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!

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[1] Promotional notes for the 2013 Glasgow Film Festival

The Last Detail

Buddusky suggests their next move.

Daryl Ponicsan is best known as the author of the 1971 novel The Last Detail which in 1973 was adapted into a film and directed by Hal Ashby, who two years previous had successfully directed the offbeat comedy/romance Harold and Maude. The Last Detail stars Jack Nicholson as Signalman 1st Class Billy L. “Bad Ass” Buddusky, Otis Young as Gunner Mate 1st Class “Mule” Mulhall and Randy Quaid as Seaman Laurence M “Larry” Meadows. This simple well told story unfolds as follows. Two hardened career petty officers, Buddusky and Mulhall are detailed to take the young naive seaman from the Navel Base in Virginia to a New Hampshire Navel Prison to serve an eight-year sentence for attempting to steel $40 dollars from the Polio charity box! The two officers take a liking to Meadows and decide to show the lad a good time on their journey north. Their adventures begin with a near bar fight in Washington, getting blind drunk in their hotel room, they tangle with some Marines in New York and in Boston they make sure that their young prisoner does not start his eight -year prison stretch without loosing his virginity!

Ashby’s best film was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival and Nicholson, whose body of work to date had included Easy Rider(1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970), was awarded Best Actor. It also gained three Academy Award nominations but failed to pick up any which is a great shame because this film is truly a classic example of what can be done with a very understated uncomplicated story. Try and get a copy of this film if for no other reason than to see Jack Nicholson at his very best.

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.

Easy Rider

‘It’s real hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the market place’ George Hanson’s immortal line in Easy Rider (1969) sums up my attitude to the sixties hippie movement. It was ok to swan about in your robes and beads if you were middle class kids and had access to money or perhaps a student with time on your hands and political rhetoric rolling off your tongue, but the bulk of the so called youth movement had to work for a living and the nearest we got to being a student was day-release.

Even Wyatt and Billy had to carry out a drug deal to allow them to realize a long-standing ambition to visit New Orleans during Mardi Gras. With the proceeds they bought a couple of motor bikes and set of across country. Their journey takes them through some of the most beautiful and iconic parts of America including Monument Valley. During their trip they drop in on a commune, go skinny dipping with two hippie chicks and meet George Hanson who helps them get out of jail. George is a small town lawyer and a rich mans son who rejects what he see’s as ‘straight society’ and joins them on the trip, in more ways than one. Eventually, connecting up with a couple of hookers, our iconic bikers go on an acid trip in a New Orleans graveyard before continuing their journey to its inevitable end.

Regarded as one of the most influential movies of all time it stars Peter Fonda as Wyatt and Dennis Hopper, who also directed the film, as the long haired Billy. Easy Rider was also the first big acting break for Jack Nicholson, Oscar nominated for the part of George Hanson, a role originally written for the actor Rip Thorn who fell out with Hopper and withdrew from the film. Hopper’s portrayal of the American dream through the alternative society, one that rejects conformity, proves only one thing that bigotry and ignorance generally win in the end!