Movie directors and their stars can make for strange bedfellows. Portly, reserved Alfred Hitchcock found his favorite leading man in dashing, sophisticated Cary Grant. Mercurial, sloppy, handkerchief-chewing John Ford created an icon out of John Wayne, who was as nimble as a cat.
Sometimes, though, a director and his star become mirror images of each other: The star is made into the director’s alter ego and the director the star’s chief inspiration. Such was the case with Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson, who, from the late 1960s through the mid-1990s, teamed on seven films, six directed by Rafelson, including at least three masterpieces: Five Easy Pieces (1970), The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). Rafelson died in July at the age of 89.
Numbers alone cannot express the depths of their connection. Before Rafelson entered the picture, Nicholson had been circulating as an actor in the lower echelons of Hollywood for close to a decade. He bounced between decent parts in cheapo productions, including Roger Corman’s The Raven (1963) and Richard Rush’s Hells Angels on Wheels (1967), and weaker roles in bigger films, among them the entirely unexceptional sequel to Mister Roberts, Ensign Pulver (1964). The smile, the sarcasm, the combustible energy — none of the Nicholson trademarks had been established. He was fast on his way to the fate of Rick Dalton in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood: washed up without ever having been a true star.
That changed when Nicholson met Rafelson, who was a nephew of screenwriter-playwright Samson Raphaelson, of Jazz Singer fame, a Dartmouth College graduate, and, by his account, a former wandering jazz musician and disgruntled member of the U.S. Army in Japan, where he wrote film criticism and helped smooth out the English translations to the films of Yasujiro Ozu. Yet his thin show-business resume to that point consisted mainly of co-creating and producing a sitcom centered on an ersatz boy band, The Monkees. “I met Jack Nicholson in a film society, which maybe he was one of the organizers of,” Rafelson said in a 2010 documentary. “We became friends.”
Rafelson prevailed upon Nicholson to co-write the Monkees’s first and only foray into feature filmmaking, Head (1968). A madly loopy cinematic experiment in which the super-mild, but tremendously appealing, Monkees are deposited into a psychedelic dream fantasia, the film didn’t stand much of a chance with the public. But Rafelson, having welcomed Nicholson into his orbit, remained determined to exploit his pal’s untapped potential.
In 1969, Nicholson turned up in a key role in Easy Rider, produced by Rafelson’s BBS Films and an unfathomable box-office success, and the following year, he was cast in his first iconic part in Five Easy Pieces: Nicholson was Bobby Dupea, an insubordinate member of a high-born, artistically oriented family who, out of sheer cussedness, whiles away his life on an oil rig and in the company of a waitress, played by Karen Black. The part firmed up his persona: hip, fierce, quick to anger, quick to charm. Nothing better illustrates this admixture than the famous diner scene in which Bobby, disgusted at not being able to order wheat toast without first ordering a chicken salad sandwich, uses his arm to sweep his table clean.
I did a long interview with Bob in 2004, and we were in touch until his death. When I look at Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, I see what I took to be the salient aspects of his mercurial personality: his combative sense of humor, devilish disposition, and attraction to life’s seaminess. The men were two of a kind.
Yet, as the poet said, the two roads soon diverged in the wood: Having set forth Nicholson’s basic public image, one that would return in numerous non-Rafelson films, from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) to The Shining (1980), Rafelson set about deliberately undoing, or at least complicating, that very image. In the brilliantly cerebral drama The King of Marvin Gardens, Rafelson cast Nicholson in the unlikely part of a bookish, earnest radio monologist — a huge gambit, as Rafelson told me, because “I didn’t know that he was able to detach so entirely from his persona as to play a character who, for example, wouldn’t smile at all in the movie.” What — no Nicholson teeth on display?
Then, in Rafelson’s brilliant version of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, Nicholson seemed to inhabit the filmmaker’s own id: As Frank Chambers, the good-for-nothing wastrel who seduces, and conspires with, the discontent waitress Cora Papadakis (Jessica Lange), Nicholson is presented as unappealingly as any major movie star ever has been, in a testament to the star’s trust in Rafelson. As imagined by Rafelson and screenwriter David Mamet, Nicholson’s Frank is a lecher, a scoundrel, a dumb cluck who can be talked into murder. Here is that rare film that looks at human depravity and doesn’t flinch — just as it looks at human passion, the sort that ignites between Frank and Cora, and doesn’t blink. Incidentally, this makes Postman one of the great unacknowledged conservative films, since conservatism requires taking a measure of reality as it actually is, not as we might wish it to be.
A man who always seemed to be spoiling for a fight, Rafelson tended to cast Nicholson in parts that might have irked the actor or annoyed the audience. Yet because the men were so close, and because they seemed so similar, this mustn’t be seen as Rafelson picking on Nicholson as much as using his star as a vehicle to examine his own psyche.
In his films for other directors during these years, Nicholson so often seemed to be cashing in on his own magnetism — see, for example, the over-the-top theatrics of his performances in Batman (1989) or A Few Good Men (1992) — but on the increasingly infrequent occasions when he reunited with Rafelson, he was asked to go darker, dig deeper: Their romantic comedy Man Trouble (1992) was not a success, but Rafelson again required Nicholson to play a loser with minimal attractive qualities, and their film noir Blood and Wine (1996) was an outright triumph, showing Nicholson could play angry, moody, and wrathful without losing what makes him so watchable. Not coincidentally, neither film, nor The Postman Always Rings Twice, resonated with the public as much as the sort of movies for which Nicholson won prizes in later years, such as, say, As Good As It Gets (1997).
Bob Rafelson did not need Jack Nicholson to make a great movie. His most appealing movie was Stay Hungry (1976), a comedy-drama with the unlikely milieu of the bodybuilding scene in Birmingham, Alabama, starring Jeff Bridges, Sally Field, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. And because he related so profoundly to its real-life adventurer protagonists, Rafelson considered his epic drama about Burton and Speke’s quest for the Nile’s source, Mountains of the Moon (1990), to be the “least un-enjoyable” movie he made, as he put it to me.
Yet I keep coming back to the films Rafelson and Nicholson made as a duo. This director and this star responded to each other’s energy, recalcitrance, and unruliness. They made one perfect film in Five Easy Pieces and then kept stepping on each other, like unhappy dancing partners, for the rest of their careers.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
