Movie Quote of the Day (‘Prizzi’s Honor,’ on a Hit Man’s Head-Scratcher)

[Charley is telling former girlfriend Maerose about new love Irene Walker.]

Charley Partanna [played by Jack Nicholson]: “I met her in a church. It just happened. I knew she was the woman for me. She'd organized the scam in Vegas. I go looking for the bad guy and it turns out to be my woman, can you imagine this? Not only that—Pop tells me she's the piece man for the Nettabino contract. Just the same, I love her, Mae... I love her.”

Maerose Prizzi [played by Anjelica Huston]: “Well...”

Charley: “How can I live with this? I gotta do something about it. I gotta straighten it out.”

Maerose: “Then do.”

Charley: “Do what? Do I ice her? Do I marry her? Which one of these?”— Prizzi’s Honor (1985), screenplay by Richard Condon and Janet Roach, adapted from the novel by Richard Condon, directed by John Huston

Flashback, August 1990: ‘Chinatown’ Sequel ‘The Two Jakes’ in Disappointing Release

The Two Jakes, the long-awaited but troubled follow-up to the detective film Chinatown, premiered 35 years ago this month. Unlike its Oscar-winning predecessor, it did not enjoy widespread critical acclaim, nor has it achieved cult-classic status since then. 

Worse, it committed a crime worse than murder in Hollywood: it lost money ($10 million in its theatrical run, even on a not-exorbitant $25 million budget).

What went wrong with the sequel to perhaps the greatest example of neo-noir, and by any standard one of the seminal movies of the Seventies?

To some extent, critics were poised to slam a production that had short-circuited five years before—and, though several actors were carried over from Chinatown, it was missing one crucial creative contributor: Roman Polanski. 

The director, who had fled to France to avoid a statutory-rape sentence, was in no position to take a firm hand, as he’d done before in editing screenwriter Robert Towne’s vivid, sprawling dissection of L.A. corruption in the 1930s from 180 pages (enough for a three-hour movie that would have tested audiences’ patience) into a form that won its eventual Best Original Screenplay Academy Award—and in insisting on its tragic denouement.

This time, Towne, hoping to avoid similar interference with his script, planned to fill the director’s chair himself. Though it was a given that Jack Nicholson would be back as J.J. “Jake” Gittes, Towne made the mistake of casting producer Robert Evans as the “other Jake,” charming mobster Jake Berman.

Then, days before production began, Towne—feeling jittery already, courtesy of his growing cocaine problem and lack of a finished script—got a look at Evans’ thinning hairline and awful plastic surgery. 

The director should have realized that Evans, not a good actor to begin with 30 years before, would not improve with no opportunity to practice the craft and time now working its inevitable ravages.

Evans, terrified that he would never regain his exalted Hollywood position after his recent Cotton Club disaster, refused Towne’s request that he withdraw from the project. The picture collapsed in a blizzard of threats and lawsuits.

By 1988, Nicholson was ready to revive the corpse of The Two Jakes, with conditions meant to forestall another catastrophe: Towne was obligated to submit a completed screenplay to Paramount Pictures, yielding effective control of the project, and Nicholson agreed to direct “for scale”—i.e., using techniques to make the film appear bigger than its financial resources would typically allow.

The new arrangements only solved some problems that had aborted the project before. Nicholson didn’t possess Polanski’s skill at tightening Towne’s vision, took on the additional responsibilities of producing while leaving Evans (after so many years, shorn of his self-confidence) the nominal title—and still had to act himself. 

Moreover, he had to find several actors to replace those who had accepted other roles in the interim, including Kelly McGillis, Cathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci, and Dennis Hopper.

Nicholson’s attempt to impose coherence on Towne’s first draft, through voice-over narration (a device suggested by Billy Wilder, who had used it effectively in one of the key early examples of film noir, Double Indemnity), only clarified the complicated plot to a limited extent.

The four-year delay in filming had one advantage, in a small way: it made more realistic the passage of time between Chinatown and The Two Jakes. The sequel was supposed to occur in the early postwar period, a decade after the original.  

The joke in Hollywood was that this would be the first sequel not requiring aging makeup, as the actors had done so naturally. (I was stunned, for instance, when I saw Perry Lopez reprising his role as Lou Escobar, but this time walking with a cane.)

