Film Comment: Editor's pick: California Split

Editor's Pick: California Split

The cover of the Sept/Oct 1974 FILM COMMENT is graced by an image from Robert Altman's glorious California Split (Col/TriStar, $24.96). Inside is a lengthy consideration of the director's career in which the film is roundly dismissed, and its creator is accused of trying "to improvise his way out of an intellectual vacuum." Go figure. Never available on video, this study of two compulsive gamblers, their rambling misadventures, and the marginal world they inhabit is one of the Seventies' most unrecognized masterpieces and one of Altman's very best films. Without the pretensions of Altman's more extravagantly lauded movies of the same period, it somehow captures the mood of the country at that odd moment, with its manic highs and aimless torpor. It's not necessarily about losers, but it is about a form of madness, depicting as it does the sheer fuck-you exhilaration of gambling as well as its ultimate emptiness. Elliott Gould, as the indomitably confident and log-orrheic smart-ass Charlie, and George Segal, as the subdued, increasingly desperate Bill, give the performances of their careers, and together they embody the crisis of masculinity that was increasingly overwhelming the "buddy" genre to which the film ostensibly belongs. Ahman fills Split with wonderful incidental business and indelible supporting performances from Joseph Walsh (the film's screenwriter) as a loan shark, Edward Walsh as a sore loser, and, best of all, Ann Prentiss (sister of Paula, who inexplicably never made another film) as Charlie's prostitute girlfriend. And here's something to marvel at: pre-Charlie's Angels, Dynasty, and Beverly Hills 90210, Aaron Spelling produced a film worthy of Cassavetes.--Smith Gavin