Drive, He Said

Hector (William Tepper) is a star basketball player for the College basketball team he plays for, the Leopards. His girlfriend, Olive (Karen Black), does not know whether to stay with him or leave him. And his friend, Gabriel (Michael Margotta), who may have dropped out from school and become a protester, wants desperately not to get drafted for Vietnam.

This film marks Jack Nicholson's directorial debut, a chair he would not return to often. The casting was nothing special (though Karen Black is always great); the best part may be Bruce Dern as the coach. Some day he will get the full respect he deserves.

Roger Ebert found the film "disorganized", but also said it was "occasionally brilliant" with the performances being "the best thing in the movie", including the "laconic charm" of Tepper. This seems fair. For all the good things that can be said, it never really hits home hard enough, and may be dated.

One of the more unusual movies I've ever seen is "Drive, He Said." Made in 1971 made by the same production company that made "Easy Rider" and "Five Easy Pieces" that made Jack Nicholson a star a year or two earlier.

This was the first film directed by Jack Nicholson. It's a combination basketball, free love, anti-draft movie that was filmed on the campus of the University of Oregon. It was not well-received at the time, and was somewhat infamous for its male frontal nudity scenes. The basketball skill level seemed very high.

It's basically the story of two friends--one a basketball star and Greek major who's hormones are raging and is undecided about a pro career. The other is a guy taking drugs to try to stay out of the draft, and basically he flips out.

I thought it was an interesting premise, but I found the speech of the main characters to be stilted. In some ways it captured the ethos of U. S. campuses in the Vietnam War era pretty well.

Drive, He Said (1971)

** (out of 4)

Jack Nicholson's directorial debut is a confussing mess but here goes. The film deals with a troubled basketball star (William Tepper) who's caught in an affair with a teacher's wife (Karen Black). The only person trying to make him go straight is his coach (Bruce Dern) but outsiders keep stepping in the way. The film was also co-written by Nicholson and most of the blame can start right here. The film is all over the place and it seems there are enough story lines for at least five other movies. There's also a subplot with a friend who's trying to dodge the draft, which goes no where and leads to some pretty over the top, wannabe serious moments. The one thing going for the film are some pretty good performances, although it appears Dern is trying to give a Nicholson impersonation. Nicholson's direction hits a few good notes but in the end this seems like something that would have only been shown on TV. Needless to say it's never gotten an official release on home video.

Poorly developed and fragmented movie about a confused college basketball player with a host of predictably militant and/or cynically unhappy acquaintances characteristic of 1960s academia where the film is set. I'm not sure whether we are supposed to like or even care about the characters or not, but in any event I didn't feel much of either for any of them. Jack Nicholson directed this movie with a taste for profanity and nudity. I guess he thought he was being provocative and progressively mirroring the changing cultural mores of the time. He would have fared better by putting his energy into developing characterization and refining the script that he co-wrote instead. All in all a disappointing movie which left me with a feeling of indifference about it.

This may be the only film that actually comes close to capturing on film the essentially uncapturable world of the American college experience of the late 60s-early 70s. Go ahead, name another movie that even approaches this one: "Getting Straight"? "RPM"? These are caricatures. "Return of the Secaucus Seven" has its moments, but that's a retrospective film about (self-obsessed) individuals more than a film about a time and a place depicted *in* that time and place. "Drive, He Said" portrays-- with subtlety and nuance where it should, and a swift kick in the shorts where that's the only appropriate way-- the anti-draft movement, the ambiguity of big-time college sports (especially when there's a war on), the sexual revolution of the period, and the general unreality of the day. Believe me, it was like that.

The whole cast deserves commendation (as does the director, of course) but particular praise should be reserved for Bruce Dern, as the basketball coach, and Karen Black, the hero's very unusual-- except for that time-- love interest. William Tepper, as the lead, also rates a real round of applause both for his perfect capturing of the student-athlete of the period and for actually playing real college basketball in the film (remember Anthony Perkins in "Tall Story"? Yikes!).

All in all, a classic of a kind-- and the last film someone currently in 6th grade should be writing comments on ("boring", "repellent"-- um, right, sonny, please go back to your Arnold movies). Why isn't this film available from imdb?