Poker Movies

Poker Movies
Game's astounding popularity begs the question: what are genre's best bets?

by Rustin Thompson | Published January 27, 2004

When Jennifer Wood, the managing editor of MM, asked me to come out of my self-imposed retirement from the “Home Cinema” column to write an article for the 10th anniversary issue of this magazine, my first thought was, “Great! I’ll write that article on the 10 best DVD releases of the decade or a rundown of my favorite film of each year of MovieMaker’s existence.” But the assignment she offered was considerably less sweeping: poker movies.

What?

At first this seemed much too puny of a sub-genre to be worthy of a 10th anniversary column. But when I began thinking of the parallel between playing poker and publishing an independent magazine, the idea gelled. Both pursuits involve tremendous risks of money and ego; the up-then-down rhythms of a single night of poker-playing mirror the month-to-month financial rollercoaster of putting out an indie mag. In a game of five-card draw, your winnings depend on the strategy and luck of the other players, while in printing a magazine you’re at the mercy of fickle advertisers and whether the competition beat you to an exclusive story. Also, like a good run at the tables the night before, you’re only as good as your last issue. When you’re talking about Tim Rhys, the publisher and editor-in-chief of MM, he’s a gambler who knows when to hold ’em and who has never had to fold ’em.

So, okay… poker movies. Of course, when I really put my mind to it, I could come up with very few films that were about poker. The 1998 release, Rounders, caught the arcane lingo of the table, but John Dahl’s direction was clumsy and the story implausible, particularly when the John Malkovich character so obviously gave away his bluff. And who could buy the pre-adolescent Matt Damon as a card shark?

I remember a film called 5 Card Stud, which offered the minor shock of Dean Martin’s lily-white ass, but very little card playing. Or am I thinking of The War Wagon and Kirk Douglas’ lily-white ass? Both films seemed to turn up on the ass end of drive-in double bills I attended as a kid.

Tombstone was of course about the infamous Earp-Clanton feud, with almost the entire cast decked out in huge freakin’ moustaches and scarves by Versace. But Val Kilmer shines as the clean-shaven, tubercular Doc Holliday: a Latin-spouting aesthete and poker player extraordinaire. Anybody, however, who has tried to play a hand of Spit in the Ocean after their sixth Jack Daniels would scoff at the card scenes: if Holliday was really the raging drunk Kilmer portrays him to be, he wouldn’t be able to tell a full house from an Airstream trailer.

Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels contained a thin card-playing subplot, but the movie was meretricious and dumb. There was a funny poker scene in Stranger Than Paradise, but all I can recall from it was the mighty bulk of the late Rockets Redglare filling up a corner of the frame.
If Holliday was really the raging drunk Kilmer portrays him to be, he wouldn’t have been able to tell a full house from an Airstream trailer.

Ocean’s Eleven included a scene where Brad Pitt is teaching the finer points of poker to a table full of young Hollywood actors playing themselves. As with nearly everything Pitt has done in his career, the bit would have played better had he let his movie star guard down just a bit more.

Hal Ashby’s forgotten Lookin’ To Get Out could just as well be the inscription on the late director’s headstone. This ragged study of two losers who con their way into a Vegas hotel is sad and scruffy and unsatisfying, but Jon Voight and Burt Young manage to convey the self-delusional bravado of all those fringe characters you see wandering the city’s boulevards.

More searching on Google turned up other titles: A Big Hand for the Little Lady. A Man Called Sledge. Run. A short scene in John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn. And, of course, Maverick, a film I’ll admit to not having watched but scanned. Both the estimable Time Out Film Guide and the more plebian Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide placed Maverick somewhere on the scale between “lackluster” and “lackadaisical.”

Finally, I came upon the Web link for Lesbian Strip Poker Pictures. I’d still be surfing that one if it wasn’t for the lure of the large fee I’ll receive for writing this article.

