicate (Burt Lancaster) who comes into a small fortune worth of stolen cocaine when the guy that stole it (Robert Joy) is killed by the dealers who meant to buy it in the first place down in Philadelphia, and are now hot on his heels as well.
Back in the life, though unwittingly, he sells the coke to an ongoing poker game in one of the suites in a new hotel, bit by bit, and falls into the romance of his dreams with young Susan Sarandon, whom he watched every night from his hotel room as she bathed her breasts with lemon juice in her room across the way.
Louis Malle created a poetic "Atlantic City," released in 1980 and starring Burt Lancaster, Susan Sarandon, and Kate Reid.
Lancaster plays Lou, a small-time mobster from the old days of Atlantic City.
Grace came to Atlantic City in the '40s as a contestant in a Betty Grable lookalike contest, met her future husband, and never left.Lou meets a young waitress and would-be croupier, Sally, and their lives soon collide.
Susan Sarandon does a great job as Sally, creating a totally believable character.John Guare has written a great script, the first important component of a film, and it was in the hands of a master, Louis Malle.
Then enter Sally Matthews(Susan Sarandon) a waitress and card dealer in training for one of the casinos has her life turned up when her sister and ex show up from Philadelphia after finding a big bag of white powder!
This film has a great script (John Guare), brilliant direction (Louis Malle), and two stars (Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon) at the top of their form.
Burt Lancaster plays an aging gangster who teams up with a troubled young casino worker(Susan Sarandon, in breakthrough role), when their lives get out of hand.
Susan Sarandon offers solid support with a typically excellent performance, while Michel Piccoli and Kate Reid make the most of their respective roles (both eccentrics in their own way).The film provides a surprising milieu for Malle but he manages to bring a European sensibility or, if you like a Continental style, to a fundamentally American setting.
While there are a couple of exciting action sequences (most memorable is Lancaster's killing of two hoods/drug dealers, his first 'hit' which makes him giddy with delight and finally proud of himself, after having spent his life spinning tall tales of his stature in the underworld!), it's clearly a character-driven piece - courtesy of John Guare's incisive script - and its tone introspective and bittersweet over a vanished way of life ("the good old days" as they're typically referred to); and, yet, everything is not bleak but actually quite funny on occasion!
Against a vivid backdrop of decaying splendor and shallow glamour the film gathers together several odd, unrelated characters in an unpredictable series of stories involving an aging petty gangster, an aspiring young casino croupier, two hippies on the run with a stolen roll of cocaine, and sundry other killers, dreamers, and fortune hunters.
For lack of a better tag, and because both city and script are built around the magnetic lure of easy money, the film might be called a crime story, but the richness of John Guare's screenplay, filled as it is with broken dreams and rose colored memories (says a nostalgic Bert Lancaster, "You should've seen the Atlantic Ocean back then") can't be pigeon-holed so lightly..
In his fourth Academy Award nominated role Burt Lancaster essays the role of Lou Pasco, low level numbers runner and guardian and service provider to Kate Reid, a former gangster's moll from the old days.
That forces Lancaster and Sarandon into an alliance of convenience, but who would think at Burt's age and he was 76 when he made Atlantic City, he'd find love as well.
Some interior stuff was shot in Montreal and the film wrapped on the last day of 1980 and released in 1981.Atlantic City got Oscar nominations for Lancaster and for Susan Sarandon and both ran up against On Golden Pond and lost to Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn.
The moment he gets some money, he goes out and buys a white suit and white shoes and wears them through the rest of the movie - looking like a man totally out of place with his surroundings and totally out of touch with reality.Susan Sarandon in an early role is the ambitious small town girl who wants to work in a casino in France.
It's pleasingly voyeuristic without crossing the line into perversion, and hey, it's just a nice way to start the movie.At first I found it a little hard to accept Lou Pascal (Burt Lancaster, 67 years-old but still ten times as dapper as you or I will ever be) as the small-time former gangster that he's evidently supposed to have been.
I still wondered exactly why he'd never made good before, but for me the fact that he convinced me but still left a lot of unexplored depth to the character is what makes his performance so great.Director Louis Malle strikes exactly the right balance between nostalgia and a bizarre sort of hopeful redemption.
