Reluctantly, Bobby loads up Rayette (he’d far prefer to leave her behind but she’s having none of it) and drives to Washington state. It’s Bobby’s sister, Partita, who tells him their father is sick and Bobby should come home to see him before it’s too late.
#5 EASY PIECES MOVIE#
With little fanfare, the movie reveals more when Bobby walks into a recording studio and waits for the classical pianist to emerge from her sound room. I was at the New York Film Festival for the premiere of ‘Five Easy Pieces,’ and I remember the explosive laughter, the deep silences, the stunned attention as the final shot seemed to continue forever, and then the ovation.” – Roger Ebert, “It is difficult to explain today how much Bobby Dupea meant to the film’s first audiences. Where did he learn? Why hasn’t he been using this to score women or impress his friends? We discover there is something more to Bobby when, angry that he and a coworker are stuck in a traffic jam on the way to work, he hops onto the back of a moving truck and begins playing a raucous tune on the upright piano strapped to the bed. He bowls, drinks cheap beer, plays poker with his coworkers, gets in a fight, disrespects his somewhat dim girlfriend, Rayette (Karen Black), flirts and sleeps with another woman, and seems like a completely average working class male from Central Screenwriting, though he is of course brilliantly acted by Nicholson. The film tells the story of Bobby Dupea (Nicholson), a worker on the oil rigs in the California oil fields. While aspects of the story are exceptional, no part of the movie feels false. The movie is quiet but intense, focuses on its characters and their choices rather than a purposeful plot, and doesn’t pay off with a happy, romantic ending. While John Cassavetes was really the first director to pioneer what we now recognize as the independent cinema style, breaking from the big studio flicks and polished dramas of the day, Five Easy Pieces is the movie I think of when I think about the shaping of indie film.
#5 EASY PIECES CODE#
The movie doesn’t feature any beloved, now-departed stars from the golden age, it didn’t bristle against the Code (dead and buried by 1970), it wasn’t directed by a name many people know nowadays (though Bob Rafelson was an important New Hollywood director), and it isn’t in black and white or early color. But it’s something that seems necessary to establish for a movie that slips under the radar for a lot of casual movie lovers today, and one that doesn’t have the patina of great age to solidify its credentials (though I had to point out to an attendee that the movie is a dozen years older than I am after she exclaimed, “But that’s not an old movie!” when I announced the screening). That might seem an obvious place to start we’ve watched nothing but good movies in the Third Floor Film Series. Our screening will take place Thursday, May 14, at 7:00 pm.įive Easy Pieces is an impressively good movie. The film was directed by Bob Rafelson and turned Jack Nicholson into a bonafide star.
May’s film will be Five Easy Pieces from 1970. So far in our Third Floor Film Series, we’ve watched Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo, the groundbreaking 1967 Bonnie and Clyde directed by Arthur Penn, and Elia Kazan’s steaming 1951 A Streetcar Named Desire.
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