There are a few films that explore the interrelationships and psychological issues of gambling, some of them memorable: California Split, one of Robert Altman’s small but elegiac pictures from the ’70s, features George Segal and Elliot Gould as a couple of soup-stained-tie casino vagabonds. These are guys who’d rather use their downtime to play Keno than to, say, wash up. There’s The Gambler, with James Caan’s near-existential portrait of a man addicted to the pain-pleasure principle of winning and losing. And Scorsese’s overlooked masterpiece, Casino, nailed the authentic casino atmosphere—the marathon of night, noise and lights—better than any other film. Let It Ride featured Richard Dreyfuss as a compulsive gambler having the luckiest day of his life at a Florida racetrack. This may have been one of Dreyfuss’ first post-coke addiction movies—but he was still great. Hard Eight, Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film, took a downbeat look at lowbrow gamblers in Reno.

I happen to have lived in Reno for six months back in 1981. One night I came up $200 short on my apartment rent, due the next day. With $24 dollars in my pocket, I started playing blackjack at 9:00 p.m. and left the tables at dawn with $260. Although it was chump change, I’d experienced the electric surge a gambler feels when well-placed betting morphs into a streak. That electricity is harder to capture within the architecture of a game of seven-card stud. But for the poker aficionado, or even the casual spectator—and there seem to be a lot of you out there, judging by the surge in ESPN, Travel Channel and Bravo broadcasts of high-stakes poker action—here are a few worthy titles that due justice to the game:

The Sting (1973, George Roy Hill)

There is really only one card game in this picture, but it is the “hook” which catches the “mark,” Robert Shaw’s arrogant gambler, and kicks the whole plot into gear. By the time con artists Paul Newman, Robert Redford and their band of merry tricksters are finished, Shaw is out a cool half-million. The movie is brisk and artificial. The sets appear to be deliberately made from recycled, backlit props and the intertitle cards that announce the plot turns—“The Set-Up”, “The Wire”—clunk up the action. But Newman and Redford are immensely likable, reminding us that buddy movies work best when the stars and the story are both smart and amiable. In the high-stakes poker game scene, Newman pretends to be a drunken buffoon who out-cheats Shaw by switching cards on the big hand. The scene is nicely staged, but I wished it had revealed how he made the swap.

House of Games (1987, David Mamet)

A game of five-card draw also gets things going here, and everything is revealed. That’s the fun in this mind game of a movie, a classic Mamet-ian exercise in man-woman verbal and sexual jousting. Lindsay Crouse plays a best-selling author and psychologist trying to help a patient who says he’ll be killed if he doesn’t pay off a gambling debt to Mike (Joe Mantegna), a con artist who hangs out at a place called the House of Games. Crouse is attracted to Mike and his profession, and she and we get a crash course in the con. Although things end up bloody, the poker game that hooks Crouse is superb theater.

When Crouse sees liquid leaking out of the gun that one of the players (Ricky Jay) is using to threaten her, she realizes it’s a water pistol and she’s being had. When Mantegna chides Jay for putting water in a perfectly fine replica of a real pistol, Jay defends himself by saying, “I’m not going to threaten someone with an empty gun!” It’s lines like that one and this—“I’m from the United States of Kiss My Ass”—that make House of Games a literate delight.

Kaleidoscope (1966, Jack Smight)

Some­body on the director’s creative team discovered a new kind of kaleidoscopic camera filter and decided to make a film around it. That’s the feel of this swinging ’60s, artsy-smartsy, comedy-drama. It teamed transatlantic hipsters Warren Beatty and Susannah York in a story about a playboy who comes up with what turns out to be an ingenious plan to bilk a Monte Carlo casino: he breaks into the factory that makes the playing cards and marks the photographic plates so he can “read” the decks. The cards are shipped off, he shows up at the tables and wins big. He’s caught (although we’re not sure how) and forced by Scotland Yard to play a big stakes poker game against a narcotics smuggler using the marked cards. But when the decks turn out to be old, unmarked ones, Beatty must use his wits instead of deception to win. The movie is insufferable, but it’s almost worth watching just for the big moment when the cards are revealed (a must-have staple of every poker film) and Beatty’s priceless reaction.

