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.

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Where to watch The King of Marvin Gardens