![]() ![]() In one of many interviews following Easy Rider’s phenomenal success, Dennis Hopper described the Nicholson character as symbolizing “trapped America, killing itself.” That description may embrace the emergent Nicholson screen persona. But the critics knew a tiger by his tone: Five Easy Pieces followed in 1970, and once again playing the black sheep of a distinguished family, he was called “exhilarating…a charming wastral” and “astonishingly natural.” Another Oscar nomination was inevitable. Official Hollywood, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences-which had not noticed Nicholson in any of his 20 earlier, low-budget Roger Corman quickies-nominated him for an Oscar. “The movie felt empty after his death” commented Esquire’s Jacob Brackman-and so on, and so on. Half-way through Dennis Hopper’s and Peter Fonda’s tour through counter-culture exotica, “they come upon a very real character and everything that has come before suddenly looks flat and foolish,” wrote New York Times’ critic Vincent Canby. His extraordinary ability to shade his characters manifested itself in Easy Rider, the 1969 eclat which hurled him to stardom.Īs the alcoholic ACLU lawyer who wigs out on the subject of UFO’s, Nicholson swiped the movie. It is not the first time Nicholson has made the preposterous dilemma of a character absolutely real. With vulnerability made palpable, he makes the sotto capo inescapably sympathetic. Prizzi’s Honor is sufficiently iconoclastic and anti-romantic to have given cold feet to several studio executives and probably could not have been made without Nicholson, who singularly-and effortlessly-dominates the movie. The Manchurian Candidate, based upon his second novel and released in 1962, is a classic. Condon’s co-mingling of the sacred and profane has made him one of the most popular contemporary fiction writers with something to say, not just sell. This belongs to novelist Richard Condon who, along with documentarist Janet Roach, adapted his book for the director. However, Prizzi’s operatic tone (cinematography by Andrej Barkowiak music by Puccini, arrangement by Alex North), its unusual mix of Runyonesque satire, and its Brechtian tragedy give it a special place in the Huston oeuvre, and suggest the presence of another, equally powerful, sensibility. Though monstrous, they have charm.ĭirected by John Huston who has kept company with such types before, most notably in Beat the Devil and The Maltese Falcon, the film features the fast-rising Kathleen Turner, Anjelica Huston, Robert Loggia, John Randolph, Lee Richardson and William Hickey as the don. With sincerity fairly oozing from every pore and calculation flashing from every eyeball, the whole cunning Mafioso lot manages to make the dark side of their way of life seem an unfortunate by-product of ordinary frailties. As Charley Partanna, dim-witted son of a Mafia consigliere to the powerful Prizzi family, Jack Nicholson presides over Prizzi’s Honor, his 39th film. ![]()
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