Word: nicholsons
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...Nicholson passed along with it, not out of sight, as happened with many of his fraternity, but on to other things. He worked into the mainstream that he had been trying to divert, and started running with the high rollers. He now counts as two of his buddies Paramount Production Chief Robert Evans and Warren Beatty, his co-star in Fortune. Nicholson, along with his real gifts, has always had a canny ability to move with the heat. He has done it so well that now he is the heat...
...also made it a point to phone up Actor Bruce Dern, a pal since they both scuffled through a bunch of low budget bike pictures, for a little needling: "Hey, Dernsie, I think you better retire, babe. I got it all covered -know what I mean?" Nicholson has called Dern "my only real competition -you and the guy on the hill" (referring to Marlon Brando, whose home off Los Angeles' Mulholland Drive is directly above Nicholson...
...double-edged kidding and up-front aggressiveness stand in some contrast to the cool, measured and often affectless characters Nicholson has played so well on the screen. He looks, when he is not trying, like an all-night coach passenger who is just beginning to realize he has slept through his stop. But his features have great plasticity. His friend Candice Bergen speaks of his "cobra eyes." His energy level can vary with the most careful calibration. His two best roles-as Bobby Dupea, the thwarted concert pianist in Five Easy Pieces (1970) and David Staebler, the self-consumed...
Bobby Dupea, strangled by a sense of his own failed talent, allowed Nicholson not only to turn on his own bursting temper, but to flash the charm that has its greatest single emblem in his smile, which seems to be cordially unsettling and made mostly of radium. David Staebler, on the other hand, required Nicholson to master a more dour, slippery confessional mode, to hide his character's feelings from himself under a barrage of autobiographical patchwork. Nicholson was equal to the task. It is his most daring performance, and one of his favorites...
Marvin Gardens, however, was a movie that asked audiences to reach out almost as far as Nicholson, and it flopped. Chinatown, a smooth, period private-eye yarn that works hard to hark back to the '30s and '40s, comes much more easily to hand. In it, Nicholson makes a shrewd choice to play persona rather than character-a commodity hi rather short supply in the script. His JJ. Gittes is cool, ironic, sympathetically small-time, a guy who stumbles on something a little bigger than he expected, or can manage. He also gets the chance to smile...