California Split (Spelling-Goldberg Productions, Persky-Bright Productions, Columbia, 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, after Fun with Dick and Jane – a comedy that made some serious points about the American economy and the whole fundamental evil of a system based on greed – the next George Segal film TCM showed was California Split, a self-consciously “serious” film that turned out to be a dreary bore. It had certain oddball commonalities with Fun with Dick and Jane, including a cross-dressing character (though we only see her in one scene and we don’t know whether she’s a Transwoman, a Gay drag queen or a hetero cross-dresser) and the central characters being victims of a Black robber. My husband Charles came home in time to join me for this one but he noticed me nodding off a lot, not only due to an overall level of exhaustion but because the movie was simply not all that interesting. The film was directed by Robert Altman from a script by Joseph Walsh, with the two of them also named as co-producers, and I know there’s a cult of veneration around Altman largely because his movies tend to have multiple plot strands and be about the kinds of “normal” people that usually don’t get movies made about them. I’ve long had problems with Altman; he made some truly great films, like M*A*S*H and Nashville, but he also made some dreary bores.

California Split was one of the boring ones, a self-consciously sordid tale about gambling in which Bill Denny (George Segal), an executive at a public-relations firm (at first I thought it was a record company, then a garden-seed company, but finally I realized it was a P.R. outfit that simply numbered record and seed companies among its clients), meets professional gambler Charlie Waters (Elliot Gould). They run into each other by chance at a poker game, where Charlie arouses the ire of another customer who says Waters won a hand by picking a card up off the floor (against the rules) and nurses a grudge against him. Bill protects him and the two of them embark on a gambling spree that lasts the rest of the movie and takes them from legal poker rooms (the opening features a marvelous narration that supposedly represents the soundtrack to a video the club shows newbies to explain to them the fundamentals of poker) to horse races (where for some reason Charlie talks a woman out of betting on a horse he later places his own bet on, along with Bill’s, and naturally she’s upset with him and starts throwing things at him when the horse he talked her out of betting on wins) to Reno, where they decide to hit a casino in apparent preparation for the big leagues of American gambling (at least back then), Las Vegas. There are a few women involved, including Bill’s girlfriend Barbara (Ann Prentiss, Paula Prentiss’s sister) and Charlie’s partner Susan (Gwen Welles), but they’re pretty much sidetracked to the stories of their menfolk and they disappear for long stretches of screen time.

During the action we start hearing 1920’s and 1930’s standards sung by a woman with an especially powerful voice – reminiscent of Julia Lee, the Black singer (and sister of pioneering Kansas City bandleader George E. Lee) whom Altman used in his first non-documentary feature, The Delinquents (1957) – who turns out, when we actually see her in the Reno scenes, to be a heavy-set white woman named Phyllis Shotwell, who’s damned good at phrasing these old songs. Charles and I both agreed that she and the Transwoman early on were the most entertaining people in the film! I give Altman and Walsh credit for avoiding the one almost inescapable cliché in a gambling movie – the scene in which the central character hits a lucky streak, bets it all on one last spin of the roulette wheel/turn of the card/toss of the dice and loses it all. Instead they have the two rack up a total of $82,000 at the Reno casino, split it on the spot and then Bill returns to Hollywood and his P.R. job after he admits to Charlie that he doesn’t feel the exhilaration after a big win he was supposed to feel. Instead he felt nothing, and while this makes for an oddly moving ending it’s an ending to something that hasn’t really been worth watching in the first place. We don’t feel like the characters have really grown or changed from their experiences until that final renunciatory moment from George Segal’s character, and we haven’t really enjoyed these rather dour and unpleasant people either. There were times when Altman would make his rather odd movie aesthetic, including multiple intersecting plot lines and unglamorous characters, work, but California Split is not one of those times. I joked that the only use I could think of for it is as a recruiting video for Gamblers Anonymous.