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An artful attempt to scope American
decline in a semi-desperate reunion of two brothers
Sixteenth in my 1970s series, which is now headed
Did Kids Really Wear All Those Purple
Clothes? (replaces the heading
“Patchouli
and B.O.” (a recollection of the ’70s))
[for more info on my film-review banners, see
here]
Subsections below:
[introduction]
Character details I
didn’t get
The dated aspect of
the Black gangsters
David as a writer
Burstyn’s Sally and
what she means
[Edits 11/21/16.]
You should see
Part 1 to get some essential details about this film before you read the following.
The King of Marvin Gardens was the
second respectable-drama film directed (and partly written) by
Bob Rafelson; the first was
Five Easy Pieces
(1970).
(Rafelson had previously been working in TV and films, but
with low-budget or decidedly countercultural works; he helped develop the TV
show
The Monkees [1966-68] and
directed the Monkees’ swan-song film
Head
[1968], which had writing help from
Jack Nicholson. Rafelson and his partner
Bert Schneider also provided the producing company behind
Easy Rider [1969], in which Nicholson first came to major critical notice
as an actor. Some more info on Rafelson’s and Schneider’s early career can be
found in Part 1 of this review, as well as in a book by Peter Biskind [
End note 1] that I haven’t had access
to for some years. Further info on them is also available in a book on
Nicholson [
End note 2].)
For Five Easy Pieces,
Rafelson had the services of writer Carole Eastman, and he changed a few
details in her story (not entirely pleasing her, I understand). For Marvin Gardens, he had producing help
from Harold Schneider, according to film credits (I don’t know if Bert
Schneider was in the producing background of this film, as part of BBS
Productions, which made both these films). The screenwriter for Marvin was Jacob Brackman, though
Rafelson seems to have originated more of this story than he had that for FEP.
Marvin is less
impressive a film than FEP, though I
wish I had seen it more (my schedule and the nature of the DVD I got made this
difficult). If you are able only to see one or two Rafelson films, I would
strongly recommend FEP; and perhaps The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981),
which I haven’t seen, is worth a look. Marvin,
while interesting (for me anyway, as a 1970s connoisseur of sorts), is quirky
and “slight” enough—Rafelson, after all, was an early example of what would
today be called an “indie” director—that I think many young film students
wouldn’t want to take the time to see it.
Part 1 gives important orienting info; the following picks
up from that.
Character details I
didn’t get
I viewed this film all the way through once (with skips in
the DVD), and rewatched a little less than half. The main characters in the
informal “family” focused on are (1) brothers David and Jason Staebler (played by Nicholson and Bruce Dern, respectively); and (2)
Jason’s consort/girlfriend Sally (Ellen Burstyn) and (3) her stepdaughter (I
didn’t get the “step” part from the film) Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson, who
died in the 1970s at a young age). Some details surrounding the women (as
conveyed in the Wikipedia article on the film) I didn’t get from the film (my own fault, I admit;
for one thing, some lines went past me). The Wiki article also says that Sally
is “manic-depressive”—which I didn’t get, but which doesn’t surprise me—and a
“former beauty queen” (no surprise; still trying to be, it seems) “and
prostitute,” the latter of which I didn’t get from the film at all. This, of
course, adds to the tackiness and “earthy 1970s drama” qualities of the story.
The Wiki article says Jason is in the process of “conning a
Japanese syndicate” into his buying a Hawaiian island, etc. I didn’t realize
the Oriental men were from a syndicate, and I don’t know if this is meant to
say they were mobsters or Japanese-style Mafia. The Wiki article also says
Jason is (with reaching out to David for help) pursuing a scam, though I didn’t
fully get that (with this project) he was merely being a con artist; I thought
he had a legitimate business prospect, though it was still on shaky ground
(though, today, the distinction between a manically-pursued business venture
and a con game seems thin, in so many instances, indeed). In any event, enough
about the business dealings Jason is focusing on seems shaky that, whether he’s
downright criminal with it or not, we can appreciate that the larger picture of
this story concerns “the shady side of town,” including such piquant, striving
individuals as Jason.
Incidentally, the Wiki article talks about how the film
shows numerous grand old hotels that were once archetypal A.C. landmarks that
were, shortly afterward, torn down to make way for newer casino/hotels. Those
who are interested in the history of A.C. might seek out the film just for
these glimpses, because Kovacs’ photography certainly gives them a distinguished
portrait of “an old, faded world.”
The dated aspect of
the Black gangsters
The Wiki article says Jason had been working for a gang
boss—this particular nature of working I didn’t fully, consciously get on
watching (I thought Jason merely was in hock to him, or such), but it makes
sense.
