Like gambling itself, the impulses of Altman's characters [in "California Split"] seem a matter of luck or catastrophe, resting on choices ungoverned by rehearsal. The film gives us the sense that it is being improvised. We catch at events and personalities by the ends of threads. Everything seems to be going on in some tight corner of life that is off the direct route, inhabited by something musky, dangerous, and surprisingly poetic. The characters suffer the fierce aloneness that Altman identifies in American living. His film is an implacable and minatory one. It is sometimes very funny, in a mood of not caring whether you find it so or not…. Using the overlapping talk that has always been so potent in his movies, Altman again shows that he has a mysterious feeling for the low-toned energy of American humor. His films have a supple genius for the awkward in speech. It is the kind of awkwardness that makes small kids giggle about riddles, or newcomers to English who live here suddenly express the heart of America in a one-legged phrase….

The imagery of risk in the film works like a spell. One is drawn into the heroes' universe, where they are sometimes opiate-lidded with fatigue, sometimes pepped up by a redhot winning streak and superstitious that the streak can be broken as though by an evil eye if an onlooker gets too interested. (p. 78)

[Multiple] conversations crowd the film with a peculiar vivacity, which is part of its lack of natural repose. Their quality of incompleteness characterizes the world of gambling, with its emptied one-room homes where even the toaster has gone to the pawnshop and which seem inhabited only by cards and the craving to win….

"California Split" has, as any film about gambling must, some of the concentrated wildness of Dostoevski's great short novel "The Gambler," but it also achieves a kind of complicity in near-casual leisure. Complicity has always interested this warm, original director. In "California Split," Altman, as usual, has wanted to fill his dangerous, somnambulistic world with humor and with eddies of talk and mood, so that anecdotal happenings are always breaking up the ferocity of the main topic. The wish softens the film. So do the jack-in-the-box wit and the restful acceptance of eccentricity. (p. 79)

Altman always gives his out-of-step figures something poised and venturesome. He respects strong character and finds it in odd places. With each film he makes, he becomes more eloquent in his innovative way of fragmenting narrative and of burying personality so that no more of it shows than a hipbone sticking out of the sand in a mound made over someone by children on the beach. This is the way life is, of course. We are always coming in at the end of things and picking up what we can of characters formed by unknown events. But what Altman is doing is strange to the American cinema tradition. People accustomed to foreign films will latch on to his work in a second; I hope large enough audiences of others will be excited by his ambitious, imperfect, edgy dreams, which keep growing more intense and more expressive of America. One of the interesting things about "California Split" is that people who get nervous at the mere sight of someone betting a dollar in real life will find his image of hothead gamblers composing. The phenomenon maybe has to do with the remove at which art happens. (p. 80)