The post Easy Rider era of 1970s American cinema was a mythologised time when major studios produced depressing dramas about losers (though mainly white male losers). Fitting right into that sub-genre is The King Of Marvin Gardens (1972), which was director Bob Rafelson reuniting with Jack Nicholson after the success of Five Easy Pieces; I’d always been curious to see it. This is one of those Nicholson performances where you can see he was trying for something different, clamping down on his emerging Nicholson persona to play a withdrawn, fussy radio host whose full personality only comes out in the stories he tells about his brother on the radio in the dead of night. Bruce Dern gets the showier role as the big brother, a real estate hustler with big dreams of running a resort on a small island. There was something comforting about watching these losers shuffling around the wintery, depressing setting of Atlantic City (great cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs), Nicholson a witness to a deal that is doomed to fail. Ellen Burnstyn is also great as the aging glamour of Dern’s group and Scatman Crothers is charming as the mob boss that Dern works for. In the end, the film bounces between downbeat realism and abstract attempts at humour; the drama resolved itself unconvincingly with a variation of Chekov’s gun, so not completely satisfying or convincing. Still, it was good viewing if mainly for young Nicholson.
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