Upon its release, The Two Jakes received criticism as convoluted and confusing. That is hardly a disqualification for film noir or neo-noir—when Howard Hawks, adapting The Big Sleep in the 1940s, asked Raymond Chandler who had killed one of the victims, the novelist replied that he didn’t know! But there were few memorable scenes, and no compelling villains like John Huston’s Noah Cross in Chinatown.

Nevertheless, though not as great as Chinatown, The Two Jakes is far from a terrible or even subpar movie. It is well-acted and stylishly filmed—well worth viewing again, if you can ever find it on TV or on DVDs in libraries.

(My blog post from 16 years ago lays out the case for the greatness of Chinatown. But if you want to read an eloquent defense of the sequel, read Jim Hemphill’s contention in Indiewire last year that it’s not only “better than its reputation, it’s better than the classic that inspired it — broader in its tonal range, subtler in its observations, and more adventurous in its narrative structure.” For a two-thumbs-up from its time of release, see this Siskel and Ebert segment.)

The Two Jakes would not be the only sequel that found it impossible to measure up to the expectations aroused by its 1974 predecessor. The Godfather Part III would suffer a similar fate by the end of 1990.

In both cases, negative pre-release reports of on-set difficulties (in the case of Godfather III, Winona Ryder’s exhaustion-induced departure led Francis Ford Coppola to replace her with his untested daughter Sofia) predisposed many to review and judge it by its turbulent backstory as much as its admittedly problematic product.

Nicholson would move on to other projects that kept him in the Hollywood stratosphere, even if he has never directed another film. But the damage to his personal life because of his involvement with The Two Jakes was more lasting.

His admission that he had impregnated Rebecca Broussard, the actress who played his secretary Gladys, led to the painful breakup of his 16-year relationship with Anjelica Huston, who had at last run out of patience with his constant infidelity.

(Nicholson gained so much weight for his role that my late friend Ann chuckled to me when we saw the film, “Looks to me like he’s the one who’s pregnant!”)

BTW: for the entire astonishing production history of Chinatown and The Two Jakes, I recommend that you read The Big Goodbye, by Sam Wasson—who makes this a very worthy successor to his prior accounts of Breakfast at Tiffany's and the lives of Bob Fosse, Paul Mazursky, and Blake Edwards.

Quote of the Day (John Updike, on How ‘Wickedness Was Like Food’)

“Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.” — American man of letters John Updike (1932-2009), The Witches of Eastwick (1984)

The image accompanying this post comes from the 1987 film adaptation of The Witches of Eastwick, with Jack Nicholson—in a supreme bit of typecasting—as Daryl Van Horne, an audacious, rascally devil.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Terms of Endearment,’ With a Line That Could Be Jack Nicholson’s Motto)

Garrett Breedlove [played by Jack Nicholson]: “I don't know what it is about you, but you do bring out the devil in me.”— Terms of Endearment (1983), screenplay by Larry McMurtry and James L. Brooks based on McMurtry’s novel, directed by James L. Brooks

Forty years ago this week, Terms of Endearment premiered. It would go on to win several Oscars, including Best Picture. But the one that, to my mind, may have been most deserved, for Best Supporting Actor, went to Jack Nicholson. 

After a commercial and creative trough for him following his Best Actor Oscar for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975, the award solidified a career upturn that began in 1981 with his role as Eugene O’Neill in Reds.

Nicholson’s character—a retired (and randy) astronaut who romances Shirley MacLaine’s Aurora Greenway—was not part of Larry McMurtry’s novel. 

But James L. Brooks’ creation of the character provided the film with a welcome jolt. The role seemed almost tailor-made for Nicholson. (Indeed, he could easily have said the line above in The Witches of Eastwick, The Shining, or to the many women he wooed offscreen.)

Quote of the Day (Colin Nissan, on What Eyebrows Communicate)

“Your eyebrows alone can communicate more than you realize. One raised eyebrow means that you're intrigued, while two raised eyebrows means that you're surprised, and no eyebrows means that you're in Blue Man Group.”—Humorist Colin Nissan, “Shouts and Murmurs: Reading Body Language Like the Experts,” The New Yorker, June 26, 2023

The above contention about “two raised eyebrows” appears to be contradicted by the evidence in the accompanying photo. Jack Nicholson in The Shining is conveying that the phrase “killer eyebrows” is hardly a metaphor. He’s not surprised—he’s making sure the person he’s talking to is, and not in a pleasant way.

