The King of Marvin Gardens

I thought this superior to CARNAL KNOWLEDGE and am a bit surprised by the reaction to it at time of release. After FIVE EASY PIECES and before STAY HUNGRY this '72 film was thrown aside and dismissed. I guess Nicholson wasn't using his eyebrows enough for public taste. Bruce Dern gives a superb performance as his shyster-dreamer brother with big plans. Ellen Burstyn is paranoid justifiably and gives a lovely performance. The young girl Julie Ann Robinson is terrible.

A 7 out of 10. Best performance = Bruce Dern. Throw in Scatman and John Ryan and you have a fascinating mood piece. What happened to Bob Rafelson?

What can I say about this film? I may not have given it 10 out of 10 but it is definitely one of Jack's better films. It is so different to anything else he has done before, in my opinion, that some people may not know how to respond but all in all they should watch it anyway, because, more than anything else, it's impressionable and very, very interesting.

The character of David Staeblar (Jack Nicholson) comes across as your average, slightly middle-class male, seeming settled in his usual daily routine of life and living comfortably with his grandfather. When he meets up with his ambitious older brother, he seems somewhat disdainful of his pathetic dreams of success in Atlantic City. You never quite understand whether David is dismissing these pipe dreams because he doesn't believe they can happen or because he is slightly jealous of his brother.

The film, above all, highlights the relationship between four people, and how they react to each other. The two brothers and the two women. Between the brothers you can sense there is a love there but there is also an underlying current of bitterness and regret, almost as though they were never that close in childhood.

Sally (Ellen Burstyn) is clearly in love with Jason but she is also terrified that his 'upcoming success' will leave her out in the cold and, despite coming across as independent and feisty, you can see she is desperately trying to cling on to a stability she craves with him. She wants people to think she's okay but really she craves security. There is anguish and real suppressed emotion there. She was considered beautiful in her day but her looks are fading and she's not getting any younger. She's constantly reminded of that when she looks at her stepdaughter Jessie. I think Ellen Burstyn played this role beautifully and truly think she deserved to win an Oscar.

Both the direction and screenplay on this movie were impeccable, and I would strongly suggest to anyone who hasn't seen this film that they rent it or buy it because it is definitely not one to be missed.

Alienation and disconnection -- the uncomfortable mood gripping the nation would soon degrade into deep malaise and acute paranoia as America was stunned and traumatized by revelations of the government's deceptions and lies about the failing war in Viet Nam and then soon enough the vaudevillian scandal of Watergate. This film strives to capture the infinitely subtle drama of when innocence isn't so much lost as it's cynically packaged and sold. Dreams may die hard, but delusions usually expire with barely an audible whimper, and there was no more epic delusion expiring at that moment in our history than the vainglorious belief in the USA's infallibility. God, himself, had ordained this vast land exceptional and anointed its multitudinous inhabitants, or so we'd been told.

Like the crumbling, decrepit, musty seaside resort town which plays host to this tragicomic farce, America was not living up to its slogan as the Shining City on the Hill. Atlantic City in the early 70's not only manifested the startling decay of so much of this nation's urban spaces, but also poignantly symbolized the inner decay of our national psyche. And while it's certainly sad and scary to witness the gruesome, slow, writhing death of the Great American Delusion, it's also somehow comforting and reassuring to know that just beneath the still warm corpse germinates tender seedlings incubating the merest wisps of hope for our nation's future. Amidst the emphatically strained and tortured metaphors which comprise this modest cinematic tragedy lurks genuineness and sincerity and psychological resonance. It's an awkward, peculiar little picture story that will haunt your psyche, if you're not already dead, or too delusional.

A truly great film and sadly overlooked and under rated, following up Five Easy Pieces and showing Nicholson at his most awesome. A far better take on Atlantic City than the Louis Malle's film of that name. Incredible acting from Nicholson, Dern, Burstyn... great direction and cinamatography. The movie is set in a pre-casino Atlantic City, sort of Coney Island perfected. A real actors film that we rarely see anymore. Perhaps difficult to watch because of that yet immensely rewarding. A film that perfectly captures the time and place. Dern plays an over the top hustler while Nicholson, of all things, plays an intellectual radio dweeb. Go on... see it... "no one reads anymore..."

It's hard to imagine Jack Nicholson appearing in a film like 'The King of Marvin Gardens' today. The movie is a story of an introverted broadcaster and his hustling brother; there's an air of seediness to the portrait of a run-down, early 1970s, east-coast America; of doomed hopelessness about the the huckster's implausible vision; and of a terrific sadness in the way that the broadcaster finds a touch of glamour and excitement in hanging out with his brother for a while, although the two of them have nothing in common and surely nothing is actually going to turn out right. I've heard it said that Saul Bellow's 'The Adventures of Augie March' is the great American novel because of its optimism; but this is another side of America, post-Vietnam war, a world of fraudsters, impossible dreamers, and those just hunkering down to survive. As a film, and certainly as entertainment, it's weaker than Nicholson and director Bob Rafelson's earlier 'Five Easy Pieces', primarily because Nicholson's character here is fundamentally less interesting: it's a correctly restrained performance from Jack, but playing a man who has little capacity for change, and constrained by a story that's low-key painful, rather than exciting. Yet even if this is not a fun movie, it's a telling one. Pessimism, like optimism, remains part of the American landscape, as it is in every country; but it's a shame that it's been written out of the contemporary Hollywood vision.