This film was a
re-teaming of the group from "Five Easy Pieces", and you will
easily spot the similarities in tone. Jack Nicholson plays a
late-night radio monologist, spinning heart-warming material for
insomniacs, laboring for a bit above minimum wage. His brother
(Bruce Dern) is a dreamer, a very low level mob guy who dreams of
opening up a casino and resort on his own island in Hawaii. The
shy and scholarly Nicholson somehow gets enmeshed in his brother's
criminal web.
The Dern
character lives with two women, a stepmother and stepdaughter who
are essentially classy hookers. In the original script, the
Nicholson character was supposed to end up with the stepdaughter,
a beautiful screen newcomer named Julia Ann Robinson. As the filming progressed,
everyone realized that there was no chemistry at all between
Nicholson and Robinson, and that Robinson was not going to be the
next coming of Jessica Tandy, so the screenwriter kept reducing
the significance of her role. I could see that
Robinson
had a couple of
scenes that were pretty stiff and rough around the edges, but she
was so ethereally gorgeous that I honestly didn't pay that much
attention to her line delivery. At any rate, IMDb says she never worked in
another movie in her lifetime, so her entire filmography consists
of a starring role opposite Jack Nicholson! (Other sources say
that she had small roles in two films called A Safe Place and A
Fan's Notes, which IMDb credits to Julie Robinson and Julia
Robinson respectively.)
At any rate, she disappeared
without a trace soon after making this film.
"Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" mentions
that she had a serious drug problem, and some years later died in a tragic fire,
according to director Bob Rafelson.
Cinematographer
Laszlo Kovacs did such respected films as "New York, New York,"
"Frances," "Mask," and "Ghostbusters," and he did a great job at
evoking the lost glory, decadence, emptiness, and desperation of
pre-gambling Atlantic City in the wintertime. For you foreigners,
Atlantic City has had a great renaissance in the past two decades,
and was a great resort in the 1920's and 30's. In between those
two eras, however, from the end of the war until the legalization
of gambling, it just kept getting seedier and more run-down. If
for no other reason, you should see this movie just to see the
marvelous evocation of that epoch of decay. The best view of the
city comes in a sweeping panorama when Dern and Nicholson hold a
standing conversation in a closed sky ride, a scene which serves
as a tribute to the genius of another film, a classic called The
Third Man.
Marvin Gardens
has been largely forgotten, despite being a spectacularly filmed
movie with the star power of Jack Nicholson. One of the reasons is
that Nicholson was largely wasted in a non-Nicholson role as a
soft-spoken nerd. Although he did OK in the role, there are times
when you really wish he would show some of his usual spark.
If you know your way around films, you are
probably thinking that it would have worked out much better if
Bruce Dern had played the shy, socially awkward scholar and Nicholson
had played the free-wheeling dreamer. Well, you're quite astute if
you made that observation, because that is exactly how the film
was originally cast.
Nicholson and Dern
switched roles just before shooting started!
Overall, Marvin
Gardens is a noble, if not totally successful, effort at creating
a big-budget American movie in the European fashion, concentrating
on character development rather than action. In fact some scenes
further neither the plot not the development of the characters,
but just seem to be there to create atmosphere. Not only is the
point of those scenes utterly baffling, but at various times
scenes seem to jump from one to another without clear transitions,
so you have to fill in a lot with your imagination.
Tres Euro!
Although I liked
the film, I don't especially recommend it except for the marvelous
visuals. If you're really a film buff, you'll have to rent the DVD
just because it is a marvelous transfer of Kovacs' photography. If
your tastes are mainstream, you'll find the film talky and
disjointed and boring. I enjoyed the total package, flaws
and all, and consider it to be somewhere between a highly-flawed
masterpiece and a noble failure, both of which are OK by me.
Nudity report:
Whether a great
actress or not, Julia Robinson sure looked great with her top off
in a squirt gun scene!
The other nudity
in the film featured the very ample chest of 40-year-old Ellen
Burstyn. Of course, there really aren't any nudes of Burstyn as a
young woman. Burstyn, who won one Oscar and was nominated for four
others, never made a movie at all until she was 37. She worked as
a model, and then as one of the high-kicking Rockette-cum-Busby-Berkley
hoofers called the June Taylor Dancers. You probably remember them
from the famous overhead cam shots on the old Jackie Gleason
variety programs. After her June Taylor years, she worked as a
stage actress for a decade or so, with an occasional TV guest
appearance until she caught a break and Peter Bogdanovich cast her
in The Last Picture Show.