CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1974)

Few filmmakers have managed to tap into the American consciousness as piercingly and spontaneously as Robert Altman. Though billed as a gambling comedy, this 1974 two-hander does not make the mistake of enthralling us into the very subject it critiques; we’re shown barely anything about gambling to be able to play it, let alone to glamourise it. Nor does it preach with trite buzzwords like “addiction” and “greed”, and condescend to its subjects with pity or contempt. This subgenre of media—starting with The Hustler (1961) and The Sting (1973), over to Uncut Gems (2019) and The Card Counter (2021)—has always walked a tightrope between what’s responsible and what entertains, and here’s California Split hitting a home run in both games; it’s kind of a curious anomaly.

Joe Walsh wrote, with his own experiences with gambling addiction as the template, originally with Steven Spielberg to direct, who by then had only made Duel (1971). As Spielberg hopped onto The Sugarland Express (1974), Altman, whom Walsh eventually settled for, proves a drastically different beast. It is said that jazz musicians frequently borrow from other genres for inspiration, twist them with their own attitudes, and the results often sound far removed from the original. A Kansas City native, Robert Altman takes on the all-American kitsch and adjusts it to his own tastes and rhythms, often discarding dramatic conventions in doing so. You can see the influence of growing up on the improvisatory, progressive bebop that Kansas City, one of the “cradles of jazz”, was known for. From the hair-raising macho profanities south of the 38th parallel, and a snow-ridden frontier locale inhabited by cowboy boots and Leonard Cohen numbers, to a detective neo-noir that plays its hard-boiledness for spoofs, and a country-bumpkin gangster flick with none of the usual pulpy artifice, his images breathe like living things, imbued with personalities of their own. To label them as products or “content” is to demean their character.

As is generally the case with his work, California Split neither leaves us with the kind of emotional impact a standard genre piece like Casino (1995) does, nor expects us to catch on with its rhythm at once—a trait inherited by Paul Thomas Anderson’s early works such as Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999). It may be that Godard brewed Hollywood schlock and cultural satire together so that Altman could cook small talks, clout chasing, sexual humiliations, and Duke Ellington in the same cauldron. But his instincts and rhythms are unmistakably American. From the ensemble casts to the overlapping dialogues, his scenes weren’t designed with dramatic effect as a priority. They are impressions, crude looks at this messy hodgepodge of confusing voices and diverging dispositions crashing and melting into one. With Kay Rose as the soundwoman, the film’s environments were designed with the tenor and climate of night clubs and ballrooms —an ensemble of heaps and clutters—with the main dialogue overlaying the intruding chatters as a solo would the syncopated chords, which in turn emerge out of the inscrutable noises and the heat bottled up within the soundscape.

A lot of the times in improv jazz, the accompaniments were already so syncopated and unpredictable that it’s sometimes hard for the solos to distinguish themselves even when toning down everyone else. It’s what gives jazz this erratic kick: you find yourself immersed in it wholesomely as you’re trying to work out the different pieces. Altman’s unrefined, topsy-turvy parlance essentially works the same way, and the splitting migraines resulting from it have been staying with us ever since Warner Bros. fired him for Countdown (1967). When McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971) was first released, critics such as Rex Reed took it out on the “wet toilet paper”-filtered sound and decided that the film was “garbage”. It took Pauline Kael going on Dick Cavett’s show and hijacking his precious airtime, pointing out that “you hear only what you need to hear” that the critical consensus had begun to shift:

“You get a certain hum of conversation in the background. The first time you lose a word, you’re likely to think: “Oh, what was that?” But by the second time you realize you’re not meant to hear it… Most of the words in movies aren’t worth hearing anyway, and you forget them as soon as you’ve heard them… You have to feel your way into it.”

Pauline Kael, film critic for the New Yorker.

The traditional way of sound mixing, by recording from a single boom mic hanging above the set, can be frustrating if the filmmakers’ intention is anthropological. Our own ears are better at picking up nuances in conversations and attuning our frequency to one channel at a time, than a single microphone which mixes everything into one harsh cacophony. Coming off of the four-track stereo system used in McCabe, the eight-track system—first utilised here in California Split—gave the picture’s illusion of reality more dimensions, ideal for capturing the “razzle-dazzle” at a crowded crapshoot table.

