Word: rafelsons
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Directed by BOB RAFELSON Screenplay by JACOB BRACKMAN
Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson's previous film, was a good, sharply observed melodrama. The King of Marvin Gardens shows the same restrained, rhythmic editing and unemphatic camera movement, the same scrupulous care for dramatic nuance. Marvin Gardens may not be as successful as Five Easy Pieces; yet in many ways it is more interesting and certainly more daring -the work of a talented director trying to extend himself...
...Rafelson and Scenarist Brackman understand their two played-out heroes without ever condescending to them, although both writer and director are often guilty of using the same kind of tin-ear dialogue and trite image that David himself might employ in one of his tortuous monologues. One of Rafelson's most certain talents is a nearly preternatural instinct for working with actors, and Nicholson and Dern give consummate performances. In such diverse parts as the bemused attorney in Easy Rider, the laborer and fugitive musician in Five Easy Pieces, the tomcat of Carnal Knowledge, Nicholson has already displayed remarkable...
...almost combustible uncertainty that shades Jason's assurance with doubt and intimations of defeat. Dern also moves Jason beyond the more obvious pyrotechnics to which the script has confined him, and the scene in which he embraces an embarrassed Nicholson is one of the best in the film. Rafelson may be too detached and dispassionate, but Dern and Nicholson never...
...also liked Karen Black's performance and a scene where Jack Nicholson sits down to play the piano in Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, a slick film about alienation which seemed to cut away to a Laszlo Kovacs Easy Rider scenic vista whenever something seemed about to happen; Alan Arkin's Yossarian in Mike Nichols' Catch-22; Carrie Snodgress's heroine and Frank Perry's paranoiac camera work in the somewhat overdrawn Diary of a Mad Housewife; Charles Bronson's headstrong investigator in Rene Clement's Rider on the Rain; the dripping decadence and provocative idea behind Performance...