Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1980)

Susan Sarandon and Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Susan Sarandon, Kate Reid, Michel Piccoli, Hollis McLaren, Robert Joy, Al Waxman, Robert Goulet, Moses Znaimer, Angus MacInnes, Sean Sullivan, Wallace Shawn. Screenplay: John Guare. Cinematography: Richard Ciupka. Production design: Anne Pritchard. Film editing: Suzanne Baron. Music: Michel Legrand*.

Old gangsters, like old gunfighters, make good movie protagonists, witness the success of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman (2019). There's something about a survivor's story that draws us in, giving veteran actors good roles to play at the waning of their careers. But director Louis Malle and screenwriter John Guare give us a special twist on the survivor's story, eventually revealing their old gangster to be a bit of a fraud, a hanger-on after all the big guns have been killed off, a has-been who is really a never-was. Hence the glee of the elderly Lou Pascal when he actually guns down two thugs -- something he never had the nerve to do when he was a bit player in the mob. Atlantic City works neatly with two kind of dreamers, both with impossible dreams. Lou's dreams are impossible because they're about an illusory past in which he was a big shot, whereas the dreams of the young, like Sally Matthews's, are impossible because they don't have what it takes to fulfill them. Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon got Oscar nominations for playing Lou and Sally, and the film itself racked up nominations in the three other categories in the "top five": picture, director, and screenplay. It won none of them, but like so many Oscar also-rans it has become more valued over the years than most of the winners: Who today remembers Chariots of Fire, which won for best picture and for Colin Welland's screenplay, or has the endurance to sit through Reds, for which Warren Beatty won best director? I cherish Atlantic City for the many unexpected angles through which it views its sort-of-lovable losers, for its use of the crumbling old Atlantic City as a metaphor for the ravages of time, and for lines like Lou's "You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days."

*A courtesy credit: Although Malle commissioned a score from Legrand, he decided not to use it. The only music in the film is diegetic, like Sally's tape recording of Bellini's "Casta Diva" and Robert Goulet' s rendition of Paul Anka's "Atlantic City, My Old Friend."

Black Moon (Louis Malle, 1975)

Black Moon (Louis Malle, 1975)

Cast: Cathryn Harrison, Therese Giehse, Alexandra Stewart, Joe Dallesandro. Screenplay: Louis Malle, Joyce Buñuel. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Art direction: Ghislain Uhry. Film editing: Suzanne Baron.

My Dinner With Andre (Louis Malle, 1981)

Jean Lenauer, Wallace Shawn, and Andre Gregory in My Dinner With Andre

Andre Gregory: Andre Gregory
Wallace Shawn: Wallace Shawn
Waiter: Jean Lenauer
Bartender: Roy Butler

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory
Cinematography: Jeri Sopanen
Production design: David Mitchell
Film editing: Suzanne Baron
Music: Allen Shawn

How interesting that a film that has no story of its own should be such an engaging tribute to the power of storytelling. Having realized that My Dinner With Andre is going to be just watching two rather ordinary-looking men having dinner in a nicely appointed but not particularly unusual restaurant, we have to supply our own visuals. That is, we supplement what's on screen with our imagined visualizations of the stories Andre Gregory tells Wallace Shawn about his travels. Gregory is such an artful raconteur that our task is easy, and we conjure up our own versions of his experiences in a Polish forest, the Sahara desert, the Findhorn community in Scotland, and an especially weird Halloween on Long Island. But Shawn is not a sponge: He's us, a bit skeptical, willing to affirm "Enlightenment values" and ordinary life against Gregory's spiritual enthusiasms and dodgy adventures. Meanwhile, we're also watching the men eat -- or perhaps not eat, for I grew rather impatient with their ignoring the meal they have ordered. And we're watching the ambience, the comings and goings of the restaurant, the waiter and bartender and the servers in the background -- and sometimes the foreground, for director Louis Malle has provided flickers of action as people pass between the camera and the Shawn-Gregory table. The designers have also cleverly positioned a mirror over the table, so that we get glimpses of people other than our interlocutors. Malle uses this mirror smartly toward the end of the film when we see the waiter standing still in the mirror and realize, before Shawn and Gregory do, that the staff is waiting to close up, delayed only by their conversation. That so much can be made out of so little is one of the surprises and delights of My Dinner With Andre. For some people, I know, it's like a film about watching paint dry, but I find it a small triumph of unconventional filmmaking.

The Fire Within (Louis Malle, 1963)

Maurice Ronet in The Fire Within

Alain Leroy: Maurice Ronet
Lydia: Léna Skerla
Dubourg: Bernard Noël
Eva: Jeanne Moreau
Solange: Alexandra Stewart

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louis Malle
Based on a novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle
Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet
Production design: Bernard Evein
Film editing: Suzanne Baron

The Fire Within seems an ironic title for a film about a man whose internal fire has become so low that he plans to, well, snuff it. The French title is Le Feu Follet, which means "will o' the wisp," proverbially "something just out of reach." The thing out of reach for Alain Leroy, a recovering alcoholic whose stay in a clinic has been so effective that his doctor thinks he should go home, is any reason to go on living. Estranged from his wife, who now lives in the United States, he searches for the elusive raison d'être in sex, work, family life, drugs, politics, society, and a return to alcohol, but the quest ends in failure. It's the midlife crisis writ large, but what saves Louis Malle's film from slumping into yet another ennuyant portrait of ennui is the keenly internalized performance of Maurice Ronet as Alain as well as the perverse vitality of the world he is seeking to leave: i.e., Paris in the early 1960s. Malle's vision, in tandem with Ghislain Cloquet's rich black-and-white cinematography, gives us a milieu that presents almost too many reasons to stay alive, so that the problem -- Camus's familiar "one really serious philosophical problem" of suicide -- remains centered in Alain himself. The film crackles with the tension between the world as Alain sees it and the world we see through Malle's eyes.