As a magazine writer who gets into gambling as his way out of life and money troubles, George Segal the yuppie plays against Elliot Gould the cut-up, who embraces gambling as a way of life. Dropping in and out of poker tables, racetracks, and boxing rings, Gould’s Charlie radiates an easy, jaunty, devil-may-care vibe. A flamboyant bum hanging on his luck, he has a natural magnetism to his screen presence, and his hefty low-pitched voice doesn’t carry with it the masculine coarseness of, say, Sterling Hayden or Michel Piccoli; you could smell Elvis on him. You’re flabbergasted as you’re trying to read his movement and gestures, as he slides his way into his line readings. After meeting at a game, Charlie enjoys having Bill (Segal) around as a sounding board for his bravado. And with how jittery Bill seems at times, it’s easy to see why: he’s a perfect foil for Charlie’s confident facade.

From the moment we first saw him, Bill was anything but sure of himself. You could practically feel his butt edging away from his seat, less out of excitement than anxiety and dissatisfaction. He’s the archetypal white-collar hero trapped behind an office desk, dreaming of getting out but doesn’t know how or if he should. He can’t resist being with Charlie because he represents the kind of life and confidence he thinks he’s looking for. And if he lets Charlie casually kiss him on the lips, you know it’s his love for vigour and escape more than his fondness for his playmate, Charlie’s latent homosexuality aside (two hints: Gould had a brilliant bit as a one-armed piccolo player to cheer Bill up, but you’d never guess the catch; a horse they betted on at the races was named “Egyptian Femme”, and as Bill cheers on the jockey, Charlie keeps shouting the horse’s name).

As an actors’ director, Altman’s gift lies in bringing the characters out of his actors without compromising their nature. (Is it any wonder that Shelley Duvall started out as one of his gang?) While Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick can go to great pains to achieve that illusion of realism, and still have some scenes coming off stilted here and there, Altman’s more laissez-faire, improvisatory approach lends to the atmosphere and the performances that unvarnished quality without seeming like he even tried. It flows out of him and his cast like an airy brush of stroke—smooth and assertive.

I’m often amazed by some people’s near-nonexistent standards on acting, so the go-to adulation for a performance—that the performer acted as though they weren’t really acting—goes in one ear and out the other. But here I am, desperately trying to find a better way to summarise Gould and Segal’s wonderful bravura together, because, in a way, like the tenor sax players relaying their solos and playing off each other, they were really playing as themselves. While shooting the Reno sequences, for instance, Altman had them playing with former addicts to establish the mood. When they jumped out of a roulette table after winning and guffawed like chimpanzees hugging each other, you wonder whether they really staged it or had simply lucked out during filming. In this sense, it’s closer to what Scorsese does with Mean Streets (1973) or Bertolucci with Last Tango in Paris (1972): by constantly shifting focus between the foreground and background, it achieves a fly-on-the-wall effect that resembles cinéma vérité, without directly simulating the documentary techniques.

Owing much to this impromptu ambience, the movie’s humour flourishes reflexly without much excess fat—it works in ways that are both tonal and allusive. In a casual naming bet at a bar involving the names of the Seven Dwarfs, the two leads spill quite the tea on themselves when they could only recall Sleepy, Dopey, Grumpy, and Doc. Worse, one of them added in Dumbo (dumb-o?). Yet the gag only needs their tipsy silliness to work, so we’re amused even without getting the pun.

In the same way that jazz musicians throw the quarter-note rhythm out the window, Altman does so with the conventional structure of the first acts and third acts. He doesn’t work with resolutions, and the arcs and conflicts in his films were often left underdeveloped, if not sidelined altogether—life is both too short and too long for simple dramas, with their clean breaks and melodic timings. If jazz’s melody works within the structure of rhythm, as opposed to rhythm being the feature of the melody as in most pop and classical music, Altman doesn’t confine his narratives within the framework of a plot. Instead, he reshapes that framework so it’s bound instead by the characters: not necessarily how complete a picture we get of them, but rather how real they felt and how human they resonate.

Unlike American Graffiti (1973), Goodfellas (1990), and other such character-driven works that still rely on the narrativising for their characters to be realized, Altman unleashes the actors’ personalities and lets their characters run amok, as the story fades into the background. One scene bleeds into the next without the film preparing us for it, with no scripted logic to propel it forward. We’re trusted to fill in the gaps ourselves. For the average consumers accustomed to being handed a pre-packaged deal, with the mechanics laid out right in front of them, this Altmanesque style of progression can, by contrast, seem aimless and demanding. To paraphrase a friend who was ecstatic about Gosford Park (2001), the only Altman he’s seen: “the movie would have been fun even without a mystery to solve.”

