THE GAMBLER directed by Karel Reisz stars James Caan in a difficult role as Alex Freed a compulsive gambler with many inner demons who is completely out of control He can't resist a bad bet because that's where the juice is While his irrational rationalizations--largely influenced by Dostoyevsky whose novel THE GAMBLER he teaches to his students at City College--might seem like a lot of … Continue
In order to pay off a gambling debt to the mob, Vitelli agrees to kill a Chinese unknown to him. Against all odds he succeeds in killing the man, but he gets severely wounded during his flight. But the gangsters turn against him as they had not expected him to survive the assassination and Vitelli is forced to kill these men too. Ben Gazzara delivered a lifelike impersonation of a simple man who found his happiness in running a third-rate strip bar and who gets caught in something that is much too big for him, sometimes he does not even seem to understand the whole meaning of it.