Any fan of Big Jack’s who hasn’t had a chance to see his earlier films should make sure they don’t miss the King of Marvin Gardens.

DIRECTOR BON RAFELSON AND JACK NICHOLSON

Bob Rafelson was Jack Nicholson’s first and perhaps closest collaborator in a short series of highly idiosyncratic films that established Jack as a big star.

Both Five Easy pieces and King of Marvin Gardens come across as rejections of the American dream at the most personal level. What was sold by Hollywood just didn’t add up for Jack and Bob; they were looking for something else. Salesman’s dead so what now?

THE PLOT

Surfing through the loneliness of the FM waves David Staebler (Jack Nicholson) works as an all night talk-jockey: it’s like being in outer space alone and neurotic. One day he receives a call from big brother Jake (Bruce Dern) telling him to get to Atlantic City because something big is brewing: a scam to buy an island off Hawaii and turn it into a resort. All they have to do is hustle some money up front….

BOB, JACK AND BRUCE

The film takes on a fragmentary form structured on a series of set pieces that allow Bob, Jack, and Bruce to express the intuitive relationship that they’ve developed: Jack was in three films directed by Rafelson, and Jack had directed Dern in one movie, Drive He Said. The trio had worked together enough to have developed a feel for scenes yet still be energised by each other.

GOOD

What makes Marvin Gardens so good is the dovetailed playing of Nicholson as the talk radio man and Dern as his conman brother - hopeless cases who can't manage their lives or the equally well-drawn women who come into contact with them. Dern lives with an ageing blonde, Sally, played by Ellen Burstyn, and her pretty step-daughter (Julia Robinson) and the film’s subplot consists of a sexual contest between them, a sort of warped mirror image of the relationship between the two men.

Atlantic City the resort town and home of the original game of Monopoly is shot by Laszlo Kovacs as a down-at-heel holiday and gambling resort, in a manner which seems to point up the characters' disillusion.

GROWING REPUTATION

"As a raconteur of vivid, touching events, himself looking on from the dark" Rafelson’s reputation as a director /writer has faded. King of Marvin Gardens was not a critical success at release, but its reputation has steadily grown particularly in Europe and Derek Malcolm long time Guardian film critic has unhesitantly included the movie in his personal century of film.