This is not really a review or evaluation of the film as such, but more of a rough collection of scattered comments.

News of first-time screenwriters writing specific scripts based on their own personal life experiences and actually, miraculously, really, seeing the movie get made and released is always inspiring. The ones that always come to mind are Robert Mulligan with Summer of 42; Douglas Day Stewart with An Officer and a Gentleman; and James Toback with The Gambler. (Even Sylvester Stallone and Rocky can qualify here.) I say inspiring because such news invariably involves more than just a desire to entertain or succeed in Hollywood: the writer believes so strongly in his message that he believes the truth they have to impart to us is so worth discussing in artistic terms, that your desire to succeed will not be denied. In fact, there is a scene from the movie that we mention very briefly here, The Toback Gambler, in which the protagonist Axel Freed, a professor of literature, gives a short lecture to his class on this very topic of will and desire. .

Here is an excerpt from an article Toback wrote for Deadline Hollywood. Give some background on how he came to write the script.

“After graduating from Harvard in 1966, I taught literature and writing in a radically new program at CCNY, whose additional faculty included Joseph Heller, John Hawks, William Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, Adrienne Rich, Mark Mirsky, and Israel Horovitz. I also wrote articles and reviews for Don, harpists, The times, The voice and other publications. Above all, I gambled, recklessly, obsessively, and in secret. It was a rich and exciting double life with heavy doses of sexual adventurism thrown in for good measure. Inspired by the life and work of my literary idol, Dostoyevsky, I embarked on the writing of The player originally intended as a novel. Halfway through, it became clear to me that I was watching and listening to the “novel” as a movie and abruptly decided to turn it into one. When I hit full stride, I felt like I was a recording secretary, just putting on paper the dialogues and images I heard and saw as if they weren’t sounds and images at all, but rather real-life actions that exist in my brain”.

So, as we see, the film began as a powerful personal vision. British director Karel Reisz soon became involved in the project. Reisz, author of one of the seminal texts on film montage, was a director of realistic films with a “focus on marginal characters”, as his obituary in The Guardian puts it. Certainly The Gambler qualifies there.

He also had some pretty bad luck in the way the executives he shot the photos for handled them once they were finished and ready. The Toback article cited above details this in regards to The Gambler; Steven Bach’s Final Cut, one of Hollywood’s truly classic insider stories, tells how Reisz’s next film, Who’ll Stop SThe Rain? It was sabotaged by the very studio he made it for! (By the way, the image was adapted from Robert Stone’s classic novel Dog Soldiers. Stone would go on to write the fabulous Hollywood-bashing novel Children of Light, and after reading Bach it’s easy to see why.)

The movie itself is a blast, and the article linked above is a great help in understanding it and general gaming sensibilities. Lauren Hutton is an almost unreal presence on screen: why the hell wasn’t this woman a star anymore? In the title role, James Caan is excellent as an addicted gamer, but not very convincing as a college professor. Paul Sorvino plays a role that is kind of a hybrid of the ones he played in Goodfellas and A Touch of Class. And in small roles we have a lot of actors who would be pretty well known over the years: Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, Burt Young, Vic Tayback, Antonio Fargas, James Woods. They are all very capable here.

The script, while very powerful and obviously authentic, is not without its problems; for example, Axel’s girlfriend and mother, both prominent for a time, at one point simply disappear from the screen. They literally disappear. And Dostoevskian existentialism is highly questionable as a working philosophy, even though we understand that it is the main operating principle of the main character.