The King of Marvin Gardens.

Brother's David and Jason Staebler.

Bob Rafelson followed up one of his best films, Five Easy Pieces (1970) with another collaboration with Jack Nicholson The King of Marvin Gardens (1972). This film that has just been restored prior to a UK cinema re-release, obviously the studio think it’s time to reappraise ‘one of the great undervalued films of 1970’s American cinema[1]’ But I’m afraid no amount of restoration can improve the films tediously pretentious story line. It attempts to tackle similar themes to his previous movie including dysfunctional families and that sense of disillusionment that seemed to exist at the turn of that century.

Sally and her stepdaughter Jessica. 

Set in a bleak decaying out of season Atlantic City. Nicholson plays one of two brothers David Staebler a rather aloof, depressed late night radio presenter. His loud-mouthed brother Jason (Bruce Dern), a con man that’s always chasing that elusive get rich quick scheme, invites David to join him on a real estate scam. The party also includes two women that accompany Jason on his criminal endeavours. The older of the two is Sally (Ellen Burstyn), the younger one is Sally’s stepdaughter Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson). The two have a strange relationship with each other and Jason. In one scene we find the two women topless in a hotel room having a water pistol fight in which Jason is invited but David excluded!  Even the talented actors on show can’t rescue this gloomy dull movie from the dreary tedium that its non-story evokes. I think Rafelson meant it as a metaphor for a decaying America, but in my opinion he didn’t succeed!

---

[1] Promotional notes for the 2013 Glasgow Film Festival

Five Easy Pieces

Some films just never seem to date, Bob Rafelsons Five Easy Pieces (1970), now re-released 40 years later, is one such movie. Best known for featuring one of Jack Nicholson’s finest performances as the American rebel Bobby Dupea.

Bobby Dupea

Robert Dupea was a child progeny, a brilliant classical pianist from an academic middle class family who run away to join America’s drifting working class. The film opens with Bobby earning a living in an oil field along with his friend Elton (Billy ‘Green’ Bush). His free time is spent drinking beer, and in bowling alleys. He has a girlfriend, a waitress and aspiring country singer Rayette Dipesto (Karen Black), an affair he does not want to commit to. When Bobby finds out from his sister Partita (Lois Smith) that his father is seriously ill following a stroke he returns home, taking the pregnant Rayette with him. The visit home gives Dupea an option to re-assess his way of life.

Rayette Dipesto

Rafelsons film, scripted by Carole Eastman, is about rejection of family life and the rootlessness that is bound to follow. No better demonstrated than by the final scene when Bobby abandons Rayette at a service station and hitches a ride on a truck heading for Alaska leaving behind his jacket and his wallet therefore relinquishing his existing identity. It always was the director’s intention to cast Nicholson in this role and started a run of the actor’s best films up to and including 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. If you have never seen this excellent piece of American cinema then now’s your chance.