Sometimes when a scene finishes, we barely have the time to react, because the action doesn’t beat around the bush for effects and melodrama. After Bill and Charlie are beaten and mugged in a parking lot, the film cuts to them ready to leave police custody, bantering as if nothing had happened. It’s only when they were stuck up for the second night in a row that they began scowling. Being the habitual gamblers they are, they were angrier at their bad luck than the wrongs done to them. And being the instinctual gamblers they are, they betted their lives and bargained with the thief; he took half their winnings and ran. In disbelief, Charlie banged his fist on his yellow Ford Pinto, and berated the mugger as if he’s entitled to the money, as if he’s earned it fair and square: as if he’s a whole lot better than the mugger.

The American desperation—cinema’s favourite subject—is the dialectics of success and emptiness. When a drunk termagant rambles on about her troubles being a cuckquean or feeling clueless about what to do with dogshit, she seems a caricature of bipolar disorder. She calls Bill a “faggot” and grumbles: “What am I doing here?” And later when Bill is interrupted by one of Charlie’s roommates (Ann Prentiss) while flirting with his other roommate (Gwen Welles), his face says exactly that. Phyllis Shotwell’s gritty blues tunes were another proxy used to reflect and comment on our heroes’ vacuity and distress: “This town is full of boys, who think they’re mighty wise, just because they know a thing or two.”

The film doesn’t let non-gamblers off the hook either; it uses the premise as an analogy to broaden its subject. When Bill asks the prostitute roommate (Prentiss) why she would go out on dates with clients she doesn’t even know, her response is: “Those are the chances you have to take.” These characters’ humanity is illuminated not by allegory, but rather by trivialities like these. We don’t wonder where the movie’s taking us or predict how the lug nuts will get tightened up nicely in the end. The pleasure is in the details and the interplays of temperaments along the way. You have to say a lot to spoil the experience since the stuff that normally makes a ruinous spoiler isn’t really at the heart of a movie like this.

All artists can be said to have an id and a superego. Without learning of the credits, chances are that you could not have recognised from The Sugarland Express, Jaws (1975), and 1941 (1979) the sensibilities that went into Saving Private Ryan (1998), Schindler’s List (1993), and Lincoln (2012). Nor could you have identified, for instance, the humanistic sentimentality of The Elephant Man (1980) and The Straight Story (1999) from the schizophrenic Lost Highway (1997) or the nightmarish Eraserhead (1977). California Split is no doubt closer in spirit to Altman’s “party movies” like Nashville (1975) and Short Cuts (1993) than with Images (1972) and That Cold Day in the Park (1969). Yet it lacks the same recognition: it’s not as infamously irreverent as M*A*S*H (1970), not as subtly biting as Nashville, not as elusively haunting as 3 Women (1977), and is sometimes passed around as the potboiler that gets sandwiched between Thieves Like Us (1974) and Nashville.

Yet as far as any one of the accusations thrown at his public persona goes, it would seem as though this is the work that comes closest to being the alcoholic, risk-keen, mulish, bohemian pothead’s self-portrait. (Is this why he cast Edward Walsh—a look-alike—in the role of a thuggish bum who lost his game and threw a bloody tantrum?). Can any viewer, knowing how close he is temperamentally to the subjects he depicts (he boasted of being a gambler himself once), fault Altman for not wanting to moralize or intensify the drama? Is it any surprise that the original, cornier ending—with Bill dribbling the what-are-you-gonna-do-with-your-life nonsense at Charlie—was taken out?

When Godard wasn’t sure of the answers to his doubts, like the limitations of radical youth whose politics he undoubtedly shared (1967’s La Chinoise), his apprehensions would work their way into his films and often get mistaken for insight. Altman works in similar fashions, except his subjects are American. You seldom see him taking a target head-on the way Oliver Stone or Michael Moore might. Instead, it’s incomplete sketches of unresolved feelings and contradictory sentiments, cues and imageries picked up in everyday life, thrown together to be juxtaposed, with the slight hope of uncovering a loose pattern out of all this mess we call reality.

USA | 1974 | 108 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Robert Altman.
writer: Joseph Walsh.
starring: George Segal, Elliott Gould, Ann Prentiss, Gwen Welles, Edward Walsh, Joseph Walsh, Bert Remsen, Jeff Goldblum & Barbara Ruick.