From Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1974 (Vol. 41, No. 491).
It’s really a pity that the version of California Split that eventually came out
on DVD, due to musical clearances, had to eliminate some of the play with
Phyllis Shotwell’s songs alluded to here. (For a much later consideration of
this film, including these changes, go here.) — J.R.
CALIFORNIA SPLIT
U.S.A., 1974Director: Robert Altman
In a poker game at a gambling casino near Los Angeles, Charlie
Waters, a winner, is accused by Lew, a sore loser, of playing in
cahoots with the dealer, Bill Denny. Bill and Charlie become
acquainted afterwards in a nearby bar and get cheerfully drunk
together; outside, they are beaten up by Lew (with the help of
friends), who makes off with their winnings. Charlie invites
Bill to stay over at his house, which he shares with two
prostitutes, Barbara and Susan. In the morning, Bill returns to
his job on a glossy magazine but is persuaded to take off that
afternoon and join Charlie at the racetrack, where they make
a small fortune on one of Charlie’s hunches. Wanting to celebrate
with Barbara and Susan, they pretend to be policemen in order to
intimidate the girls’ transvestite client “Helen” and persuade
him to leave, then go to a prizefight. Held up on their way out,
Charlie insists on giving the robber only half of his $1460. Later,
encountering Lew at the racetrack, Charlie beats him up and
recovers the money initially taken from him. Hounded by his
bookie Sparkie to pay back a debt, Bill sells a large number of
possessions and prepares to drive to Reno; Charlie, back from
a Mexican trip, persuades Bill to let him come along and
supplies some of the betting money. Remaining sober and
methodical, Bill wins a total of $82,000 at poker, blackjack
and roulette, which he splits with Charlie; then he explains
that he’s through with gambling – no longer feeling or believing
in the mystical sensation associated with a winning streak –-
and leaves for home.
Even before the title sequence starts, over the familiar Columbia
Pictures logo, California Split has already begun to chatter. A
steady rush of talk — telegraphed, overheard, sometimes barely
audible –- spills into the opening scenes like a scatter of loose change
from a slot machine, meeting and eluding our grasp in imitation of a
strictly chance operation. Admittedly the overall odds of the game
are somewhat fixed: the movie has a script, two box office favorites
and hard Hollywood money behind it. But the improvisatory spirit
is unmistakable, if only because an alert audience is obliged to ad-lib
in order to keep up, feeling its way through a conjunction of background
and foreground elements, and compelled to shift its attention as often
as the characters. At first glance a throwback to the rambling antics
of M*A*S*H; the new film in fact offers a substantially different
experience. While the former film affected to play on the audibility
range of its dialogue, it never really let the spectator miss a significant
line. McCabe and Mrs. Miller on the other hand, actually broached the
idea of a spectator mingling with a plot–discovering it in his own way, in
his own time–rather than simply following it. Altman’s conception of character
was altered in the process; the notion of collective effort in M*A*S*H became
overlaid with irony in McCabe (where the successful building of a town was
offset by the two lost figures who ran it), and virtually atomized in the
broken encounters of isolated cranks in The Long Goodbye. Much of this
fragmentation and discontinuity persists in California Split: even if the
sense of a common bond between the gambler heroes is practically all that
keeps its putative narrative going, it is ostensibly determined and then
severed by the arbitrary whims of chance, and continually interwoven
with the jabbering world of compulsive night people around them.
For the first time in Altman, there is no moral judgment of the
behavior occurring within this absurdist framework: the respective
introverted and extroverted styles of Segal and Gould are presented
in their own terms, as they play against one another, and interpretations
are left to the viewer’s discretion. The interest of these styles is based
on a kind of existential suspense common to jazz and bullfighting,
where identity/authenticity is prodded, tested and revealed by outside
pressures requiring some sort of accommodation — whether it’s winning,
losing, betting, being robbed, seduced (an extraordinary scene between
Gwen Welles and Segal), interrupted (as, in the same scene by Ann
Prentiss), or otherwise challenged. Altman’s establishment of this climate
largely derives from the chance encounters staged by his soundtracks
through the intervention of an ‘independent’ text, achieving some of its
jazziest effects here through Phyllis Shotwell’s raunchy delivery of (mainly)
of-screen tunes. In the second scene at the local casino, a song begins
loudly over the poker players in long shot, recedes to a murmur overtaken
by these players in medium shot, then regains volume with a close-up of
Segal –- playing with an audience’s diverse routes into the scene. The
lyrics usually have only the broadest relation to the action, but sometimes
they draw closer in witty surprises: “I’m goin’ to Kansas City’, is heard
over the trip to Reno, and after the heroes arrive, Shotwell’s and Gould’s
wholly independent raps suddenly converge on the word”nobody”.
Gould’s verbal cadenzas embody this spirit throughout, for Charlie is an
aggressive loudmouth forced to justify his vulgarity with inventiveness and
virtuosity, while Segal plays, as it were, a sort of inner-fire Miles Davis to
Gould’s Charlie Parker. A similar contrast is afforded by the respective ‘hard’
and ‘soft’ styles of Prentiss and Welles, each as remarkable as the other. After
the more simplistic formal conjunctions of Thieves Like Us, Altman’s
touching demonstration that he can pursue a linear plot as such when he
wants to — the life of the latest film is motored by a series of gambles taken
for their own sake. Perhaps the most notable carry-over is the scenes of
awkward domesticity: the polyphonic dinners ofThieves are matched by
Charlie and Bill’s wonderful breakfast of Froot Loops, Lucky Charms and
beer. The mottled lighting schemes of bars and gambling dens exploit the
Notion of competing centers of attention, and what might first appear as a
loose construction of gags is in fact a packed surface composed of many
constantly shifting parts. In short, the charges already brought against
California Split for formlessness suggest a grammatical problem more than
a real one: its triumphant achievement –- and Altman’s — is to change form
from a noun into a verb.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM
