Each month, MovieJawn will be highlighting the work of one star or director, focusing on what makes them unique in the Hollywood (or worldwide) firmament! First up is Jack Nicholson for his birthday month!

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

Jack Nicholson is the kind of actor I struggle to evaluate. Most stars try to find a middle range between playing off their persona and creating new characters for each project. Others reach an iconic status where their roles are explicitly written for them or they are actively playing off their normal on screen persona, like Robert de Niro in Meet the Parents. Jack falls into that category, and for decades he sometimes devolves into self-parody as an intense man who can fly off the handle at any time into an outburst. Sometimes it works well, like in Batman or The Witches of Eastwick, other times, less so (here’s to you, Wolf). Having recently read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and picking up Criterion’s BBS boxed set, I decided to watch the three Bob Rafelson movies in the set, two of which feature Nicholson. It probably says something that I enjoyed Head the most of the three, but that’s a story for another time. While Five Easy Pieces became iconic, The King of Marvin Gardens floored me. 

Nicholson plays David, a depressive late night radio host who lives in Philadelphia with his grandfather. Bruce Dern co-stars as David’s brother, Jason, a con man who lives in an Atlantic City hotel. After arriving to bail Jason out of jail, David is convinced to hang around with his brother and Sally (Ellen Burstyn), a former beauty queen turned sex worker, and her stepdaughter, Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson). Jason’s current scheme, opening a hotel and casino in Hawaii, is revealed, and becomes the driving force behind the story. The core of the film is ultimately the relationship between these two opposites as brothers, and seeing Nicholson and Dern bounce off each other is electric. 

According to Burstyn, Rafelson asked Nicholson and Dern to switch roles during rehearsals, and I think it makes for a much more interesting picture. Five Easy Pieces may have seem rote when I watched it because I’ve seen The Shining and a half dozen other Nicholson performances where he plays a regular person who flies off the handle, but I found his low energy performance as David much more compelling. There’s a listlessness to David, a directionlessness that is enhanced by his seeming lack of momentum, where his Five Easy Pieces character is so energetic in his running that it was no longer that compelling. But here, Nicholson shows a depth within a quietness that feels even more surprising in retrospect. 

Named for a street in Margate, New Jersey as a reference to the properties on the Monopoly board, my local connection to Atlantic City might have had something to do with my interest in the film. I never saw this version of Atlantic City. Shot in the winter of 1972, most of what is shown in the film was demolished after gambling was made legal in 1976 and shiny new casinos were built along the boardwalk. Here, the city is shown as rundown, a shadow of its former era as a nightclub hotspot, but not yet a flashy gambling draw designed to be an East Coast rival to Las Vegas. By 2023, casinos have popped up all over the Philadelphia region, and have plunged Atlantic City back into feeling like it has been left behind.

The King of Marvin Gardens echoes its namesake in the way that Jason treats his real estate scheme like he’s waiting to roll doubles and and pass Go, but also echoes the original point of the iconic board game. Called The Landlord’s Game at first, it was to remind people that the whole point of capitalism was to crush their opponents and take them out of the market, thereby increasing rent and lining your own pockets. That message is even more starkly felt in the crumbling boardwalk hotels of 1972. The location’s economic depression ties into David’s nicely, and shifts the idea of Jason from that of an optimist to that of a delusional never-was. Jason is a con man only smart enough to know when he needs to get out about five minutes too late, and David learns that ambition can easily lead to a bad ending for everyone involved. 

Everything dies, baby, that's a fact
But maybe everything that dies some day comes back
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City
–Bruce Springsteen, “Atlantic City”