Flashback, September 1970: ‘Five Easy Pieces’ Marks Generational Clash—and Nicholson as Leading Man

Five Easy Pieces, which opened at the New York Film Festival 50 years ago this month, reflected its creators’ desire to bring a French “New Wave” sensibility to American audiences, with a drama that was character- rather than plot-driven, focused on an anti-hero who could find no easy resolution to his problems.

In the process, it propelled 33-year-old Jack Nicholson—who, after a decade of acting in low-budget flicks for exploitation-movie mogul Roger Corman, had finally gained significant mainstream attention with a supporting turn the year before in Easy Rider—into contention for leading roles, even in studio pictures—a perch he would continue to occupy for the following four decades.

Although Nicholson went on from triumph to triumph, the same could not be said for his two collaborators in creating his misfit, Bobby Dupea. Director Bob Rafelson would make other unusual films (Black Widow, Mountains of the Moon), but a characteristic he shared with Bobby—resistance to authority—limited the quantity and quality of his subsequent work. (See Josh Karp's excellent 2019 profile of him for Esquire.)

The least heralded member of the trio was screenwriter Carole Eastman. A fellow student of Nicholson’s in acting class, she had come to admire his brilliance. Four of her six produced screenplays would feature her friend, but none of these was as successful as channeling his snarling but smart persona into a complex character who continually surprises audiences. (At some level, this former model may have identified with Bobby herself; like him, she was highly intelligent, funny, an object of desire, and not always understood even by those who knew her best.)

Eastman’s Oscar-nominated screenplay used the road-picture genre as the basis for its gossamer plot. But the road offers less of an opportunity for Bobby’s brooding oil-well rigger to understand himself than for the audience to glimpse his restless heart.

Meeting his sister after years away from the family, he follows her urging to see their ailing father while there is still time. Bobby must re-enter his musically minded family’s home off the coast of Washington---which, for all its pristine beauty, had led him to escape its stifling atmosphere of pretentiousness and privilege.

The “chicken salad” scene in the film’s first half, in which Bobby explodes at a waitress for the menu’s absence of his desired item (an omelet with a side of toast), is the one that inevitably ends up in highlight clips of the film or of Nicholson’s long career, as it showcases the unexpected edge that the actor brought to so many roles.

But it is a more subtle scene in the second half of the film (in the accompanying photo) that I think demonstrates Nicholson’s range, while pinpointing the source of Bobby’s aimlessness.

The chicken salad scene presented the actor with a foil—actress Lorna Thayer, with dialogue that Nicholson could react against. In contrast, when Bobby talks alone on a hillside with his father, a mute stroke victim, Nicholson had to face an actor (William Challee) who could only react with sad eyes.

Nicholson speaks jaggedly, letting the audience absorb Bobby’s anguish as he searches futilely for words that can connect him to his long-estranged parent:

“I don't know if you'd be particularly interested in hearing anything about me. My life, I mean... Most of it doesn't add up to much that I could relate as a way of life that you'd approve of... I'd like to be able to tell you why, but I don't really... I mean, I move around a lot because things tend to get bad when I stay. And I'm looking... for auspicious beginnings, I guess... I'm trying to, you know, imagine your half of this conversation... My feeling is, that if you could talk, we probably wouldn't be talking. That's pretty much how it got to be before... I left... Are you all right? I don't know what to say.”

Nicholson’s slow, soft dissolve into tears is a far cry from the rage he displayed in the diner scene. As Bobby pulls himself together, he confronts what he has long avoided about himself, but with no happiness realized: “The best that I can do, is apologize….We both know that I was never really that good at it, anyway...I'm sorry it didn't work out.”

At the same time, the scene shines a different light on the “generation gap” than the one depicted in Easy Rider. The gap between parents and children here in Five Easy Pieces is not over counterculture issues like music, drugs or the Vietnam War, but a broader division over values—one that predated the film’s release in 1970 and endured well beyond it.

That inability to bridge the divide has left the younger generation adrift—in Bobby’s case, unable to commit to a relationship or even a steady job.

Many of the “youth” films that Hollywood greenlighted after the success of Easy Rider (e.g., Zabriskie Point, The Strawberry Statement) are little remembered these days. But Five Easy Pieces and a movie that opened the month after its release, I Never Sang for My Father, examined, in the context of a similar generational conflict, another issue that would become even more salient for baby boomers: how to work out a relationship with an aging parent in failing health.

