Who would want to spend two hours with a pair of unkempt degenerate gamblers? If we’re being honest, a lot of us would. That’s why movies like Rounders, Uncut Gems, The Sting, and The Hustler exist. The euphoric highs and bracing lows of a gambling addiction aren’t much fun in real life, but it’s an ideal subject matter for film, which can offer us the thrill of a winning streak while sparing us the real-life consequences.
No film has done it better than 1974’s California Split, a prototype for both the modern gambling movie and the modern bromance. It’s about a casual gambler, Bill (George Segal), who meets a professional gambler, Charlie (Elliott Gould), and decides to go all in on the lifestyle. Actually, calling Charlie professional is misleading. He’s not looking to earn a living. His goal is to keep gambling and, ultimately, to keep having fun. The two suffer some mishaps over the course of their glorious week together: Charlie gets beat up multiple times, they lose a lot of money. But Charlie never lets it get him down, so it never gets us down either. California Split is a party that refuses to end.
The deftness of tone can be credited mostly to the performances by Segal and Gould, who feel like brothers who were separated at birth and have just fallen back into each other’s arms. Gould’s Charlie is a motormouth who believes—rightly—that he can talk his way out of any situation. (Vince Vaughn, another fast-talking beanstalk with curly brown hair, was surely taking notes.) In a great scene, Charlie is held up at gunpoint but somehow convinces the mugger to only take half his winnings. He sleeps all day, makes spontaneous trips to Mexico to gamble on dog races, and sort of manages two women who are both sex workers. Is Charlie a pimp? I guess so, but the relationship between the three is never defined. Nevertheless, we’re drawn to characters like Charlie, who live with a freedom most of us dream of but don’t have the audacity to pull off.
Bill is mostly along for the ride, a good role for Segal and his easygoing, aw-shucks, slightly sleazy charm. Even when he blows up at Charlie, it’s hard to take him seriously—that grin is never gone for long. The two Jewish actors are a perfect pair, rising simultaneously in Hollywood during the first era in history in which their stardom was even possible, and seemingly enjoying every minute of it. There’s a cultural specificity in their performances—they get by on their cleverness not their might—but also a universality. From Bud Abbott and Lou Costello to Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, film comedy has been built on these kinds of friendships between two people who exasperate and delight each other in equal measure.
It’s probably indefensible to have gotten this far into a review without mentioning director Robert Altman, one of cinema’s great masters, who deserves credit not just for conjuring the film’s pleasingly rambling tone but for shaping the chemistry of his two leads. In the early days of shooting, Segal was trying to match Gould’s frenetic tone, but Altman wisely encouraged him to simply play the straight man.
California Split also pioneered Altman’s use of an 8-track sound recording system, which allowed him to institute overlapping dialogue, the aesthetic for which he is best known. In his casinos, tracks, and poker rooms, Altman’s naturalistic soundtrack allows us to feel as if we’re merely listening in on the exploits of Bill and Charlie, heightening the reality, while also providing us the emotional distance not to take their problems too seriously.
Like all great parties, the darkness begins to creep in around the edges. A life lived on the margins has its drawbacks, and Altman sees this, but chooses to neither moralize nor redeem. The trauma of the sex work is hinted at, particularly by Susan (Gwen Welles), a younger woman that Charlie and his girlfriend have taken on. She has tears in her eyes after a bad “date,” although we’re never told exactly why. This is a movie of feelings, not plot. When the duo gets robbed by a fellow degenerate, we can feel the blood on Bill’s face and the bruises on Charlie’s ribs. None of this is worth lingering on because the film follows the lead of its characters. It keeps the party going, always searching for the next score, whether it’s money, girls, or simply a temporary escape from the drudgery of a normal life, until it comes to its soft ending. Every winning streak has to end, but California Split has a helluva run.
California Split screens Aug. 3 at 9:25 p.m.; Aug. 5 at 7 p.m.; Aug. 7 at 12:45 p.m.; and Aug. 8 at 7 p.m. at AFI Silver. silver.afi.com.