Axel's lonely castle '11HE ARTS David Robinson The Gambler in Karel Reisz's film is Axel Freed, who sur- faces unshaven from a gamb- ling casino to go directly to teach his English class at a New York university. This morning he has lo'st $44,000, and the syndicate heavy" men are close behind him. Having eased the money out of hii reluctant mother, he takes off and chances the lot in Vegas. When he doubles it there, he cannot resist another gamble dn the football games, and loses it all. After that the stakes get bigger: after money he can chance only his conscience and his life on the tables. Axel sees himself possessed not by demons but by holy zeal. "You're crazy ! " his in- credulous girl friend says. "Yes, but I'm blessed ! " he exults, and at that moment the lights of the casino radiate about his head like the gold halo on an icon. " I'm not going to lose it. I'm going to gamble it." The intellectual and rational part of him is always looking for explanations for the irra- tional urge that drives him. He quotes Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underwor-ld to demonstrate that what is is what you believe; and later applies it to himself explaining that what he loves in gambling is " the un- certainty-the threat of losing. That I could lose. But I won't lose, because I don't want to. That's what I like ". Contrarily, he quotes Lawrence's view that the Americans fear new experi- ences; but chance and risk al- ways give him something new, and stimulation. " If all my bets were safe there just wouldn't be any juice." Perhaps he feels in gambling a link with his grandfather the rich patriarch of a big Jewish family, who as a boy in Lithua- nia, knifed a Cossack, came to America and with only wit and will and chance built up a great furniture trading business. Yet Axel's real dilemma is that ultimately he does not belong to his grandfather's world or to anyone else's ; and, again, he quotes the example of Washington as a man who lived constantly against the grain of his being and in alien worlds. Axel lives between several worlds and belongs to none nf them. The night world of the gambler is only a kind of limbo: and to emphasize its unrealitv the life of the gambling tables is sometimes filmed without any other sound but the accompani- ment of Mahler's first symphony -used very effectively through- out the film as a commentar-v upon Axel's successive meetings witlh his own fate. In his visits to his grand- father, to his mother, to hlis classroom. even in the time he spends with his girl friend, he seems only to be surfacing tem- James Caan and fellow player porarily and rather absently. Yet he is a stranger also in the world of the gamblers, where he is a source of constant admira- tion and reverence and even pride among people who have some difficulty in mastering basic American-even though they may be his heavy creditors. The Gambler is, in fact, not so much about an individual gambler or an obsession as about the whole business of living and siting oneself in life, and getting "the juice" out of that particular gamble. The tables are as much a symbol ef an American life as was the quest for the Great White Whale. The script of The Gambler is an original first screenplay by James Toback, who is a pro- fessor of literature in New York (and the self-conscious remini- scence of a first novel hangs over the character of Axel). It gives Karel Reisz another of the obsessive and impetuous heroes he has seemed to prefer (in Night Must Fall, Morgan and Isadora), though much more than the others Axel has a con- sciousness of the battle between his own reason and impulse. Most of that battle goes on unseen. As a hero Axel presents the very large and basic prob- lem that because of his nature he is unable to make emotional contact with anyone-neither his family' nor his girl friend, and certainly not the people of his underworld. Perhaps he has him- self a sense of that. His two last and biggest gambles involve for the first time personal involve- ments. In the first, pushed by the gambling syndicate, he must persuade his favourite student to throw a ball game, and chance the consequences of the boy's reaction. In the second he walks into a Harlem ghetto brothel, and chances his life on the knife of a black assassin. Does he triumphantly caress his wound because it is at last a mark of human contact as well as a win- ning stake? It is fruitless to speculate whether a suppler actor than James Caan (Jack Nicholson or Stacey Keach, perhaps) could have revealed more of Axel, have portrayed his isolation without isolating him as well from the spectator. As it is, Axel must be re- vealed more through his world than his own person; and the world is drawn with Karel Reisz's faultless care for detail: not only in its immediate phy- sical aspects (the oppressive clutter of cast-aside paper in Axel's apartment; the old- world opulence of his grand- father's house; the eerie prison of an urban tennis court be- tween apartment houses; the dazzle of the casinos, the very smell of the brothel) but the subsidiary characters too. A syndicate hatchet man wrecks the apartment of a bad debtor wvith the genial competence of a friendly milkman; grandfather's expansive paternalism never quite conceals the cold calcula- tion ; he perceives clearly how irreconcilable are Axel's dif- ferent worlds wvhen he tells him his girl friend is not for him- " not for a scholar. For a club- man, a playboy ". Monty Python atzd the Holy Grail chances its arm with parody, which is always a riskv undertaking, involving as it doe.s commitments to the original that can become onerous. A duty, however vague, to a storv makes it harder to take off into the inconsequences and inter- ruptions that are the essence of Monty Python comedy. The story becomes less an excuse than an obstacle to the gags. At its best, Monty Python combines loW variety with Alice in Wonderland. The special logic of Alice is uppermost in choice moments, like the attempt to prove a case of witchcraft by weight, wood and a somewhat elusive analogy to a duck; or the taunting French- men who hurl astounded cows from the battlements upon the equally astounded besieging Round Table knights below. The music hall elements are tdc the fore in Terry Jones's trouser- less and falsetto Prince in the tower. Mlonty Python's special hrarid of humour lies in the joke of inappropriate reaction-as when the Black Knight, shorn, Peck- inpah fashion, of all his limbs, continties sportingly to battle, with British phlegm and forti- tude; or a small-time king escorts Sir Lancelot through the ranks of guests dead and dyiig from Lancelot's excessive energy with his sword, discus- sing possible improvements to the property. It is all hit-and- miss ; but the hits are often rich fun. Alexander Kluge's Occasional Work of a Female Slave is an attractive rarity, a political film which acknowledges that poli- tics are people in all their untidiness. and not only theories. In this Kluge is in advance of Godard, who in other respects has been a profound influence on his work. Roswitha is married to a boorish chemistry research student, Franz Bronski, wvhom she supports, along with their family, by running an illegal abortion clinic. (The film points out the irony: she gets rid of other people's children so that she can afford more of her own.) When the clinic's activities are reported to the police by a rival abortionist, Bronski is obliged to work in a factory, and Roswitha determines to engage herself in political activities. Since that consists in causing unrest at the factory wvher e Bronski wvorks, he loses his job; and Roswitha is last seen selling sausages wrapped in political pamphlets, at the factory gate. The strength of the film both as tract (on feminine libera- tion) and entertainment is the performance of Alexandra Kluge, the director's sister and the star of his first film Ahschied von Gester-n (Yester- day Girl). lHer mixture of zeal and muddle, good nature and energy without focus are touching and involving. But the sensitive might prefer to avert their eyes in the sequence early in the film showing an abortion, which seems to be per- formed with the aid of outsize shoe-horns. Axel's lonely castle The Gambler (x) Universal Monty Python and the Holy Grail (a) Casino Occasional Work of a Female Slave. (x) Gate