Five Easy Pieces

Director: Bob Rafelson, Bob Rafelson

1970 / 98min / 35mm

A masterful character study from Rafelson and screenwriter Carole Eastman, Five Easy Pieces introduces Jack Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea as a shit-kicking good-ol’-boy hand on the California oil fields, seemingly interested in nothing but booze, bowling, and balling with best gal Black, in a sweetly ditzy, star-making turn. But a call to come home to his ailing father reveals another side to Bobby, a one-time piano prodigy and part of a family of ultra-cultured upper-crust eccentrics shut up in the family compound on Washington State’s Puget Sound. The star-making role for Nicholson, whose subsequent decade was as good as any actor has ever had.