City of Blight

IN Atlantic City, the East Coast's first legalized gambling paradise takes form on screen as a sore on the continent's skin, a pustule that bursts every decade or two. The film jumps back and forth among images of demolition and urban renewal: a billboard on a lone, dilapidated building proclaims. "Atlantic City, you're back on the map--again," while in a spectacular shot before the credits director Louis Malle shows us an aerial view of a massive stucco hotel collapsing into a heap of dust and rubble. Malle's Atlantic City is a patchwork of the old corruption and the new, numbers-runners and cocaine dealers, rickety frame houses and opulent casinos, aging beauty queens and female croupiers-in-training. There's always some new growth blistering out from the old scar tissue, and by the end of this story of love-and-death in the gambling town, you might wish someone would finally deluge the place with antiseptic.

Malle has attempted two things with this movie, and succeeded in at least one. In Pretty Baby, his last movie, he buried a potentially lurid story about teenage prostitution under a mountain of period detail, creating a fuzzily romantic picture-book of old New Orleans. Atlantic City is an equally memorable urban portrait, but this is clearly not a city Malle loves, and he serves it up with objective clarity, sharply focusing his lens on stupid people in ugly places doing evil things.

As an inquest into the soul of an American city, Malle's film offers a catalogue of detailed horrors--I'm surprised the city's Board of Tourism didn't find some way to block its distribution. A pair of young people, Robert Joy as Joe and Hollis McLaren as the pregnant Chrissie, make their way down the highway towards this mecca of evil at the film's beginning, and you figure they are innocents who will be ground up by the Big City's hustlers and dealers. It turns out, though, that Joe is trying to sell a pound of cocaine he picked up at a Philadelphia drop-off site, and Chrissie is a mindless, though benevolent, sucker who babbles about reincarnation and defends Joe's dealing by remarking "Dope's all right--dope is for everyone!" Malle's Atlantic City seems to suck all the aimless and the brainless from everywhere across America to itself, gathering them in this sinkhole so they can leech off each other.

Malle animates his vision of a contemporary Gomorrah with an intelligent deployment of detail and hovering shots of inanimate scenes. Some of his ironic directorial comments are almost absurdist: After mob punks kill Joe for stealing their coke, his estranged wife Sally (Susan Sarandon) is left to dispose of the body. When she arrives at the hospital to take a look, there's a gala ceremony to christen its new "Frank Sinatra wing," and right down the hall from Joe's corpse peacock-plumed dancers are kicking their feet while a blow-dried singer (Robert Goulet) croons. "I'm glad to see you're born again, Atlantic City my old friend..." As Sarandon tries to phone Joe's parents to give them the news. Goulet hovers outside her glass phone booth, directing his saccharine song to her.

MALLE MAKES SUCH SCENES seem plausible in his Atlantic City, and as a slice of fallen life this is a successful film. But as a presentation of a handful of characters and their lives Atlantic City fails. Malle seems to have trouble casting male Americans: Keith Carradine's deadwood performance in Pretty Baby nearly ruined that movie, and in Atlantic City Burt Lancaster acts with such leaden sluggishness you wonder if the projector is running at the right speed.

Lancaster plays Lou, an aging numbers-runner who moves in on Sarandon to help her after Joe's death, courts her, saves her from the mob, and eventually gives her the means to get out of the casino town. In their several romantic encounters, Sarandon's cool-headed, warm-hearted social climber comes off as a well-rounded if simple character: "Tell me stuff," she earnestly asks Lou, wanting to know about French wines, Italian opera, good living. Whether John Guare's screenplay or Lancaster's mole-like blindness to subtlety is responsible, though, Lou never acts like anything but a tired, bored Burt Lancaster. "I did it! I really did it!" he giggles after shooting the punks who are after Sarandon, and it sounds like he's celebrating having fooled the director.

Lancaster just about torpedoes the human side of Atlantic City, leaving it a film that says a lot about a place and very little about people. It's still worth seeing--if you want to rid yourself once and for all of any desire to visit the Las Vegas of the East. In Malle's nightmarish portrait, it's a city that can never change; no matter how much filth it accumulates, it will always be able to attract a little more.

Malle's characters are always cleaning themselves, washing their hands, trying to rid themselves of the soot and the smells of their city. In the film's opening shot, Sarandon goes through a ritual of purification that appears like a refrain through the movie: to remove the fish-smell from her body after her workday as an oyster-bar waitress, she squeezes lemon-halves over her arms, shoulders, chest and breasts. Dingily unerotic, bathed in orange light, the sequence seems more satanic than baptismal. It distills the almost misanthropic repulsion towards this city that guides Malle's direction: nothing can really wash the smell away.