You may start to ask, “If you didn’t get so much of the
scams going on, why are you writing about the film?,” and my answer would be,
“You know, the details of these scams may not be as much worth figuring out as
such would be in, say, a smart Coens film; Marvin
Gardens is an also-ran film from an old time, which may be ‘irrelevant’
enough that modern audiences wouldn’t want to see it [see my comments about Don
Shiach’s ranking of critically-top 1970s films in End note 1 of Part 1]. So I
would advise seeing Rafelson’s Five Easy
Pieces; but if you want to gorge
on Rafelson films, or just get a taste of ‘earthy, 1970s downer-ending fare,’ Marvin is good to compare with FEP.”
However, what struck me like a brick when I first watched Marvin was the dated, and rather
benighted, element of having the gang be primarily Black (never mind the oddity
of casting Scatman Crothers, an avuncular sort with a winning, teeth-prominent
smile, as a gang boss). Of course, we know that, perhaps likely enough in the
1970s and no less today, gangsters with whom someone may get snared in terms of
loan-sharking or whatever else can be of a variety of races or ethnic
groups—Hispanic, Asian, whatever. But with this film, it would seem, especially
where run-down Atlantic City was concerned, that the issue was to have readily
recognizable “mafiosos” of a certain stripe be involved with Jason. Still, why
were Blacks used here?
Films, up until The
Godfather (1972), which practically singlehandedly rewrote the book on
Hollywood’s dealing with this, were awkward about dealing with gangsters that
were “quintessentially city player” types. Even The French Connection (1971), which dealt with a real-life
drug-dealing criminal enterprise that involved the Mafia, seems to muddy the
identity of “who the circle of crooks was.” FC
included some Italianate players (like “franchisee” point-people Sal Boca and
his wife Angie); it also included an apparent Jewish moneyman in Leo Weinstock.
But famously amid the street culture, which the film presented as “just what
insidious lowlife our hero Popeye Doyle had to resort to tough measures to deal
with,” were a lot of Black characters (as consumers more than major “players”),
mainly those who used drugs—which the heroin dealers had as their primary
consumer base.
In fact, an early sequence in FC has Popeye and his colleague Cloudy chasing (over a series of
street blocks) an Afro’d man who was doing some low-level dealing in a bar.
This was at the time, I would suggest, anachronistic in a way that today’s
viewers might not realize: the film’s real-life story happened about 10 years
before, in about 1961. Certainly the Italian-American Mafia was in full flower
then (the famous 1957 meeting of various families in upstate New York was only
a few years before). As for Blacks’ being in 1961 the overwhelming majority of buyers
of imported illegal drugs, that may (or may not) have been true; but in 1961,
Black-American culture did not have the pulsing/burgeoning,
soul-music-listening, big-Afro-headed “face” that it did by 1971, and (even if
this is a sort of cosmetic feature) it is this culture that the film presents
for its middle-class American audience (among whom there was no small amount of
Archie Bunker types).
My point is that FC seemed
(or seems in retrospect) to traffic in, for its white audiences, presenting
criminal “street life” in New York as if (as the root of much evil in NYC
society) all Blacks were hanging out in shady bars in the city, waiting to “get
well,” as the slang was, in terms of partaking of a new heroin shipment. You
don’t see in FC any Black characters
who are on the side of whites and decent society (except for the undercover informant
for whom Popeye tries to maintain his “disguise” by shoving and slugging him
mercilessly in between getting info out of him in a pay toilet). In fact,
subsequent re-viewings of FC get
across how dated the racial situation seems in this regard.
Marvin Gardens
seems to fall right in with this “marketing set of concerns.” It is part of the
film’s artful—some might say too self-conscious—way of portraying “what
characters are about” that the only Black people of note are some who cut a
putatively menacing figure on the street—whether with Afro and stylish
sunglasses, or as an avuncular “don” sort in Scatman Crothers—and are part of
the gang that Jason is entangled with. Remember, in the early 1970s, the only
real ferment of films that focused on Black street culture comprised the
respectable-enough likes of
Shaft (1971)
and the other (often lesser-in-quality) Blaxploitation films.
(I wish I could have watched Marvin all the way through a second time, to get more of the
Black-gang subplot. For one thing, a late scene where Nicholson’s David is
meeting with a gangster in a mall-like area seems, visually, to play on
early-’70s stereotypes, but comes across as gripping nonetheless—though I
couldn’t get all the dialogue. And a subsequent scene with David meeting with
Crothers’ Louis in a sort of brave-adult tete-a-tete, over a stiff drink, seems
nicely staged, if it left me puzzled as to what was going on.)
Maybe, after all, we can be sympathetic to Rafelson and say
that this story looked at a man (Jason) who happened to be involved with (among alternatives) a Black gang, while
the Italian Mafia was the one more insinuated throughout Atlantic City street
culture. Who knows. Anyway, this Black-gang detail made the film seem
especially dated.
