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Five Easy Pieces was oddly conservative for a 1970s Jack Nicholson film

6 August 2010 4:05 PM, PDT | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

Hailed as a milestone for New Hollywood, Five Easy Pieces now reveals itself as a curio of a more conservative time, says John Patterson

Forty years on, Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces – the movie that made Jack Nicholson, as Robert Dupea, a Pacific-Northwestern dropout who loses himself among Texas wildcatters – stands as a truly protean experience. The first time I saw it, I wanted to be the same kind of self-absorbed, mercurially charming asshole Jack played (indulge me, I was 13); second time, not so much; third time, the cast infuriated me; fourth time, I thought the blue-collar characters were insultingly one-dimensional; fifth time, I got over it; and last week, we met in the middle, shook hands, and it felt almost like a masterpiece.

It was shot while Nixon was secretly bombing Cambodia in the winter of 1969-70, and released in September 1970, after the summer that saw the Kent State shootings in May, »

- John Patterson

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