Word: nicholson
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Janos has been covering the show-business beat for two years, working on cover subjects as varied as Jack Nicholson and Mary Tyler Moore. He came to TIME in 1968 after serving as a speechwriter for L.B.J. and then Veep Hubert Humphrey. Says Janos, a former Houston bureau chief who has also reported on space shots and astronauts' moon walks: "Even a superspectacular like Kong is pale stuff compared with watching a rocket lift off at Cape Kennedy...
This woman means what she says, too because once presented with a human (in the guise of Jack Nicholson), she wastes no time in offering up her virginity (I didn't clock it, but let's say 35 minutes into the film). Director Arthur Penn then gets down to the real business of the film, the mutilation of cattle thieves. (Blowing a man's kidneys out while he's having intercourse, flinging a steel rabbit trap through a man's eyeball--you know, "the breaks.") This grotesque circus of gore soon winds down into incoherency, and buffs who expected more...
...given any meaningful information until the last five minutes, and then after the fact. At that point both murderer and arcane motive are brought in out of left field to wrap up this rambling indecisive attempt at a thriller "American style." It is as if in Chinatown Jack Nicholson only discovered that John Huston had any interest in land just before he shot Faye Dunaway. Nor does the film's shallow social satire allow its all star cast to flourish any more than does the plot. Mastoianni is locked into a dull role as a middle class detective unsure...
...Passenger is Antonioni at his most pretentious. Jack Nicholson assumes the identity of an international gunrunner who dies in his hotel in the African bush and for a few scenes it appears that the film may develop into a compelling spy thriller. But no such luck--Antonioni isn't really interested in guns--or anything else for that matter--so Nicholson simply wanders through Europe in an existential search for self-identity and the Meaning of Life, picking up a languid Maria Schneider en route. Only the film's visual beauty--Spanish landscape and Gaudi architecture shot in lush Italian...
...something grand, perhaps a statement about loneliness in America. When Paul Brennan, the protagonist, tells his companions that the bible business must be good in Alaska, one is reminded of the scene in Five Easy Pieces where a hitchhiker proclaims the virtues of cleanliness in Alaska to Jack Nicholson...