Word: nicholson
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Take last year's The Postman Always Rings Twice, directed by buddy and fellow ball of energy Bob Rafelson. In this remake of the 1946 filming of James Cain's lascivious novelette, the wayfaring Nicholson picks up work at a gas station/diner because he lusts for the Greek owner's wife. The original discarded all ethnic and sexual references, using only the plot outline. You know how people fall in love in those old movies--a look and a kiss. It usually sufficed, but not when homicide was involved. Nicholson's bestial portrayal, with the re-inserted punching and humping...
...JACK NICHOLSON must be viewed as dangerous. Dangerous to the status quo, and to our ideal of an untarnished hero. He has energy. He has charm. His brittle smile can be the most unsettling experience in cinema. His characters seek the unanswerable. He can love and kill in a single breath. Like a glass time-bomb, intricate and wired, he is capable at any instant of erupting into wicked, verbal violence...
Unlike other stars, who cut a certain profile and hold on to it for years through variations of the same film--Bogart, Gable, Redford, Eastwood--Nicholson strives to delve into the human consciousness in unethical ways, and makes you love him for it. Killer eyes. Killer grin. Lady killer. Killer. But somehow a hell of a hero. Whether he's Bad-ass Buddusky fiving a kid his last breath of freedom, J.J. Gittes investigating a roller-coaster mystery, Bobby Dupea trying to shed his meaningless skin, or George Hansen smoking his first joint, Nicholson has found that inner peace...
While many criticize him for playing variations of himself, Nicholson has made such a tactic practicable by proving his self to be supercool with a tinge of vulnerability, bitterly, defiant of--but emotionally affected by--a world without any apparent reason or overseeing deity. His surface steely-eyed, fierce-grinning goblin envelops a much more luminous, purposeful character in whom we see our hopes, anxieties, lusts, and humanity, and with whom we attempt to carve a moral niche in the rotting bark of 20th-century civilization. Nicholson's important films involve religion of the self; he acts as he sees...
Many had trouble accepting this motivation, especially when Nicholson's character did not receive the retribution Cain had planned, the (unjust, but plausible) charge of murdering Nora Papadakis, who dies when their car crashes. Rafelson explained his modified denouement as sufficiently powerful: seeing Jack Nicholson cry makes you feel rotten enough, and seeing him (as the book would) sentenced to death for following his passions would be too much...