Delayed Reaction: Atlantic City

The Pitch: Hot girls make old guys do really stupid things.

This is kind of an odd movie. I was watching it for a while, waiting for the story to kick in before realizing that it had already gotten to the story. It's funny without really ever telling jokes. Like, Robert Goulet randomly serenading Sausan Sarandon as she's trying to make a call in the phone booth. I'm not sure what the point of that was, but I liked it. Lou (Burt Lancaster) being positively giddy about killing those guys and making it on the News. Sally's sister explaining Eastern mysticism to Grace as she's rubbing her feet. Sally (Susan Sarandon) shutting down the advances of her teacher as cluelessly as possible. These were all amusing.

Lancaster and Sarandon are both great, especially because they are both pretty hapless. Lancaster is always on the outside looking in (quite literally when you consider how he knows Sarandon), always wanting to believe he's more than a small-time hustler. He wastes all that money so quickly because he doesn't know what to do with it. Sarandon just isn't that clever. She's not stupid or needlessly dumb, but she's not that clever. Through conditioning from other movies, I kept expecting he to be more sly that she was. She's pretty simple though.

I didn't find out until afterward that this is the film Louis Malle made before making My Dinner With Andre. That sounds right. I don't know why. I have no insight into how that seems like a natural pairing. I just think it makes sense.

My biggest issue with the movie is that I have trouble with age differences larger than about 20 years between romantically linked characters. Even in the upper teens weirds me out some. 33 years is a lot. The only saving grace is that the big age gap is kind of the point. It's not like the movie was pretending that the idea of them ending up together wouldn't be a little weird.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend