The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

Such a frustrating disappointment

Simply Perfect

Fresh and Exciting

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

David Staebler (Jack Nicholson) is a Philly talk radio DJ taking care of his grandfather. He goes to Atlantic City to find his black-sheep brother Jason (Bruce Dern) in jail. Monopoly originated from Atlantic City and Marvin Gardens is the property right before Go To Jail. Jason tells David to find Lewis to set off a mercurial scheme to get a gambling license with Japanese investors. Jason has an even bigger plan to live big in Hawaii. Sally (Ellen Burstyn) is Jason's girlfriend and Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson) wants to be a pageant queen.I would like this movie so much more if I understood the proper plan and what Jason is trying to do with his scheme. Jason is so weaselly that he never really explains what's going on. On the other hand, that's what so real about Jason. He's no mastermind and it could be perfectly realistic that he has no plans. The question becomes what David is thinking about. Bruce Dern is absolutely brilliant as the unstable brother. This is a well-acted movie but I don't really understand what's going on.

Jason Staebler (Bruce Dern) has gone directly to jail, lives on the boardwalk and fronts for the local mob in Atlantic City. He is also a dreamer who asks his brother, David (Jack Nicholson), a radio personality from Philadelphia to help him build a paradise on a Pacific island, asking him to believe in yet another of his dreams, yet another of his get-rich-quick schemes.While this story is good and the direction is fine, it is the cast that really sells the movie. Especially Dern and Nicholson, who had previously worked together. Nicholson and Scatman Crothers subsequently co-starred in Miloš Forman's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975) and Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" (1980).To give a fair review, I would need to see the film again. So, until then, this is just a place holder.

The casting of a young Jack Nicholson is very much against type and the opening monologue is impressive. Lesser actors would had been blown off course from there.Bruce Dern is also cast against type, playing the loud, showy role as his conman older brother with big dreams and a real estate scam which he ropes Nicholson in, Nicholson being the glass half empty kind of guy is rather negative about it all. Not helped that he is also a depressive.Tagging along with Dern are an older and younger lady who help him hustle and Scatman Crothers plays a type of Mr Big that Dern has seemingly upset.The setting is Atlantic City, before it got knocked down and redeveloped with casinos. In that sense we are seeing a decaying city from the past. The acting is top notch, the story has some surreal elements and part of it is hard to follow. What exactly is going on with the women that Dern has, why did one of them think she was now over the hill and burn all her clothes and the passed the baton to the younger one. It was as if scenes were cut out so you cannot follow the story properly.

Ever see a movie where you didn't like any of the characters? This movie is one of them. I know that in the early 70's, when it came out, I probably would have thought it "profound." In those days antinomianism, angst, the nihilism of the post-war nuclear threat, were still chic. The plays of Samuel Beckett were still fresh. And Hollywood was at the zenith of its "profound" era. I have re-viewed many movies from that time--movies I thought were so deep--and found them pretentious and wanting. I didn't see King of Marvin Gardens then, but I felt the same as during a recent viewing of The Deer Hunter, the first 2/3 of which were yawningly--guess I'll get a beer-- "profound." I won't see it again. So much of Nicholson's early work is so acidic I can no longer stand it. Five Easy Pieces? What a load of self-indulged artsy-fartsy hooey: the Nicholson character is so talented that he, like Zarathustra, comes down from the mountaintop, becomes a roughneck, takes up with a proletarian woman, and later selfishly says the hell with them both. (Sometime in the mid-80's I wrote him off until About Schmidt, where does a bang-up job.) In King of Marvin Gardens, he sounds like he's on the same bad pot-high, during his radio monologues, as he was in the camping scene in Easy Rider: talking about Venusians or...huh?. As for the rest of the cast: Bruce Dern, would do better in construction than acting; Ellyn Burstyn, really should have concentrated on organic gardening and psychoanalysis. The movie's real star was the backdrop of Atlantic City, then on hard times. All those old hotels and faceless old-folks who, no doubt, still remembered its heyday, were wonderful. They kept me through it to the end.