Tuesday Minute
No. 88 | May 4, 2010

Plight of the Piano Player

Our theme this week
Piano-playing protagonists in peril

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le Pianiste) (1960)

Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Jack Nicholson had been making movies since the ’50s, but not until Easy Rider in 1969 had he earned much notice.  In the next year came a performance that established him as a force to be reckoned with.

In Five Easy Pieces, Nicholson plays Bobby Dupea, a complex and volatile man whose blue collar existence belies his musical talent.  He works in an oil field to get far away from his family, but there’s no escape from the failure he feels in never having fulfilled his early promise.  He’s a rebel against all he was brought up to be, perhaps with good cause, but all his rebellion has brought him is an empty, joyless life.  His girlfriend is Rayette (Karen Black), a waitress and fan of Tammy Wynette (“Stand by Your Man” is her anthem), and the two of them travel back to visit his dying father.  In the end, Bobby decides it is time for a change, but whether for better or worse it’s not certain.

Five Easy Pieces is best known for its “chicken salad sandwich” scene.  In the span of a couple of minutes, in an act as simple as placing an order at a diner, the conflicts of the times are played out.  His rage against authority palpable, Dupea confronts the waitress and her nonsensical rules with a combination of creative thinking and a violent sweep of the table.  Nicholson became a hero of sorts (you can see his persona in the making), but the movie doesn’t offer easy answers.  The old order still stood, the revolution didn’t come—not in that diner, at least, or most of society, for that matter.

As much as anything that year, Five Easy Pieces kicked off a decade of filmmaking when the old rules weren’t working, and for a time, something new was possible.

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Five Easy Pieces
Bob Rafelson, director
Jack Nicholson, Billy Green Bush
Chopin’s “Fantasy in F Minor, Op. 49″ (with horns)

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Five Easy Pieces
Jack Nicholson, Sally Struthers, Toni Basil, Helena Kallianiotes, and Lorna Thayer
Diner Scene

 

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Quote of Note
Lloyd:  There comes a time that a piano realizes that it has not written a concerto.
Margo:  And you, I take it, are the Paderewski who plays his concerto on me, the piano?
—Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe), Margo Channing (Bette Davis), All About Eve (1950)

…58…59…60.

1. Five Easy Pieces (1970) | Old Old Films says:

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