In I Never Sang for My Father, Melvyn Douglas’ Tom Garrison represents the obdurate, querulous parent that Nicholas Dupea was before his stroke. His son Gene, more dutiful and repressed than Bobby Dupea, is similarly unable to make peace with the past issues that corrode his bond with his father. “Death ends a life,” Gene concludes, “but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some final resolution, some clear meaning, which it perhaps never finds.”

That struggle began years before for Bobby, so resenting his father that he casts himself out of the family’s Edenic home and is cursed, Cain-like, to roam the Earth. His best actions—rushing to aid oil-field buddy Elton when he’s being assaulted, defending pregnant waitress girlfriend Rayette against a pompous visiting philosopher—end up for nothing because he sees no value in what he does.

After he makes a floundering plea to the third woman he sleeps with in the course of the film, his brother Carl’s student-lover Catherine, she rejects him to devastating effect: "You have no love for yourself, no love for family, for friends—how can you ask for love?"

Put in 2020 norms, Bobby is unable to negotiate the distance between cultural norms for his Red State acquaintances (signified by the country music in the first half) and his Blue State family (indicated by the classical music they all play, but none so well as he). Nicholson, Rafelson and Eastman showed a half century ago that this conflict, not the parental one, was cleaving its anti-hero in two. Now, we know, the entire nation feels so riven.

Quote of the Day (Jack Nicholson, on the Hardest Part of Fame)

“Getting out of a hotel room at 4 a.m.”—Jack Nicholson, answering a question at a film premiere from Allure Magazine correspondent Jeffrey Slonim about the most difficult thing about being well known, quoted in Bed Widdicombe, “Red Carpet Rumbles,” The New York Times, February 24, 2013

(The accompanying photo by Alan Light shows Nicholson with Dennis Hopper at the 62nd Academy Awards, March 1990. From the looks of it, Jack wasn't a particularly good influence on the reformed hellraiser. But what else would you expect?)

Quote of the Day (David Thomson, on Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining’)

“There have always been some people who thought that Jack Nicholson’s performance as Jack Torrance the caretaker was so far over the top you couldn’t see the top anymore. Was this the regrettable start of Nicholson’s acting with his eyebrows?”— David Thomson, “Days and Nights at the Overlook: Why 'The Shining' Continues to Shine,” The New Republic, March 25, 2013

If they gave out Oscars for eyebrow acting, Jack would have nailed this one instantly, based on the evidence here from the Stanley Kubrick film, and would be home free for a Lifetime Achievement Award by now. 

Quote of the Day (Alison Pill, on Jennifer Lawrence)

“She’s just so intensely present. One of my favorite things in watching an actor is feeling, the story is safe in your hands. I can lean back and trust you with this. You can count on this girl. There’s no vanity or pretense that gets in the way of her being the character. When she’s standing somewhere, she looks like she’s standing in that place. I buy every second of it, which allows all the fantasy to come in.”—Actress Alison Pill on Jennifer Lawrence, interview by Sheila Heti, The Believer, February 2013

With all the music on the Oscar telecast the other night, one especially apropos set of notes could have been played at one certain moment: Culture Club’s “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya,” as Jennifer Lawrence lost her footing on the way up to collect her honor.

But years from now, one hopes, Lawrence will be able to surmount that mortification to remember that Hollywood in turn tumbled for her that night. (Personally, I think a more potentially dangerous moment was averted with the disappearance of Tinseltown’s Dirtiest Old Man, Jack Nicholson, following what appears to be an attempt to reenact in real life his typecast star turn as the Devil in The Witches of Eastwick.)

What her peers in the acting community, and beyond, will recall then is her deeply true and heartfelt performance in Silver Linings Playbook, a film that, because of all its risks (not all of them successfully paid off) in depicting mental illness, needed every ounce of believability she could provide it.

I can’t say that I’ll ever watch The Hunger Games or its inevitable sequels, but Lawrence’s performance in Silver Linings Playbook has convinced me that there’s enough truth in what Alison Pill says about her fellow thespian that I’ll follow as much of her other work as I can in the future.

This Day in Film History (Film Noir Par Excellence, Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” Released)

June 20, 1974—While Lou Escobar might have advised heartbroken private eye J.J. Gittes, “Forget it, Jake—it’s Chinatown,” fans like myself can do nothing of the kind when it comes to Roman Polanski’s brooding meditation on corruption and loss.

Ostensibly a tribute to the gloomy, black-and-white mystery genre of the Forties and Fifties known as film noir, Chinatown was recognized, immediately upon its release on this date, as a distant mirror of the growing disillusion with American institutions.

