Movies That Rule: Five Easy Pieces (1970)

We’ve just seen this man, handsome, rugged, probably 30 or 31 years old, degrade his girlfriend, a woman who truly loves him, because she’s a terrible bowler.  She throws a strike on the last frame of a “losing game,” and though there’s anger seething beneath his eyes about this trivial happening, he cuts her down with quick verbal jabs instead of blowing his top.  But that’s not enough.  He must turn to two younger women behind him and openly flirt in the company of his loyal girlfriend.  She gets up and walks away, without getting that angry.

But then, as the flirtation ends, the camera studies his face for about 30 seconds (as it often does in Five Easy Pieces), and we, the audience, see a seriously pensive man who shows nothing but dissatisfaction.  The shot stays eerily still, regarding the subject the way a psychiatrist might eye-up his patient before asking him “Where do you think this hostility comes from?”  After spending 96 minutes with this character, we can deduce that, while he might be in need of major psychotherapy, five or ten years on the couch would do little to change his disposition.

Five Easy Pieces is one of the best films to come out between 1966 and 1979, what many call the heyday for American cinema.  It easily stands in such esteemed company as Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, The Graduate, The French Connection, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nashville, Taxi Driver, and the like.  It also introduced us to Jack Nicholson as not just a great actor, but a something more like a major force, a guy who descended upon each and every picture he starred in with an intensity that rivaled an erupting volcano.  Though he was absolutely brilliant as drunk lawyer George Hanson in his Easy Rider supporting turn, this film proved that Nicholson had the chops to carry an entire movie on his own.  He is twisted and unpredictable, going from thoughtful to batshit-crazy in just seconds.  (And in those circumstances, I find myself giggling hysterically.)  We get a lot of that in Five Easy Pieces, and the world’s a better place because of it.