Imploding in Atlantic City

Moral ambiguity is a quality that director Louis Malle knows very well. Maybe this has something to do with his awareness, as a part-Jewish child at a Catholic boarding school, of a 1943 Nazi raid that sent a close friend and a teacher to Auschwitz. (The memory ultimately led to Malle’s monumental 1987 film, Au Revoir, les Enfants.) Though most of his movies were made in France, he tried his hand at America-set dramas too, including 1981’s My Dinner with Andre. Malle’s most notorious American movie is surely Pretty Baby (1978), in which a eleven-year-old Brooke Shields plays a child prostitute in 1917 New Orleans whose virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder. But he received major awards nominations for his next film, 1980’s Atlantic City, which became perhaps star Burt Lancaster’s last major film role.

 The snowy-haired Lancaster plays Lou, a small-time crook hunkered down in a rapidly decaying resort town where classic hotels are being imploded to make room for modern gambling casinos. Though Lou likes to boast about when he and Bugsy Siegel were prison cellmates, he makes a living—such as it is—as a numbers runner in a poor part of town, while also serving as full-time valet and part-time bedwarmer to a neighbor, a bedraggled former beauty queen who’s the widow of a mobster type. His only true pleasure, it seems, is spying on another neighbor, the luscious Sally (Susan Sarandon), who works at an oyster bar by day and sponges off her body with a freshly cut lemon come evening time.

 Pretty soon, Sally’s world will be rocked by the reappearance of a Canadian ex-husband, Dave, who shows up with her hugely pregnant sister and a whole cache of stolen cocaine. Before long, Dave will be pulling Lancaster’s amiable Lou into his orbit while he tries to make a lucrative drug sale. But of course some really bad guys are soon after Dave: there’s a marvelous chase scene, followed by a murder.

 From there, things get truly complicated. Sally and Lou draw closer together, while he enjoys spending on her the drug money the mobsters didn’t manage to collect from Dave. But ultimately, the thugs are still out there, looking for a big payday.  I won’t go into what happens, other than to say that Lou—a fascinating mix of generosity and self-preservation—ultimately makes a heroic gesture, while at the same time reveling in an unfamiliar sense of his own powers   as a tough guy. It’s a marvelously nuanced Lancaster performance, delivered when he was almost 70 and well past the athletic vigor of earlier star turns like his Oscar-winning role in Elmer Gantry. And Sarandon (only five years after her ingenue role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) matches him with a portrayal that is fierce,  poignant, and sensuous.  At the close of the film we wish them both well, but aren’t quite clear about where either one of them will land. Both were Oscar-nominated for their portrayals, as was Malle as director, but this was the year of Chariots of Fire and On Golden Pond.

 Curiously, despite Atlantic City’s very American setting, it was not technically a U.S. film, but rather a French and Canadian co-production. (Outside of the leads, most of the performers hailed from Canada, like Kate Reid as the blowsy onetime beauty queen and a mesmerizing Robert Joy as the manic ex-husband.) Still, the film has enjoyed a rare All-American accolade. In 2003 it was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, so I guess it belongs to all of us now.

 

 

Crimes and Whispers: Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart

The French may have a word for it, but I’m not quite sure what it is.  Sophisticates among us know there’s a Gallic tradition (in cinema, at least) of an older woman initiating a very young man into sexuality. Mike Nichols actually called upon this tradition in directing Dustin Hoffman in 1967’s The Graduate. Nichols advised Hoffman to keep in mind that in sleeping with his father’s business partner’s wife, Benjamin Braddock was “having an affair that’s almost incestuous.” (Nichols’ satiric point was that Benjamin -- in thrall to a woman close to his mother in age and style -- is still in bed with his parents’ generation, in more ways than one.)

Benjamin’s fling with Mrs. Robinson may approach incest, but in a French film released four years later, the mother/son incest is the real thing. The film is Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart, and (though the movie was restricted to those over 18 even in France) the result is not as salacious as it may sound. I’d always heard that Malle’s movie is semi-autobiographical, which certainly had me worried. Apparently, though, the aspects of Murmur of the Heart that reflect Malle’s own experience are the scenes in which an almost fifteen-year-old boy who loves sexy novels and American jazz is teased unmercifully by two older brothers as he works his way through puberty. (In the film, the brothers take young Laurent to a brothel, and then gleefully burst in on him as he lies in flagrante on top of a motherly hooker).

It's a curious household. The father, a successful gynecologist, is handsome and stern, with a special disdain for his hapless youngest son. The much younger mother – an Italian who was born into poverty – is something of an exhibitionist and something of a rebel. She’s been having an affair with a man who drives a flashy sportscar, and she’s an object of fascination for everyone around her, including the smitten Laurent, with whom she seems to have a specially tender bond.

Circumstances conspire to bring mother and son to a fancy hotel connected with a health spa. Laurent (bursting with hormonal excitement) tries hard to impress himself upon jeunes filles his own age, including one who wears her blonde hair in two girlish ponytails,  but this doesn’t work out. His yen for his sexy mom crystalizes when she goes off for a tryst with her lover: the film’s most whimsical and poignant moment comes as, in her absence, he puts on her dressing gown and lovingly arranges her undies, garter belt, and stockings on his bed, as though she herself were there to wear them.

The act of incest, when it comes, is born out of the mother’s unhappiness: she and her lover have parted because she won’t permanently leave her family for him. Reaching out to her sympathetic son as they cuddle together on her bed, she presents the idea as a special one-time event that will be a beautiful and secret memory between them. Mercifully, we don’t see the act itself (hooray for discretion!) but only watch Laurent, in the aftermath, searching the hotel for a willing girl his own age.

The film ends with the reunited family chuckling happily over the evidence that young Laurent has been out tomcatting,  but I believe that cheerful note is a false one. Instead I think Malle means us to see trouble ahead for both mother and son, though he leaves it to us to conjure up a sequel. After, of course, we light up a Gauloise and lift our shoulders in a classic French shrug.   .