Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 12 June

The King of Marvin Gardens (Rafelson, 1972)

I have some­thing embar­rass­ing to celebrate.

Regular read­ers will know that I remain a huge advoc­ate for phys­ic­al media. I love the qual­ity of the pack­aging, dis­play­ing them on a shelf, the fact that pic­ture and sound qual­ity is the best that you can get. I love that no one can take them away from me.

What I’m not so good at, is actu­ally watch­ing the things.

This is a lot to do with hav­ing to pri­or­it­ise what I get paid to watch. That means new films in cinemas and new con­tent on stream­ers. As media, and as audi­ences, we are con­di­tioned to nov­elty and that doesn’t leave much time for what I really love – old films.

But to para­phrase Bob Dylan, there are more good old films than there are good new films and, surely, good is the reas­on why we do this in the first place. And this may not be imme­di­ately appar­ent, but there are still plenty of gaps in my know­ledge which I would love to fill.

What I’m get­ting at is that yes­ter­day I finally watched the last film in the fam­ous Criterion Collection Blu-ray box set “America Lost and Found: The BBS Story”, a sur­vey of the inde­pend­ent pro­duc­tion com­pany that used the fin­an­cial suc­cess of The Monkees tele­vi­sion show to make some of the most acclaimed inde­pend­ent films of the 60s and 70s. Films like Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider and The Last Picture Show.

Ladies and gen­tle­men, I bought this box set in 2012. It has taken me twelve years to finish.

The last pic­ture pro­duced under the BBS shingle – fol­low­ing Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show which was a huge suc­cess and nom­in­ated for eight Oscars – was The King of Marvin Gardens in 1972.

Like the oth­er BBS films, it is a keen snap­shot of America as it moves out of the happy-go-lucky 60s into the Watergate and Vietnam-infused dark­er 1970s. The American Dream is look­ing more and more like a mirage.

Jack Nicholson is David, a depressed late night radio talk show host, the kind that sits in the dark extem­por­ising bleak auto­bi­o­graph­ic­al stor­ies rather than enga­ging with talk­back listen­ers. He gets a call from his broth­er, Jason (played by Bruce Dern), a small-time con­man look­ing to become a big-time one. He is in Atlantic City, look­ing for investors in a Hawaiian resort he wants to build.

It soon becomes clear that this pro­ject is dream­land and Jason’s self-belief is not sup­por­ted by the shaky rela­tion­ship he has with fad­ing beauty queen Sally (Ellen Burstyn) and her step-daughter Jessica (Julia-Anne Robinson). They clearly have heard all this before but, with no bet­ter options, are reluct­antly going along for the ride.

This is winter in old Atlantic City, before the grand board­walk hotels are replaced by post-modern Trump-era casi­nos. The weath­er is grim and the tour­ists are absent. Rafelson’s eye for an absurd com­pos­i­tion – honed dur­ing those years work­ing for The Monkees – is in excel­lent shape, fea­tur­ing one bril­liant locked-off exter­i­or tableaux after anoth­er (sup­por­ted by cine­ma­to­graph­er László Kovács). 

It’s the act­ing that really stands out, though. After the first read-through, Rafelson made the geni­us decision to swap the roles that he had giv­en to Dern and Nicholson, and they work bril­liantly against type. It’s one of my favour­ite Jack per­form­ances because it is so buttoned-down. If all you know about Nicholson’s act­ing is the big, cha­ris­mat­ic, movie star stuff from later in his career, this will be a revelation.

Special men­tion, too, to Burstyn who drives the drama for­ward, and to Benjamin ‘Scatman’ Crothers as loc­al mob boss Lewis, the first of three appear­ances he would make with Nicholson.

BBS – and their young col­lab­or­at­ors like Denis Hopper, Karen Black, Nicholson, Bogdanovich, Henry Jaglom – believed that the U.S. had the poten­tial to have its own art­house cinema, as strong as Europe’s, but dis­tinct­ively American. But before Marvin Gardens had even been released they had sold the com­pany to Columbia Pictures (now Sony). These people would con­tin­ue to make films – great films – but it would no longer be a movement.

Where to watch The King of Marvin Gardens

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from Apple

Australia: Digital rent­al from Apple, Amazon, Google or YouTube

Canada: Streaming on HollywoodSuite On Demand or Starz

Ireland: Not cur­rently available

USA: Digital rent­al from Apple, Amazon or Fandango

UK: Digital pur­chase only from Apple

The America Lost & Found (The BBS Story) box is still avail­able dir­ect from Criterion or from Amazon. Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show now have their own Blu-ray (or UHD) releases but Head, A Safe Place, Drive, He Said and The King of Marvin Gardens are still not avail­able on Blu-ray any­where else.