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Title: Croupier |
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Release Date: 1998 |
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Nationality and Language: UK/France/Germany, English |
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Running time: 94 Min |
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Distributor and Production Company: The Shooting Gallery, TNG, Film Four |
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Director; Writer: Mike Hodges, wr. Paul Mayersburg |
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Producer: Jonathan Cavendish |
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Cast: Starring Clive Owen, Gina McKee |
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Technical: |
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Relevance to DOASKDOTELL site: |
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Review: Movie Review of Croupier Starring Clive Owen, Gina McKee, directed by Mike Hodges, written by Paul Mayersburg Shooting Gallery (UK) and TNG (
Well, “croupier” sounds like a vocabulary word for a Friday morning high school English test. The French word means, “one behind another on a horse,” so it has come to mean, “an attendant at a gaming table who collects and plays bets” (American Heritage College Dictionary). In other words, a dealer at a casino. Well, maybe some parents don’t want the kids to know this.
Indeed, this little art film is a munchy
film noir, that gets you into the life of the wanna-be writer Jack Manfred (Clive Owen). In his opening scene, he visits his agent,
who implores him to write what other people want, action and sex starting on
the first page. He has to prove that
he can sell before he’ll be accepted in the “literary” world. Oh, as a writer myself, do I know that
feeling. Well, he needs a job to keep
going, so he continues on with is experience from
So, is it ethical for him to work on the great British
novel essentially about his own life while he’s still working? What about this business of writing like a
Repairman Jack? One can read in
authors’ law books about invasion of privacy and libel, and about how
carefully you have to disguise characters should they be identifiable at
all. (This may be an even bigger
problem in British law than American; author Kitty Kelly (The Royals,
1997), explaining why her non-fiction book could not be published in Britain,
explained, “in Britain, truth is not an absolute defense to libel”!) Well, he tries to play his job straight (in
a supposedly crime-ridden business) but gradually sinks into trouble anyway,
taking more risks as he becomes more like “Jake,” the hero of his book. Finally, there is a shootout at the
casino—something that in real life would be an extremely rare event. Casinos are among the physically safest
places to be in (a recent horrible tragedy in
Finally, his book is published by “anonymous,” and becomes a best seller, with everyone on the London Underground reading it. That’s probably not so easy (Joe Klein and Primary Colors notwithstanding). In reality, though, many people who write while still working have to use pseudonyms.
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