"The Gambler" (1974) is a riveting drama about a man who - like many young adults in the baby boom generation - rejects the world of privilege and comfort he has been born into. Rather than turning to some form of counter-culture politics, however, Alex Freed (James Caan) holds an establishment job as a professor of English while pursuing "the juice" of financial, social, and even physical risk and pain during his considerable free time.
Like Dostoyevski's Underground Man, to whom the screenplay pays homage in an early scene of Freed lecturing to his students at NYC (i. e. CCNY), "the gambler" rejects the middle class world of reason and social convention and instead embraces the irrational, the realm of will and desire where two plus two can equal five and where poets, athletes, and addicts can "know" and experience things that ordinary human beings living in the rut of mundane existence cannot.
Unfortunately for Freed he will never be a poet although, as a literature professor, he can quote Shakespeare, e.e. cummings, and Walt Whitman with anyone. He can also turn an original phrase or two and lead his relatives, friends, and other less literary folk to believe that he has great books in him. But the truth is that he's a third rate talent stuck in a $1500 a month gig trying to wheedle literary appreciation out of reluctant undergrads who are obviously going through the motions to get paper qualified for one pragmatic goal or another.
He is also not a great athlete although he kids himself about how he might have been a star basketball player - even, at one point, stopping at a playground in Harlem to take on a local 15 year old hot shot in a game of one-on-one, betting $20 to a dime that he will win. He gives the hot shot a pretty good game, but loses, thus establishing the real extent of his athletic talent for us - and perhaps himself - to see. No, the only sure and easy way he can get the juice is through gambling and the self deceptions about winning and losing that his compulsive behavior entails.
Considering the barrage of searing insults that Harvard-educated Axel Freed hurls at the Brown University (my alma mater) football team, I would like to say very bad things about this film, but I'd be lying. Written by heralded screenwriter James Toback ("Fingers," "Bugsy," etc.) and featuring one of James Caan's finest performances, "The Gambler" has deservedly become a 1970s cult classic.
Like Dostoyevski's Underground Man, to whom the screenplay pays homage in an early scene of Freed lecturing to his students at NYC (i. e. CCNY), "the gambler" rejects the middle class world of reason and social convention and instead embraces the irrational, the realm of will and desire where two plus two can equal five and where poets, athletes, and addicts can "know" and experience things that ordinary human beings living in the rut of mundane existence cannot.
Unfortunately for Freed he will never be a poet although, as a literature professor, he can quote Shakespeare, e.e. cummings, and Walt Whitman with anyone. He can also turn an original phrase or two and lead his relatives, friends, and other less literary folk to believe that he has great books in him. But the truth is that he's a third rate talent stuck in a $1500 a month gig trying to wheedle literary appreciation out of reluctant undergrads who are obviously going through the motions to get paper qualified for one pragmatic goal or another.
He is also not a great athlete although he kids himself about how he might have been a star basketball player - even, at one point, stopping at a playground in Harlem to take on a local 15 year old hot shot in a game of one-on-one, betting $20 to a dime that he will win. He gives the hot shot a pretty good game, but loses, thus establishing the real extent of his athletic talent for us - and perhaps himself - to see. No, the only sure and easy way he can get the juice is through gambling and the self deceptions about winning and losing that his compulsive behavior entails.
Considering the barrage of searing insults that Harvard-educated Axel Freed hurls at the Brown University (my alma mater) football team, I would like to say very bad things about this film, but I'd be lying. Written by heralded screenwriter James Toback ("Fingers," "Bugsy," etc.) and featuring one of James Caan's finest performances, "The Gambler" has deservedly become a 1970s cult classic.