The Gambler (1974)

          While not a flawless film by any measure, The Gambler is one of the sharpest character studies of the ’70s, combining elegant filmmaking with exquisite writing and an extraordinarily nuanced leading performance. The picture offers a mature examination of addiction, portraying every troubling aspect of deception, manipulation, and risk that addicts manifest in pursuit of their illicit thrills. First-time screenwriter James Toback famously based the script on his own life, so protagonist Axel Freed (played beautifully by James Caan) is a respected college professor from a wealthy family. Driven by self-destructive compulsions, Axel regularly courts danger by making reckless bets with bookmakers. When the story begins, Axel gets in debt for $44,000 after a bad night of cards, and the pain Caan expresses in his face demonstrates that even for someone accustomed to losing, an impossible obligation triggers bone-deep fear. As the story progresses, Axel hustles for cash every way he can, whether that means hitting up family members or placing outrageous new bets.

         This fascinating protagonist’s entire life is a high-wire act, a nuance that Toback’s script explicitly articulates in myriad ways. Whether Axel’s telling a classroom full of students about a self-revealing analogy or explaining his behavior to long-suffering girlfriend Billie (Lauren Hutton), Axel says he’s after self-determination. In the twisted worldview of Toback/Axel, the threat of ultimate failure is the only acceptable proof of ultimate existence—he’s a daredevil of the soul. As such, Axel isn’t a sympathetic character, per se. Quite to the contrary, he’s a scheming son of a bitch whose idea of honor is tied in with revealing that everyone around him is a schemer, just like him. That’s why it’s so painful to see Axel inflict his lifestyle on the few innocents he encounters, such as his mother, Naomi (Jacqueline Brookes). And yet Toback carefully surrounds Axel with people who exist even lower on the moral spectrum, such as jovial loan shark Hips (Paul Sorvino) and vulgar mobster “One” (Vic Tayback).

          Director Karel Reisz, a Czech native making his first Hollywood movie, serves Toback’s script well. Among the film’s many effective (and subtle) directorial flourishes are a trope of slow zooms into Caan’s anguished face at moments of critical decision and the repeated use (via composer Jerry Fielding) of variations on a taut Mahler overture to suggest a life that’s all prelude. (After all, each climax in Axel’s existence is merely a fleeting high soon replaced by insatiable hunger.) Caan is on fire here, playing the cock of the walk in confident scenes (the tic of fixing his hair before important encounters illustrates Axel’s vanity) and quivering with ill-fitting anxiety during moments of emasculation. Vivid supporting players including Brookes, Sorvino, Tayback, Morris Carnovsky, Antonio Fargas, Steven Keats, Stuart Margolin, M. Emmet Walsh, James Woods, and Burt Young echo Caan’s intensity; each player adds a unique texture, whether guttural or sophisticated. Hutton is the weak link, her gap-toothed loveliness making a greater impression than her weak recitations of monologues. And if The Gambler sputters somewhat in its 10-minute final sequence—a love-it-or-hate-it microcosm representing Axel’s risk addiction—then a minor misstep is forgivable after the supreme efficacy of the preceding hour and 40 minutes.

The Gambler: RIGHT ON

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

          With the possible exception of Dirty Harry (1971), the offbeat Western The Outlaw Josey Wales is Clint Eastwood’s best movie of the ’70s, and also one of the most textured films in his long career. Blending a sensitive approach to character with Eastwood’s signature meditations on violence—a unique combination that resulted from Eastwood’s fractious collaboration with co-screenwriter Philip Kaufman—the picture delivers the intense action fans expect from Eastwood Westerns, but also so much more. Based on a novel by Forrest Carter, the picture was written by Kaufman and Sonia Chernus, with Kaufman originally slated to direct. Alas, Eastwood, who was the film’s de facto executive producer (though not credited as such), got into a disagreement with Kaufman partway through filming and fired Kaufman, stepping into the director’s chair himself.

          Eastwood had already helmed four features, so he was well on his way to developing a recognizable style—deep shadows, long takes, quick-cut bursts of bloody violence. Yet while it’s possible to watch the film and make educated guesses about which bits remain from Kaufman’s tenure behind the camera, the blending of two sensibilities goes much deeper than that, since Kaufman wrote a script he intended to direct and Eastwood followed that script. In any event, fused authorship gives The Outlaw Josey Wales more tonal variety than one finds in Eastwood’s other ’70s Westerns, especially because so much screen time is devoted to presenting idiosyncratic supporting characters.

         The story begins when pro-union bandits led by the craven Terrill (Bill McKinney) murder the family of Missouri farmer Josey Wales (Eastwood) during the Civil War. Joining the Confederate cause to seek revenge, Wales annihilates several enemies but witnesses the treachery of Terrill’s commander, Captain Fletcher (John Vernon). Soon Wales becomes a fugitive, with Fletcher and Terrill his relentless pursuers. Wales embarks on a long journey through the South, inadvertently gathering a surrogate family of frontier stragglers while preparing for his inevitable confrontation with Terrill, and possibly a second showdown with Fletcher.

          As in many Eastwood pictures—notably Unforgiven (1991), which can be seen as a successor to Josey Wales—this picture investigates the question of whether a man can preserve his soul after succumbing to bloodlust. Wales is a decent, hard-working man when we meet him, but tragedy turns him into a ruthless killer. Then, once he’s out on the frontier, protecting and being protected by his oddball friends, he becomes something more than a vigilante; he’s a strange sort of gun-toting patriarch, struggling to claim high ground while mired in moral quicksand.