The Cincinnati Kid (1965, Norman Jewison)

This is the granddaddy, the Mona Lisa, le grand fromage, of poker movies. Jewison took over for Sam Peckinpah, and the movie could use more of Sam’s anachronisms and less of Jewison’s clichéd sentimentality. But this is compensated for by the presence of two of the finer vixens of the New Hollywood, Ann-Margret and Tuesday Weld—two beauties who make Cameron Diaz and Gwyneth Paltrow look like anorexic game show models.

There is also fine talent behind the camera. The New Orleans location photography by Philip H. Lathrop is first-rate, the script is by Terry Southern and Ring Lardner Jr. and Hal Ashby—who started out as an editor—deftly cuts between the banal romantic scenes and the more impressive poker sequences.

Steve McQueen plays the talented upstart who takes on the old master Edward G. Robinson in a marathon game of five-card stud. The tension-wracked final hand is worth watching again and again for a crash course in how to bluff and when to bet. When Robinson is scolded for making what appears to be a reckless raise, he sums up the game’s timeless, intractable appeal: “It’s gets down to what it’s all about… making the wrong move at the right time.” MM

It's Poker Movie Mania!

Does the recent poker phenomenon have you thinking you’ve already seen the best poker movies ever made? Well, we’ll give it to you straight. There’s a whole new hand being dealt to indie audiences, and some of these babies are really the nuts. On deck is a full house of new poker films in various stages of production, including studio and indie features and a couple of documentaries. Which ones will hit the jackpot and which will fold is anyone’s bet. But for now, ante up cause here’s the deal:

This spring, Dimension Films will release Shade, starring Sylvester Stallone and Melanie Griffith. Directed by first-timer Damian Nieman, it’s a crime thriller set in the world of poker hustlers working the clubs and bars of Los Angeles. Three hustlers encounter “The Dean” (Stallone), a man for whom players will drop their entire bankroll just to say they have taken a seat at his table—and pull off a successful sting that results in their pursuit by a vengeful gangster.

Nashville moviemaker A.W. Vidmer has completed his indie film Stuey, which stars Michael Imperioli and tells the compelling true-life story of card prodigy Stu “The Kid” Ungar. Ungar played high-stakes gin rummy in New York at age 14, but was running for his life at age 20, completely broke. He made good on his debts by winning a tournament, then made his name by winning the World Series of Poker the very first time he played in 1980. He won it again the following year, but by 1989 had lost it all—a victim of the Vegas lifestyle and his own excesses.

Another indie is The Big Blind, written and directed by poker player David James and financed by his game winnings. A dark comedy, the movie is an ensemble piece that features 50 actors in over a dozen intertwined stories. The many vignettes shown deal with con artists, gangsters, professional card players, addicts, bums and a single mom—and tell their stories of betrayal, crime, addiction, failed love and hope—all tied together by the casino.

At least two feature length documentaries are currently being made on poker. Rovin’ Gamblers, directed by Rebekah Sindoris, chronicles the lives of six young professional poker players with an unparalleled obsession for the game. Sindoris follows their lives from the tables to the nightclubs to family dinners as they struggle to stay on top of their game. Currently being edited, the film was shot in multiple locations including Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York’s underground card rooms and Costa Rica. The stories shown range from a millionaire’s boys’ club ski/golf/poker trip on a private jet to a struggling novice’s attempt at taking the grand title.

In addition, MM Publisher Tim Rhys’ Taking a Shot takes a look at high-stakes poker players, moviemakers and other mavericks who have successfully gambled on themselves to achieve the American Dream. Rhys interviews stars and analysts from the world of high-stakes and tournament poker, as well as celebrities and entrepreneurs who have unique personal perspectives on risk-taking and its relationship to achieving success, American style. The doc is being shot over a six-month period, and chronicles the fortunes of Rhys’ partner and producer, Susan Genard, as she competes in a series of high-stakes tournaments to try to win enough money for her company to produce an independent film!

Though not yet in production, Warner Brothers’ Lucky You, written by Eric Roth, has Curtis Hanson attached to direct. The movie is a drama set in the world of high-stakes poker and focuses on a gifted young player confronting his personal demons as he attempts to win a Vegas tournament.

Now, onto the slate of new backgammon movies... just bluffing. —Andy Rose