It was hard to miss, in the final weeks of the Watergate scandal taking down an American President, that Gittes had discovered a link to a murder involving the water supply of the city of Los Angeles. 

(The real L.A. water supply scandal—the city’s original sin against nature, if you will—had occurred not during the 1930s decade lovingly recreated in the film but early in the 1900s, and it involved William Mulholland—but that’s a post for another day.)

Like the Francis Ford Coppolo epic that beat it out for most of the major Oscars the following year, The Godfather II, the primal source of wealth, corruption and violence was the family. 

That eternal wellspring of conflict, as ancient as the Old Testament and Greek tragedy, might account for why, though the original personalities and issues underlying both films have faded, these meditations on crime American-style have endured for two generations of subsequent movie fans, continually to be rediscovered and marveled at.

Now, we can see the sterling work of all hands involved with Chinatown. (For one of many examples, notice how the subtle set design by Richard Sylbert underscores the theme of the difficulty in extracting the truth. Gittes is always walking up countless steps and through endless doors, and mirrors abound—all cues that, as John Huston’s Noah Cross character warns him pointedly, he doesn’t know what he’s getting into.) But the product almost didn’t gel.

Jack Nicholson and Polanski butted heads sometimes over conception of character, but the real fracas occurred between the director and Faye Dunaway. 

Polanski, accustomed to a Hitchcockian style of total control over his product, didn’t appreciate the actress’ input, and eventually saw her as “insane.” He didn’t help matters, though, by yanking a stray hair from her scalp because it caught the light and ruined a prize shot. 

Dunaway can still go ballistic when asked to respond to the rumor that she retaliated for being denied a bathroom break by throwing a cup of urine in Polanski’s face.

Also contributing to the atmosphere of intrigue and tension (perhaps helpful, after all, to a thriller) was producer Robert Evans. Dunaway was able to land the role to begin with only because Evans’ first choice, his then-wife, Ali MacGraw, left him for Steve McQueen. 

Just before the film was to premiere, Evans stirred the pot again, jettisoning the original score by composer Phillip Lambro and giving replacement Jerry Goldsmith only 10 days to come up with a better one. (Fortunately, Goldsmith delivered.)

More consequentially, Polanski felt that Robert Towne’s brilliant, twisty screenplay failed in one respect: its happy ending. As a childhood survivor of the Holocaust and a widower (wife Sharon Tate was murdered by followers of Charles Manson), Polanski believed that, even when it receded, evil left an indelible stain.

And so, Gittes—a cynical marital investigator more blessed with doggedness than with smarts—at last solves the mystery—and is unable to bring to justice the powerful criminal at the heart of it. 

Worse, as he walks disconsolately away from the final killing, he knows that the evil will contaminate yet another generation--and that he inadvertently perpetuated it.

As blogger Tony Macklin notes in an extremely perceptive post, dualities abound throughout the film, including “light and darkness, vision and blindness, wholeness and imperfection, innocence and corruption.”

The most significant parallel, however, concerns rape. Rape of the land is analogized to rape of a daughter. The man responsible for both is sinister businessman Noah Cross.

The casting of John Huston in that role is completely apropos. His presence is not only a tip of the cap to Polanski’s seminal influence in making the film, the Huston-directed The Maltese Falcon, but also a reminder of the ark-building Biblical character he played in a film Huston himself directed, The Bible.

Unlike the Biblical patriarch, though, Noah Cross is not escaping water but cornering the market for it. When angrily prodded by Gittes, “What can you buy that you can’t already afford?”, Cross replies, “The future…the future.”

Everyone has his own favorite scene in the film. Mine is the love sequence between Nicholson and Dunaway’s Evelyn Mulwray. Suddenly their characters, unable to maintain their former veneers any longer, are seen by the other up close and vulnerable.

As Dunaway dresses the painful wound to Nicholson’s nose (cut off in a famous scene featuring the director himself as the principal thug), she discovers that he’s less a sleazy, wiseguy divorce detective than a world-weary idealist. 

He, in turn, upsets her precarious balance -- and begins slowly to discover that she's not really a scheming femme fatale but a damaged victim--by observing “something black in the green part of your eye.”

What Dunaway haltingly calls her “flaw in the iris” initiates moments of tenderness completely isolated from everything else in this bitter film. 

But even as it makes us care for the characters, the scene also hastens the tragic ending. What makes us touchingly human also renders us weak enough to become ensnared by the vast net of money and power.