          Simply by dint of the nuanced script, Eastwood’s acting has a broader range of colors here than usual, and the way his performance is decorated with weird details—like spitting tobacco onto nearly every living thing that crosses his path—makes Wales as indelible an Eastwood characterization as Dirty Harry or the Man With No Name. McKinney and Vernon provide different colors of villainy, with the former essaying a violent zealot and the latter portraying a world-weary pragmatist capable of shocking ruthlessness. Reliable character actors including Matt Clark, Woodrow Parfrey, and John Quade populate the movie’s sweaty periphery. Yet it’s the actors playing members of Wales’ surrogate family who often command the most attention. Sondra Locke, appearing in the first of many films she did with Eastwood, lends fragile beauty that contrasts the ugliness of Wales’ world, while Chief Dan George is dry, funny, and wise as Lone Watie, an aging Cherokee Indian who joins Wales’ entourage.

          Holding the movie’s potentially disparate elements together is slick technical presentation, courtesy of cinematographer Bruce Surtees and composer Jerry Fielding (both frequent Eastwood collaborators) and others. From its unique spin on gunslinger mythology to its colorful use of vivid Western archetypes, The Outlaw Josey Wales feels consistently interesting, literary, and personal.

The Outlaw Josey Wales: RIGHT ON

Escape from Alcatraz (1979)

          The final collaboration between director Don Siegel and his superstar protégé, Clint Eastwood, Escape from Alcatraz is a smart thriller about exactly what the title suggests—the only known successful escape from the titular prison, a fortress-like structure built on a small island in the San Francisco Bay. For three decades, from 1933 to 1963, “The Rock” was considered one of the most secure federal prisons in the U.S., and the real-life jailbreak that inspired this movie occurred in 1962, just one year prior to the prison’s closure. (J. Campbell Bruce wrote a nonfiction book about the incident shortly afterward, and screenwriter Richard Tuggle adapted the book.) Although Eastwood and Siegel reportedly had a tense relationship on the project—it’s rumored that Eastwood directed much of the picture because his aging friend was losing his touch—the film is as smooth as anything either man made during this era.

          Siegel’s storied efficiency is visible in the minimalistic storytelling, while Eastwood’s penchant for gloomy lighting and leisurely pacing adds a meditative quality. It helps, tremendously, that the material plays to the strengths of both men. Portraying a career criminal obsessed with breaking out of an “escape-proof” prison, Eastwood seethes as only he can, forming a community of like-minded inmates while enduring the cruel machinations of a nameless warden (Patrick McGoohan). Siegel meticulously depicts every step along the would-be escapees’ dangerous path, from carving a secret tunnel to preparing for a brazen leap into the choppy waters surrounding the prison. Some of the story mechanics feel like standard prison-picture stuff, like the development of a sympathetic geezer (Roberts Blossom) whom we can sense from his first appearance will not breathe free air, but the use of stock characters suits the milieu. Similarly, loading the cast with workaday character actors—Eastwood and McGoohan notwithstanding—helps accentuate the idea of prison as an equalizing environment.

          More than anything, however, Escape from Alcatraz works as a mood piece, building ambience and tension as we, the viewers, become more and more invested in seeing the “heroes” succeed. (Regular Eastwood collaborators including composer Jerry Fielding and cinematographer Bruce Surtees contribute immeasurably to the film’s menacing quality.) Escape from Alcatraz may not be about much, beyond the usual pap about man’s inhumanity to man and the sweet nectar of freedom, but it’s an offbeat action picture in that many of the thrills stem from characters scheming in private; rather than building toward confrontations, it’s a movie about characters avoiding confrontations.

Escape from Alcatraz: GROOVY

Demon Seed (1977)

Taking the crazed-computer menace of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in a depraved new direction, this strange thriller is based on a Dean Koontz novel, but bears the unmistakable signature of its director, Donald Cammell, notorious for co-directing the perverse cult classic Performance (1970). Even within the confines of a big-budget Hollywood movie, Cammell lets his freak flag fly throughout Demon Seed, which features an anguished Julie Christie as a woman who gets imprisoned, tortured, and impregnated (!) by a sentient computer. The source of her misery is her scientist husband (Fritz Weaver), who creates a supercomputer called Proteus IV; the computer’s desire for physical life prompts Christie’s artificial-intelligence insemination. Much of the movie comprises two-character scenes with Christie and Proteus, which mostly manifests as lava-lamp patterns on computer screens, so Christie’s main costar is unseen actor Robert Vaughn, who provides Proteus’ voice without much vigor. Adding a hallucinatory feel are long electronic-animation montages by Frank Mazzola, and Proteus’ eventual physical manifestation as a weird cube/diamond thing that extends long tendrils of geometric shapes. These trippy sequences are like Yes album covers come to life. However the movie suffers from idiotic plotting and long dull stretches, plus the miscasting of two behind-the-scenes players: Jaws cinematographer Bill Butler and frequent Peckinpah composer Jerry Fielding both contribute great work that belongs in a different, less bizarre movie. As for Christie, she flails through scenes that would be impossible for anyone to play, and seems embarrassed by her surroundings. So although Demon Seed is pretty damn weird, grounding elements like Butler’s crisp cinematography, Christie’s emphatically expressed anguish, and Vaughn’s overly explanatory voiceovers tether the movie to earth when it clearly wants to drift into even weirder territory.

Demon Seed: FREAKY