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.

The tragic portrait of a drifter who can't come to terms with who he is - Five Easy Pieces review by Philip in Paradiso

The central character of the story is Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson), who works in an oil field in California. He has an attractive girlfriend, Rayette (Karen Black), who is a waitress in a local diner and has dreams of becoming a country-music star. Despite his lifestyle and his demeanour, it becomes clear that Bobby Dupea is not actually your ordinary working-class man: he was a classical pianist, at an earlier stage in his life, and comes from an artistic family of musicians. The movie is primarily a character study focused on Bobby Dupea, and the tension there is between what he is, outwardly, and what he would like to be or could have been, inwardly, is at the very heart of the story.

Bobby has been drifting from one dead-end job to the next. He is not faithful to Rayette, and yet she loves him, frequently complaining that he does not treat her nicely. She is a simple girl, but she is genuine and finds it difficult to make sense of his moody behaviour. On one level, the storyline is quite simple. If you analyse it, however, you realise the story can be read on many interlocking levels. The theme of class differences is explored in the film, which is not so common in American movies, through the tensions there are between Bobby and Rayette.

On a deeper level, Bobby is a man going through a form of profound existential crisis. He does not seem to know what he wants, who he is, or what (and who) he wants to be. He has become a drifter due to his inability to take responsibility and make clear choices in his life; Bobby seems to be running away from his own actions and their consequences, as if the lack of meaning of his existence made that existence unbearable, and yet he cannot find or construct any kind of stable meaning for that life. Much of the time, in practice, Bobby's frustration translates into what can only be described as abusive behaviour towards women, particularly Rayette.

The film is memorable and captivating. All the actors are good. I found that Karen Black's acting actually shines through and is rather superior to J Nicholson's performance as the sulky macho man. There is no doubt that it is a very good film. But it is dark and the central character - Bobby - is an unlikeable person in many ways. Given the nature of the story, this is inevitable, but it makes the film difficult in some ways: we are having to follow the goings-on of an individual who is, when all is said and done, narcissistic, volatile, immature and disagreeable. So, it is a challenging but an interesting film.

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.