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California Split Movie Review (1974)
Roger Ebert
6-7 minutes
California Split Movie Review

| Roger Ebert
January 1, 1974 | 0

They meet in a California poker parlor. One wins, despite a heated discussion with
a loser over whether or not a dealt card hit the floor. They drink. They become
friends after they are jointly mugged in the parking lot by the sore loser.

They did not know each other before, and they don't know much about each other now,
but they know all they need to know: They're both compulsive gamblers, and the
dimensions of the world of gambling equal the dimensions of the world they care
anything about. It is a small world and a flat one, like one of those maps of the
world before Columbus, and they are constantly threatened with falling over the
edge.

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They're the heroes (or at least the subjects) of "California Split," the
magnificently funny, cynical film by Robert Altman. Their names are Bill and
Charlie, and they're played by George Segal and Elliott Gould with a combination of
unaffected naturalism and sheer raw nervous exhaustion. We don't need to know
anything about gambling to understand the odyssey they undertake to the tracks, to
the private poker parties, to the bars, to Vegas, to the edge of defeat, and to the
scene of victory. Their compulsion is so strong that it carries us along.

The movie will be compared with "M*A*S*H," the first big hit by Altman (who is
possibly our best and certainly our most diverting American director). It deserves
that comparison, because it resembles "M*A*S*H" in several big ways: It's funny,
it's hard-boiled, it gives us a bond between two frazzled heroes trying to win by
the rules in a game where the rules re-quire defeat. But it's a better movie than
"M*A*S*H" because here Altman gets it all together. Ever since "M*A*S*H," he's been
trying to make a kind of movie that would function like a comedy but allow its
laughs to dig us deeper and deeper into the despair underneath.

Bill and Charlie are driven. We laugh at their hangovers, their bruises (treated
with hot shaving cream), the kooky part-time prostitutes who serve them breakfasts
of Froot Loops and beer. We move easily through the underworld of their friends,
casually introduced through Altman's gift of overlapping dialogue and understated
visual introductions, so that we're not so much shown a new character as encouraged
to assume we knew him all along. And because Joseph Walsh's screenplay is funny and
Segal and Gould are naturally engaging, we have a good time.

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But then there are moments that take on bleaker meanings. At one point, for
example, at the ragged edge of sleep, boozed out, defeated, Bill and Charlie cling
desperately to a bar and very seriously bet with each other on the names of the
Seven Dwarfs (There was Droopy ... Sleepy ... Dumbo?). And at another time,
cornered with their winnings in still another parking lot by still another mugger,
this one armed, they hand over half their winnings and bet him that's all they
have.

He takes it and runs; they win; they could have been killed but their gambler's
instinct forced them to make the try. At the end of "California Split" we realize
that Altman has made a lot more than a comedy about gambling; he's taken us into an
American nightmare, and all the people we met along the way felt genuine and looked
real. This movie has a taste in its mouth like stale air-conditioning, and no
matter what time it seems to be, it's always five in the morning in a second-rate
casino.

As always, Altman fills his movie with quirky supporting roles -- people who have
somehow become caricatures of themselves. At the private poker game, Segal stands
at the bar, surveys the table, and quietly describes every player. He's right about
them, although he (and we) have never seen them before. We know he's right because
these people wear their styles and destinies on their faces.

So do the hookers (played with a kind of tart-next-door wholesomeness by Ann

Prentiss and Gwen Welles). So does "Helen Brown," one of their customers who's a
middle-aged man who likes drag as much as he's terrified of the cops (inspiring a
scene of true tragicomedy). Altman's movies always seem full, somehow; we don't
have the feeling of an empty screen into which carefully drawn characters are
introduced, but of a camera plunging into a boiling sea of frenzied human activity.

What Altman comes up with is sometimes almost a documentary feel; at the end of
"California Split" we know something about organized gambling in this country we
didn't know before. His movies always seem perfectly at home wherever they are, but
this time there's an almost palpable sense of place. And Altman has never been more
firmly in control of his style. He has one of the few really individual visual
styles among contemporary American directors; we can always see it's an Altman
film. He bases his visual strategies on an incredibly attentive sound track, using
background noises with particular care so that our ears tell us we're moving
through these people -- instead of that they're lined up talking to us. "California
Split" is a great movie and it's a great experience, too; we've been there with
Bill and Charlie.

