The Gambler

Axel Freed teaches literature at a New York university. He sets Dostoyevsky. The same man owes forty-four thousand dollars and the debt grows every week. He takes money from his mother and loses that too. One of his students plays basketball, and Axel proposes fixing the result. The subject is not gambling but a man wanting to lose. When Axel wins he does not stop; he puts the money straight back. The film builds this not as a story of addiction but as a form of the wish to destroy oneself, and ties it openly to the texts he teaches. The form is tied to seventies New York. Nightclubs, gyms, the subway. The narration is deliberately untidy and the escalation follows no classical shape. The screenplay is James Toback's and rests largely on his own history with gambling, which he later described openly. Karel Reisz directs. The final scene is the most argued-over: Axel does something that damages his own body and looks into a mirror as though he has won. The film does not explain it. James Caan plays Axel, Paul Sorvino the loan shark and Lauren Hutton his girlfriend. Who it is for: viewers who like seventies American character drama. Who it is not for: anyone who wants to connect with the protagonist; he considers himself right throughout and the film does not correct him.