Poker In The Media: California Split
by Bodog Poker | Aug 11 2010
California Split is a film that seems to never come up when people talk about movies about poker and gaming and that seems a shame. Director Robert Altman, working with relative newcomer Eliot Gould and George Segal crafted a fantastic movie that may seem a bit out-of-date (it was, after all, made in the 1970s) and suffer from poor sound (this was the first non-Cinerama movie that used eight-track stereo and the mixing is horrible in places,) but if you're looking for an authentic look at the nascent poker scene, you can't do any better than this. Altman's craft and ability to create a genuine atmosphere out of small bits would later become even more finely-tuned, but this is a great movie that sadly gets undervalued because of movies like M*A*S*H and The Long Goodbye.
The plot is not very thick, frankly, but with two actors playing such rich characters, the story really lies in the changes and decisions Bill Denny (Segal) and Charlie Waters (Gould) make and how they are affected by them. Charlie, typical for Gould of that period, is a smartass whose mouth runs away a bit, a man who's hooked on the highs and lows of gambling and poker. Denny's a magazine writer who's not quite as embedded in the scene as his friend. The movie details Bill's addiction to gaming and how it takes control of his life and his eventual apparent redemption.
For many poker players, the early scenes involving Bill's gaming problems are going to be slow going: we've seen it all before, and even if Altman's a great director, repeating the same litany as many another film has done can get tiresome. Bill goes into debt to his bookie and hocks some of his possessions to make his way to Reno where the two leads pool their money to buy into a poker game. This is where it gets interesting: one of the players in that game is none other than Thomas A. Preston, Junior, also known as Amarillo Slim, playing himself in one of those “Oh, wow!” moments that you don't quite get when you see one of our big multimedia star players showing up on TV or in a movie nowadays. Altman related Amarillo Slim's appearance and his choice to put him in the movie to one journalist: “[Slim was used] to add drama to the poker game for the actors and crew. He elevated the game to a very high professional level.”
Play poker onlineDisappointingly to some, Bill takes his poker winnings and moves onto other games, games that require less skill and more luck, but that's actually consistent with his character – it's not the games themselves he's addicted to, but those moments where you win and lose, a crash or a sudden windfall. While the last act isn't centered around poker itself, it does a great job of presenting the gamer mentality and how we can all get caught up in the moment while we play. Roger Ebert's review of the film says it best: "At the end of California Split we realize that Altman has made a lot more than a comedy about gambling; he's taken us into an American nightmare, and all the people we met along the way felt genuine and looked real.”
