Robert Altman has always been interested in the minute details of the world around his characters – particularly when it comes to his ensemble pieces, but also in surprising cases, such as a movie like California Split. The 1974 film does not have a particularly huge ensemble, primarily following two characters through very different journeys with gambling addiction and otherwise featuring a small handful of supporting players. It does, as we see in the opening scene, have a tremendous eye for detail, though. It’s not just that the action is set against an in-movie video explaining the rules of card-playing. It’s also that we immediately get a sense of the film’s exploration of the effects of card-playing on the players. Joseph Walsh’s screenplay is not only a cautionary tale, then, but a character study, about two men who win a lot of money and lose a lot of their souls in the process.
That’s a relatively familiar idea, but Altman is more intelligent and probing in his approach by allowing the cast of characters to inhabit what seems, for all intents and purposes, to be the real world. At the center of the story are Bill Denny (George Segal), who works in the offices of a magazine but hates it, and Charlie Waters (Elliott Gould), a semi-professional gambler whose winning streaks apparently pay his way through living with a pair of prostitutes and otherwise twittering away the days. Both men are devoted to gambling as a lifeline, even as one can tell that each of them gets something very different out of their obsession.
For Bill, it’s a necessity beyond the simple fact of his own devotion to the practice. He’s also in hock to his bookie Sparkie (played in a cameo by the screenwriter, great as an intimidating man who has only so much patience on reserve) and must peddle his wares, including his car, to move deeper into his obsession at the expense and solely for the furtherance of the next score. He shacks up with Charlie in the meantime, and it’s clear that the other man’s loosey-goosey lifestyle is simply too much excess for the more tightly wound Bill. Segal’s performance is truly something to watch, masterful in the way the actor embodies his character’s tendency to analyze everything in front of him, as if the man is constantly calculating either an escape plan or a strategic move.
As for Charlie, this is a man ruled by his vices and thoroughly comfortable with that. He barely bats an eye when robbed at gunpoint, managing to talk the attacker down to robbing him of only half his money and later viciously retaliating against another man who took all of it. He means business, but he also has a devil-may-care attitude about the life he leads. He is not the manager of the two sex workers who live in his house. Instead, it seems like Barbara (Ann Prentiss) and Susan (Gwen Welles) are simply fixtures in a life that has no other grounding. They are simply there, in the house, and Susan ultimately grows very fond of Bill, who is unlike any other man she has met.
Prentiss and Welles are essential pieces of this ensemble, as they contribute to the lived-in sense of character-building that is so uniquely Altmanesque about this particular step in the director’s filmography. Gould, meanwhile, is a ball of nervous energy throughout, and it’s fascinating how Altman, Walsh and film editor Lou Lombardo conduct the narrative (such as it is) entirely around Charlie’s personality, with Bill acting as a foil for the purposes of bringing the energy level to a simmer when necessary. This isn’t really an urgent film, full of stressful editing or high tension, though one does feel the stakes of this whole arrangement as the two men enter a series of card-playing games that see their totals enter the five-figure arena.
The influence of California Split can clearly be felt in later films, from the depiction of the rules of the game(s) in Rounders to the overall stylings and study of character in Mississippi Grind (which even took inspiration for its poster from the advertisement art for this movie). Having been directed by such a singular filmmaker, though, the movie also feels fresh, entirely different and far deeper than whatever its far-reaching influences might suggest. This is thoughtful, absorbing and morally probing.
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