Belcourt member tickets on sale now! General admission tickets on sale Thu, May 15 at 10:00am.
Part of Weekend Classics: Altman at 100
The gambler’s code and the thrill of the chase are the names of the game as down on his luck Bill (George Segal) partners up with free-spirited Charlie (Elliott Gould) for a roller coaster journey of ups and downs through the casinos and racetracks of Tijuana to Reno in search of the big score. Altman sought and achieved a high level of authenticity with the aid of ex-gamblers as extras (as well as champion poker player Amarillo Slim). Though currently out of release, prior home video versions have been cut by 3-4 minutes. This 35mm print is now the only way to see the complete film.
“The director’s most inviting, and possibly his most purely pleasurable, despite its sucker-punch wrap-up. Gould’s rake lives for ‘the action’; as he reads the faces of those Reno high-rollers, cracking jokes but also exhibiting awe, he’s happy just to be among them. Watching, we are, too.” —Alan Scherstuhl, Village Voice (Aug 15, 1974) “The movie will be compared with M*A*S*H, the first big hit by Altman (who is possibly our best and certainly our most diverting American director).... It’s funny, it’s hard-boiled, it gives us a bond between two frazzled heroes trying to win by the rules in a game where the rules re-quire defeat. But it’s a better movie than M*A*S*H because here Altman gets it all together. Ever since “M*A*S*H,” he’s been trying to make a kind of movie that would function like a comedy but allow its laughs to dig us deeper and deeper into the despair underneath.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (Jan 1, 1974) “As in all Altman films, winning is losing; and the more Altman reveals, in his oblique, seemingly casual yet brilliantly controlled way, the more we realize that to love characters the way Altman loves his, you have to see them turned completely inside out.” —Don Druker, Chicago Reader
