Word: riders
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...RAFELSON'S film, Five Easy Pieces, is already being touted as this year's Easy Rider, for whatever that's worth. The movie falls into two parts. In the first, an oil rigger played by Jack Nicholson lives the beer-drinking, bowling, broad-screwing life which most screenwriters and intellectuals imagine occurs in lower-middle working class settings. But we shortly discover that the boozer is also a piano player manque: he is a wandering, gifted member of an extraordinarily talented musical family. Nicholson is the prototype Alienated One, a sort of prodigal son with balls, and his journey...
...name summons up fond and durable memories: the gum-chewing philosopher of humor, the man of homely common sense that somehow added up to uncommon wisdom. Out of it he fashioned not one, but a half-dozen careers-rodeo bronco rider, walk-on humorist (before the phrase had even been invented), Ziegfeld Follies headliner, movie star, radio commentator, newspaper columnist -a one-man galaxy of talent. He lives again on the stage of Washington, D.C.'s Ford Theatre in a gifted recreation by James Whitmore in a show appropriately titled Will Rogers' U.S.A...
Jack Nicholson is either a mountebank or a highly gifted actor. Possibly he is both. As the dead-eyed hero of a couple of obscure westerns that he produced himself (The Shooting and Ride the Whirlwind), he made Clint Eastwood look like Laurence Olivier. In Easy Rider, he walked on and won the film from Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. Then he descended to his former persona in On a Clear Day, playing either Barbra Streisand's lover or a codfish. It was difficult to tell which...
Chopin? This is no ordinary roustabout, no average hardhat. This is a supergypsy, Robert Eroica Dupea, scion of a musical family, gifted pianist and older brother of the easy riders of 1969. Indeed, the same studio that produced Easy Rider has manufactured an undrugged, mature version of that film, complete with central emblem: the road as panacea. But now, if something in the plot has thickened, something in the pulse has slowed...
...stylistic ties. On the road, Robert and Rayette pick up two dykey hitchhikers. One is sullen. The other (Helena Kallianiotes) delivers a ten-minute broadside at "man." She hates to disclose her destination (Alaska) because "man" will go up there and make it filthy. Like Nicholson in Easy Rider, Kallianiotes knows how to establish a character swiftly and how to make a running gag gallop. When she is on, the picture is wholly hers. Perhaps it is a characteristic of the new "road" pictures. In which case, the star should have known his fate. After all, he did it first...