Louis Malle's "Atlantic City" is as much a look at the changes that the east coast's gambling mecca was undergoing as it is a story of an aging gangster and a waitress.
He also takes care of an elderly woman (Kate Reid) who came to Atlantic City decades ago for a Betty Grable lookalike contest, and who now mostly stays in bed with her little dog, pulling a lever to ring a bell to get him to come down and tend to her, yelling at him when he does.The film is an exploration into aging, fading glory, and the struggles of life, but in an interesting way, it shows us that the glory days really might not have been all that glorious.
A revivifying Atlantic City is the backdrop for this poignant drama about Lou Pascal (Burt Lancaster), an aging small-time hood, and Sally Matthews (Susan Sarandon), a young waitress who dreams of becoming a casino croupier.
Malle also makes great use of late 1970's Atlantic City, seen as a rundown, cut-rate casino-town trying to rebuild its brand, a fitting venue for a story about aging and failure, hope and resilience, and the importance of looking good (Lou's first purchases with his dope-windfall is a sharp new suit).
I was expecting a flashy picture based on the title of the movie, but it's a smaller, more subtle film that boasts very fine leading performances from the great Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon.
His dream died long ago as he now works a widow named Grace (Kate Reid) who came to Atlantic City herself for a Betty Grable look-a-like contest.
You've got an aging petty crook (Burt Lancaster), a drug dealing user, a doormat of a woman (Susan Sarandon), her bizarre and spacey sister and a nasty old lady with an equally nasty dog--all of which are hard to care in the least about and one who is just thoroughly despicable.
This movie is about a woman (Sarandon) who lives in Atlantic City and is working at an oyster bar in a casino while she goes through gaming school to become a dealer in a casino.
Present-day oyster bar waitress/ croupier-in-training Susan Sarandon crosses paths with former Old World gangster Burt Lancaster while dealing with her estranged drug-trafficking husband, a relationship that ignites a final fire under the romantic-minded gentleman who remembers Atlantic City the way it used to be.
The pregnant Chrissie wants to take LSD "so we can learn from the baby's wisdom" and Dave, a coke dealer, wants to dump his stash and his past.Sally (Susan Sarandon), who is both Chrissie's sister and Dave's estranged wife, shovels shrimp behind the counter of a casino oyster bar but meanwhile sees to her dream by attending dealers' school - "I gotta develop my blackjack; I'm gonna deal my way to Europe" - and, total woman that she is, works on improving her body with lemon juice and her soul with a cassette of Bellini's Norma.
When she becomes romantically involved with Lou, she has one request: "Teach me stuff." Near Sally's tattered domicile (Sally would use that word, rather than the mundane "apartment") Lou waits gallantly on Grace (Kate Reid), a former beauty queen and mobster's moll reduced by time and Lou's lack of discipline to a state of kitschy caterwaul.Grace, lying in a bed strewn with ribbons and poodles and other fussy things, bitches at and about Lou; if she were an inanimate object, she'd be a battered pink plastic lawn flamingo, but Lou, a romantic to the tips of his carefully ironed silk ties, cherishes the memory of what she was, while mildy grousing at the monstrous Baby Jane she is.Lou's most notable characteristic is his tolerance: a man old enough to have "run numbers for the dinosaurs," a man who can say wistfully, "The Atlantic Ocean was something then" - this is not a man apt to be angry long at infirmity, senility or even cruelty.Lou's dapper, chivalrous, compassionate existence informs the sensibility of Atlantic City with something very much like love; the movie's unpredictably explosive, joke-like tone can be inferred from the fact that Lou's splendid reviviscence is made possible by murder.
The movie is also memorable for the great photography and use of locations, where to me, Atlantic City is like a Miami Dive, where 20 to 30 years, before the point of the story, it would of been something different.
Sally (Susan Sarandon) works at an Atlantic City casino oyster bar.
Susan Sarandon, Burt Lancaster and directed by Louis Malle.
