Word: goulding
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...find--if the kid upstairs was listening to one particular drunken conversation down there he'd be asleep in no time: it's just the chorus that keeps him wide-eyed. So when George Segal can't stand up to scrutiny because it's cliched, or when Eliot Gould's gambler is shallow, it's no reflection on the excellent performances or the overall intelligence of the film...
...bets are off. George Segal and Elliott Gould, a pair of raveled gamblers, need luck bad. They go to Reno, play big, win even bigger, and come up empty. Granted, there does not seem to be much of promise here, but Robert Altman has made a funny, smart, anxious movie about luck and lowlife...
Like all his work, California Split (slang for high-low-split poker) has its own bent rhythm. It gives the feeling of having been made with a stoned offhandedness. In fact, there is a relaxed precision governing everything, even Elliott Gould's mumbled throwaways...
Segal's is the more kinetic performance. He plays a magazine writer named Bill Denny, separated from his wife, living out a drifting fantasy of risk and destruction. He hooks up with Gould at a Vegas poker parlor, and the two of them get their small winnings beaten out of them in a fast parking-lot brawl. From then on they become accomplices in misfortune. Gould inhabits some sort of foggy half-world of the hard scuffle, keeping company with a couple of soft-core hookers who serve beer and Fruit Loops for breakfast. Segal likes the style, likes...
...frequented by its two lead characters, a pair of compulsive gamblers. Nor does it happen at the racetrack or boxing ring or other betting locales the two visit. It has nothing to do with the relationship between the two characters, Bill and Charlie (played by George Segal and Elliott Gould), nor with their dealings with the couple of prostitutes Charlie lives with...