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After years of minor and starring roles in low-budget independent pictures (mostly exploitation flicks produced by Roger Corman), Jack Nicholson achieved star status playing unaccommodated outsiders in two major countercultural films, Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970). Thus began a string of critical and popular successes that included Carnal Knowledge, Chinatown, The Last Detail and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. But there was, in 1972, the critical and box-office disaster of The King of Marvin Gardens, now a rarely revived cult classic back in cinemas and on DVD thanks to Park Circus.

One of the most downbeat movies of the time, it features Nicholson as the deeply depressed, anti-charismatic David Staebler, who earns a modest living telling miserable tales about his family in the early hours of the morning on a Philadelphia FM radio station. He's lured at the height of winter to the once grand, now decaying New Jersey...

Treat yourself to a re-released gem of the American new wave with an astonishing performance from a young Jack Nicholson

American film-maker Bob Rafelson has just celebrated his 80th birthday, and you couldn't give him or yourself a nicer present than to see this marvellous film, now restored and re-released: The King of Marvin Gardens (1972). Like his Five Easy Pieces (1970), it stars Jack Nicholson giving a performance of melancholy, introspective subtlety that will astonish those who only know about the grinning "old devil" Nicholson, recently to be seen on TV flirting with Jennifer Lawrence. The other glory of this movie is that it shows us what a great actor Bruce Dern is, matching Nicholson in charisma and presence. Nicholson is David, a gloomy talk-show host in Philadelphia, regaling his listeners with long, literary monologues about his life. Jason (Dern) is David's estranged brother, a hustler and shady wheeler-dealer who needs...

Bob Rafelson's Jack Nicholson vehicle set in a decaying Atlantic City is quite the metaphor for early 70s America

In Bob Rafelson's The King Of Marvin Gardens, the Atlantic City of 1972 becomes the anteroom to Paradise for two brothers: one a depressive talk-radio host, the other a manic huckster. Played by Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern respectively, David and Jason Staebler are the last gasp of an America that is visibly dying all around them.

The Atlantic City of those years, with its ruined pier and empty hotels, was a crumbling pleasure dome; indeed, the movie's main location, the huge Traymore Hotel, was demolished before Marvin Gardens even had its premiere. Fading for decades, AC was doomed to wait another 10 years before legalised gambling made it the opulently tacky Vegas East that it is today. Everything in this film is dilapidated, devalued, degraded or due for demolition. As shot by László Kovács,...

There can be little doubt that Jack Nicholson is one of the greatest movie stars in the history of the medium. He's had more Oscar nominations (twelve) and wins (three) than any other actor and has been an A-list star for over forty years now, remaining a legitimate box office draw in films like "Something's Gotta Give" and "The Departed" even in his seventh decade. He's worked with everyone from Antonioni to Scorsese, and given some of the most iconic screen performances ever, from "Easy Rider" to "The Shining."

Indeed, ask a cinephile for their favorite Nicholson performance, and the same few films are likely to come up: "Easy Rider," "Five Easy Pieces," "Carnal Knowledge," "The Last Detail," "Chinatown," "The Passenger" (an amazing, nearly back-to-back six-year-run), "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," "The Shining." But this means that some of the actor's equally strong performances never quite made it into the canon,...

The Film

Before beginning this review of Bob Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), let me start with an apology. Chronologically, the film is the last entry in the Criterion Collection's "America Lost and Found: The Bbs Story" box set. While it wasn't the last film that Bbs produced (the Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds takes that honor---a film that also was given the Criterion treatment a number of years back), it marks the set's opposite bookend to Rafelson's debut film, Head (1968). Thus, while I'm going out of chronological order, there is a certain symmetry to this decision. Head helped usher in the New Hollywood Era with Bbs while Marvin Gardens was the middle-of-the-end.

The film stars Bruce Dern (Family Plot, Coming Home) and Bbs regular Jack Nicholson (fresh off the success of Rafelson's previous film, the seminal Five Easy Pieces) as a pair of estranged brothers. Dern's character,...

Bob Rafelson started a production company called Raybert (a combination of his name and producer Bert Schneider) when he was working on the Monkees television show. But Rafelson had cinematic aspirations, and so he took the Monkees to the big screen and started a production company with Bert and Steven Blauner called Bbs. Between Raybert and Bbs they made seven films: The Monkees’ feature film Head; Dennis Hopper’s seminal biker movie Easy Rider, Rafelson’s masterpiece Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson’s directorial debut Drive, He Said, Henry Jaglom’s first film A Safe Place, Peter Bogdanovich’s career starting film about small town sexuality The Last Picture Show, and Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens. Seven film in four years, with regulars Karen Black, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn, and stars like Peter Fonda, Cybil Shepherd, Jeff Bridges, and Orson Welles, made during one of the...