1st watched 7/31/2004 - 7 out of 10(Dir-Louis Malle): Small gem of a movie about two loners(Lancaster & Sarandon) who are looking for big things in their life and then stumble upon each other instead and eventually receive those big things that they've stored up in the hearts for so long.
In a corrupt city, a small-time gangster (Burt Lancaster) and the estranged wife (Susan Sarandon) of a pot dealer (Some Guy) finds themselves thrown together in an escapade of love, money, drugs, and danger.You might think this film would get a second life following the success of "Boardwalk Empire".
There are actors that seem to be born to make great roles like the one played by Burt Lancaster in this film.
A likable, charming, quite enigmatic but very friendly man named Lou Pascal, a old resident of Atlantic City who gets with his neighbor (Susan Sarandon) after the murder of her husband, Dave (Robert Joy), whom Lou recently met and started a business that might complicate the lives of everyone involved with him.
And the city is constantly presented as a different place than in its older days, everything's being demolished (including the place where the main characters live) where new casinos will be made.Lou is a sad figure in the beginning, his mob days are over and now he's taking care of old lady (Kate Reid), wife of a old friend of his, and she keeps bothering this guy all the time, ringing his bell wherever she needs him.
I thought it was a nice job of directing given that the content wasn't particular outstanding.Plot/Characters: 6* - Lou is a one time big shot in Atlantic City and gets to relive his glory days after meeting a young waitress and becoming an accomplice in a cocaine deal.
In the mid-'70s, Malle embarked upon a decade-long visit to America where, after 'Pretty Baby,' a sensitive but finally tedious look at child prostitution in 1971 New Orleans, he makes 'Atlantic City', in which an aging small-time mobster sees his romanticized memories of villainy become reality when he acts as father confessor, protector and, finally, lover to a lonely young croupier...
This movie is both an unconventional love story and a crime drama but it's also a story about past disappointments and dreams of a better future.Sally Matthews (Susan Sarandon) is an ambitious young woman who left her drab life in Canada to look for something better in Atlantic City.
At the end of her working day, she returns to the run down apartment block where she lives and routinely cuts lemons and rubs the juice into her upper body to eliminate the smell of fish.Lou Pascal (Burt Lancaster) is an elderly numbers runner who lives in a neighbouring apartment and regularly watches Sally's nightly ritual.
As he peers out of the motel window watching Sally drive away, Lou, unlike the duped taxpayers and voters of New Jersey in 1976, is too smart not to understand the truth of the matter.As good as Burt Lancaster was throughout his career, going back to "The Killers" in 1946, the man aged like fine wine.
As previous reviewers have mentioned, Atlantic City's sensibility also puts one in mind of similar cinematic masters Anderson and Altman.Sally (Susan Sarandon) is a comically ambitious young waitress, Lou (Burt Lancaster) a comically dignified old two-bit hood.
Until then, here's the best I can do."Atlantic City" is the tale of Lou Pascal (Burt Lancaster), a small-time former Mafia hood.
The Mafia was pushed out of Atlantic City by a "bad element" (read: black gangs) and ever since then, Lou's been running numbers for them and taking care of his old boss's moll, Grace (the marvelous Kate Reid).Living next door to Lou is Sally Matthews (Susan Sarandon, in what is surely her best, most honest work), who works at an oyster bar, takes classes in dealing blackjack, and dreams of going to Monte Carlo to be a professional dealer.
'Atlantic City' draws its two main characters so well, and they are so well acted by Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon, that it is only at the end that we feel let down for caring about two people who frankly don't deserve it.
Burt Lancaster plays Lou, a supposed gangster slowly watching his beloved Atlantic City dying a slow death as a new more modern place is on the horizon.
She is another reminder of a past Atlantic City that now is a decaying relic.What Lou and Sally develop over the course of the film is magic.
He, in a sense, is Atlantic City, just like Grace and that old decaying building that will soon be driven to the ground giving way to a new more modern age..
Basically elderly long time Atlantic City, New Jersey resident and small time gangster Lou Pascal (BAFTA winning, and Oscar and Golden Globe nominated Burt Lancaster) used to think he was something big in the city.