David as a writer
Nicholson has a quiet time in this film (unlike in FEP), as the putatively depressive
radio-show talker. The first sequence of the film, with David speaking into a
microphone, with Nicholson’s head framed in black, may remind you of a famous
monologue by Marlon Brando near the end of Apocalypse
Now (1979)—with the actor put on his mettle by needing to deliver good acting
amid a quiet recitation, with his head right in our face, in relief against
black background. David is telling an ostensible story of having, years ago
with his brother, killed his grandfather by allowing the old man to choke on
fish bones, after the informal family tradition had been to give the old man a
piece of bread to eat to “wash down” the fish bones every time this choking
event started. David remarks that he and his brother were “accomplices” from
then on. We find later that, after David goes home, his grandfather is alive
and well in their apartment—and the old man makes fun of David’s radio story,
which the old man had apparently heard, by coughing at him extravagantly.
Rafelson in a DVD extra says that this monologue was from a
story he had written as his first English assignment in college many years
before; he had apparently gotten in some trouble with the school for it. Here,
in addition to being somewhat quaint in its own right, it serves as a
contrasting factor to another radio story at the film’s end that David tells,
shaken, based on what he has just been through in real life with his brother.
There are some tasty lines from this, but as not to spoil it for you, I won’t
recount them.
I would note, though, that Rafelson (or someone else) says
Nicholson wrote this last monologue himself. And indeed, it is remarkable to recall
how many times Nicholson has written parts of his own dialogue for a film, even
major ones that made him as a star. As Shiach (amid other sources) notes,
Nicholson started in the film industry as a writer (at least part of the time),
and apparently he was willing to consider staying in that line of work if
acting didn’t pan out (he would also direct films over the years, including Drive, He Said [~1971], Goin’ South [1978], and The Two Jakes [1990]). But once his “acting
star” started to rise with Easy Rider
and then FEP, he would stay focused
mainly on acting.
But he wrote parts of his dialogue as follows: some of the
ending scene of Chinatown (1974),
with a group of characters in Chinatown shortly before Mrs. Mulwray is shot
(when he says about Noah Cross that he’s “crazy,” etc.); the monologue by Bobby
Dupea to his father near the end of FEP;
in The Shining (1980), the scene (or
part of it) when Jack Torrance is telling Wendy that when she comes in when
he’s writing, she distracts him (and he curses her out, eventually). How many
other instances of this writing his lines he’s done, I don’t know.
Burstyn’s Sally and
what she means
The last thing I would comment on is the pathetic situation
of Sally, played by
Ellen Burstyn, an actress so prominent in those days that
she had notable roles in Peter Bogdanovich’s
The Last Picture Show (1971), William Friedkin’s
The Exorcist (1973), and Martin
Scorsese’s
Alice Doesn’t Live Here
Anymore (1974).
I commented above on what I failed to gather about Sally
(but was corrected on by Wikipedia) when watching the film. The aspect of her
hankering after winning a Miss America pageant seems pathetic—I mean, this may
have resonated among 1972 audiences as a credible
story of a “pathetic woman holding onto one tacky type of American dream,”
whereas today it would seem a less-than-credible
story of that type. (Today, a likely prospect for a darkly humorous film might
be how young hopefuls still flock to participate in beauty pageants but run the
risk of being taken advantage of by a business impresario who later has dreams
of becoming U.S. president—and actually does become that. Maybe that story
seems too unlikely.)
But Rafelson has Sally’s situation follow a kind of story
arc when she eventually burns her clothes, makeup, toiletries, etc., in a
bonfire on the beach (this had a kind of 1970s, if posturing, “burning the old
idols” feel to it). I guess if I kept in mind that she was supposed to be
manic-depressive, this would make her actions more credible, if on the pathetic
side. (I only saw this bit once, hence my tentativeness.)
The big set piece where Jason, David, Sally, and Jessica are
having a pretend “Miss America show” in a big assembly room (with Sally playing
a giant organ) is amusing in the sort of way of “check out this
semi-improvised, low-budget filmmaking bit.” I mean, sometimes a low-budget
film is fascinating for how well it pulls off a scene, with the production
parsimoniously using what limited means there were, and still getting a good
dramatizing effect. And Jack Nicholson rises to the occasion, not just doing a sonorous
Bert Parks imitation, but singing too.
This scene has a way of getting a societal-criticism point
across by means of creative filmmaking, and as lets us enjoy how an old film
could do this, in accord with how we presume audiences (who might have been
jaundiced about such old beauty pageants by then) could have indulged and/or
appreciated this (and, for a quite different film style, even Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange [1971] has ways of presenting
set pieces that may, in modern days, seem dated/improvised in some ways to the
unsympathetic, and to the sympathetic [the fan and/or “curating film connoisseur”],
due to the story-points being made, nicely intriguing).
But also, what can we infer is the point about Sally (and
Jessica)? That, to the extent they still have dreams of winning a beauty
pageant, they are about as pathetic (or poignant) as the two hitchhiking
hippies are in FEP?
I don’t have a whole lot of conclusions to make about how
this film sums up the decaying aspects of American society in 1972, but as you
can see, there are interesting things to glean here, but mainly for the true
film scholar.
##
End note 1. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the
Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1998).
End note 2. Don Shiach,
Jack Nicholson: The Complete Film Guide (London: B.T. Batsford,
1999).