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sensesofcinema.com
California Split • Senses of Cinema
Peter Tonguette May 2003 Cinémathèque Annotations on Film Issue 78
6-8 minutes
California Split

California Split

California Split (1974 USA 108 mins)

Source: ScreenSound Australia Prod Co: Columbia Pictures Prod: Robert Altman,
Joseph Walsh Dir: Robert Altman Scr: Joseph Walsh Phot: Paul Lohmann Ed: Lou
Lombardo Art Dir: Leon Ericksen Mus: Phyllis Shotwell

Cast: George Segal, Elliott Gould, Ann Prentiss, Gwen Welles, Edward Walsh, Joseph
Walsh, Jeff Goldblum, Vincent Palmieri

Too often, it seems to me, Robert Altman is valued for his riffs on genre – whether
it be the war comedy (M*A*S*H [1970]), the Western (McCabe & Mrs. Miller [1971]),
the detective story (The Long Goodbye [1973]), or the Agatha Christie-style murder
mystery (Gosford Park [2001]) – and undervalued for his more direct and personal
films, the ones which are least self-aware of other movies and most interactive
with real life. I don’t want to fall into the same trap as those who under-rate
that side of Altman by underrating myself the titles I’ve just rattled off – each
and every one of which I love – but simply make the point that to prioritise this
strain of Altman above others is to cut oneself off from what may be the purest
expressions of this great director’s particular vision of life.

California Split belongs to this side of Altman (the only ‘genre’ it could be said
to belong to is the ‘gambling movie’) as well as another: it joins Images (1972), A
Perfect Couple (1979) and Quintet (1979) as one of the least seen and most
infrequently discussed of all of his ’70s works. Nevertheless, it seems to be on
its way to something like a canonisation thanks to some recent Altman
retrospectives around the world (though it still remains, unforgivably, unavailable
on video in the United States); while the responses I’ve read – through e-mail
lists and personal correspondence – from Altman fans who’ve just seen it for the
first time recently usually borders on the effusive. I myself only saw it for the
first time last year and suffice it to say that I was so taken with its rough-and-
tumble humanity that it was the one Altman film to figure in the Top 10 of all-time
list I submitted to Senses of Cinema.

This is a film about gambling, a metaphor-for-life which seems to have a

particularly compelling pull for Altman. Altman, a self-confessed recovering
gambler, returned to the theme with Quintet – a sci-fi picture which stands as one
of his strangest and most gripping films – and increased the stakes: play the game
or face death. Quintet was set during a future Ice Age in a world with dwindling
resources; who lived and who died depended on participation in the game of the
title. There’s nothing so novel going on in California Split – a wholly
naturalistic picture set in the 1970s – and yet its characters feel just as lonely
and pathetic (and lovable) and the outcome of the games they play just as live-or-
die important.

California Split was the third collaboration between Altman and actor Elliott
Gould, here playing Charlie, the aggressive and impudent half of the two friends
who are the film’s focus; George Segal is the more buttoned-down, but despondent
Bill. (In Altman, even friendship is contingent: the two meet by chance at a casino
and stick together only on a superstitious hunch that they may bring each other
good luck.) In his three major films with Altman (the other two are M*A*S*H and The
Long Goodbye), Gould came closer than any other actor, perhaps, to, in his loose,
uncontainable acting style, embodying in physical form the qualities which help
constitute the Altman vision: sometimes committed to ideals, sometimes not and
almost always a little sarcastic.

In his capsule review of California Split written for the Chicago Reader, Don
Druker observes, “…the more we realise that to love characters the way Altman loves
his, you have to see them turned completely inside out.” Indeed, I can think of few
directors more compassionate towards their characters than Altman, but like Stanley
Kubrick, his films are so rooted in honesty and satirical portraiture that many
observers miss (or choose to ignore) the abundant generosity behind the lens.
Though I generally reject the notion that Altman is an excessive director or that
his films lack focus or direction, he is indulgent in one way: to his characters,
for he loves them with, perhaps even for, their warts and flaws and desperation.

We follow Bill and Charlie through their misadventures, games, pick-ups, and pranks
and we come to love them. One of the film’s most remarkable achievements is to
gradually redefine what we hope for them: what seems like an outcome to root for at
the film’s outset – Bill making a big win in Reno – seems drained of all meaning
when we actually experience it at the film’s end.

What’s more, for a director who is constantly being accused of hovering above his
characters in ‘snarky’ contempt, California Split is a remarkably self-critical
film. It doesn’t require any deep reading of the work to recognise that Altman
undoubtedly sees himself in Bill and Charlie and acknowledges his own complicity in
their struggle with an addiction.

The director who pursued California Split most aggressively before Altman became
attached was Steven Spielberg. While I don’t want to make a snap judgment about
what kind of film Spielberg would have made – indeed, his early work (eg Duel
[1971], The Sugarland Express [1974]) showed just as much willingness to portray
desperation and unhappiness as his most recent work does; it’s only mid-period
Spielberg which seems to me sappy or unambiguously sentimental – I think it’s safe
to say that it would have been a considerably different film from what Altman made.
The very fact that an atmosphere existed in Hollywood where Altman could have
access to properties being pursued by Spielberg – a player and company man even
before Jaws (1975) validated him as a money-making player in the eyes of the
studios – is astonishing.

But it’s some measure of the greatness of this film that this fact is perhaps the
least of the astonishing things going on in California Split: Altman’s astonishing
mise en scène – contemplative of every level of interaction within a room, a bar, a
place – has rarely been put to more revelatory or personal ends. It’s a
masterpiece.