Rent Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Superb character study - Five Easy Pieces review by RP

I first saw this film in 1972 I think – it was showing at a local film club. It impressed me then and I'm still impressed 40 years or so later. So what is it that impresses me? The acting (Jack Nicholson and Karen Black are excellent), the photography (excellent, from California to Washington, and the character shots), the music (the use and contrast of country and classical pieces). But not the story – there really isn't one: it's a character study, the character of what a few years earlier in the UK we would have called an 'angry young man'. Bobby Dupea (played by Jack Nicholson) is angry with the world, with his family, with his girlfriend, his friends. He has run away (yes, I think that's the right description) from an intellectual, musical family (he's a classically trained pianist) and ended up in a number of dead-end jobs – he is currently working as a roughneck on an oil rig. He has a dead-end girlfriend (Rayette Dipesto, superbly played by Karen Black), a waitress with big hair whose idea of 'music' is country & western. She adores Bobby, but he can't or won't return her affection. Learning that his father is ill, they head for Bobby's family home where Rayette sticks out like a sore thumb and Bobby defends her, but eventually runs away from her yet again. I think the film can be best summed up by a quote from his brother's fiancée with whom he has a brief fling: "If a person has no love for himself, no respect for himself, no love of his friends, family, work, something... How can he ask for love in return?". Directed by Bob Rafaelson whose previous claim to fame was creating 'The Monkees', 'Five Easy Pieces' is a superb piece of filmmaking. It was nominated for 4 Oscars, and Karen Black won a Golden Globe award. 5/5 stars – highly recommended.

Thumbin' A Ride - Five Easy Pieces review by CH

How many pianists go off the rails? Probably no more than anybody else, but their misfortune - and recovery - tends to be more visible than others’. The thought comes to mind with Five Easy Pieces (1970) co-written by director Bob Rafelson whose series of Seventies films were some way from the television series he created for the Monkees.

Far from a keyboard, the opening scene finds Jack Nicholson at the hard tasl of working upon oil wells somewhere in the West while living with a big-haired woman, the equally brilliant Karen Black. What is is that has driven him from the instrument he had played from an early age in a well-heeled household upon an island off the East Coast? (That he can play, we learn from a scene in which, during a protracted traffic hold-up, he leaps from the vehicle in which he and a fellow-worker are trapped and leaps aboard an open-back truck to play upon the upright one being transported, a performance which only has the encircling horns blaring all the more.)

The film has its set-pieces, including that well-known one in which Nicholson gives vent to his stock-in-trade furious soliloquies when confronted by a diner’s set-menu upon which there can be no customer-led improvisation - one almost match by a hitchhiker’s tirade against the trash on which people spend good one. As a whole, however, it proceeds as a mood piece in which discontent with life makes for sour asides and briefly-seized opportunities, often of a carnal nature.

That this is a raw existence is mirrored by the way in which events unfurl when he learns that his father has suffered a stroke and his brother a neck injury. Return to that family home, in its muted colours, proves as on-edge as it had been in the series of trailer-parks and motels where he and Karen Black had holed up.

Is there residual honour in all this? Or is it all-round irresponsibility? How does one reconcile Tammy Wynette and Chopin? At little more than ninety minutes, the film contains more than the scenes and sounds which so often bloat the screen five decades on.

Fine acting, but avoid if you're looking for a riveting plot. - Five Easy Pieces review by IS

I added this to my list because it's Jack Nicholson and he's always great, and he doesn't disappoint here either.

However, the movie itself has a few surprises but no real plot. If you like movies with traditional story telling then you'll find this boring. This film really is the definition of a character study rather than a plot-driven film.