The King of Marvin Gardens

This is a brilliant little character study from the fabulous team that brought us the classic "Five Easy Pieces". If this last reviewer didn't get it (and obvious he didn't), than that's his problem. The detail, the beautiful photography, and the incredible use of Atlantic City locations make this film all the more worth while. Shot when Atlantic City was a dying resort town, it is used as a metaphor for this strange symbiotic relationship between two very different brothers. Nicholson as the intelligent David, and Bruce Dern (never better) as the scam artist Jason, out to make a quick buck. Do yourselves a favor, and check out this little gem.

A truly great film and sadly overlooked and under rated, following up Five Easy Pieces and showing Nicholson at his most awesome. A far better take on Atlantic City than the Louis Malle's film of that name. Incredible acting from Nicholson, Dern, Burstyn... great direction and cinamatography. The movie is set in a pre-casino Atlantic City, sort of Coney Island perfected. A real actors film that we rarely see anymore. Perhaps difficult to watch because of that yet immensely rewarding. A film that perfectly captures the time and place. Dern plays an over the top hustler while Nicholson, of all things, plays an intellectual radio dweeb. Go on... see it... "no one reads anymore..."

It's hard to imagine Jack Nicholson appearing in a film like 'The King of Marvin Gardens' today. The movie is a story of an introverted broadcaster and his hustling brother; there's an air of seediness to the portrait of a run-down, early 1970s, east-coast America; of doomed hopelessness about the the huckster's implausible vision; and of a terrific sadness in the way that the broadcaster finds a touch of glamour and excitement in hanging out with his brother for a while, although the two of them have nothing in common and surely nothing is actually going to turn out right. I've heard it said that Saul Bellow's 'The Adventures of Augie March' is the great American novel because of its optimism; but this is another side of America, post-Vietnam war, a world of fraudsters, impossible dreamers, and those just hunkering down to survive. As a film, and certainly as entertainment, it's weaker than Nicholson and director Bob Rafelson's earlier 'Five Easy Pieces', primarily because Nicholson's character here is fundamentally less interesting: it's a correctly restrained performance from Jack, but playing a man who has little capacity for change, and constrained by a story that's low-key painful, rather than exciting. Yet even if this is not a fun movie, it's a telling one. Pessimism, like optimism, remains part of the American landscape, as it is in every country; but it's a shame that it's been written out of the contemporary Hollywood vision.

Alienation and disconnection -- the uncomfortable mood gripping the nation would soon degrade into deep malaise and acute paranoia as America was stunned and traumatized by revelations of the government's deceptions and lies about the failing war in Viet Nam and then soon enough the vaudevillian scandal of Watergate. This film strives to capture the infinitely subtle drama of when innocence isn't so much lost as it's cynically packaged and sold. Dreams may die hard, but delusions usually expire with barely an audible whimper, and there was no more epic delusion expiring at that moment in our history than the vainglorious belief in the USA's infallibility. God, himself, had ordained this vast land exceptional and anointed its multitudinous inhabitants, or so we'd been told.

Like the crumbling, decrepit, musty seaside resort town which plays host to this tragicomic farce, America was not living up to its slogan as the Shining City on the Hill. Atlantic City in the early 70's not only manifested the startling decay of so much of this nation's urban spaces, but also poignantly symbolized the inner decay of our national psyche. And while it's certainly sad and scary to witness the gruesome, slow, writhing death of the Great American Delusion, it's also somehow comforting and reassuring to know that just beneath the still warm corpse germinates tender seedlings incubating the merest wisps of hope for our nation's future. Amidst the emphatically strained and tortured metaphors which comprise this modest cinematic tragedy lurks genuineness and sincerity and psychological resonance. It's an awkward, peculiar little picture story that will haunt your psyche, if you're not already dead, or too delusional.

A classic from of the New American Cinema The King of Marvin Gardens is one of the most underrated films of the 70. The film stars Bruce Dern and Jack Nicholson (cast against type as an introverted depressive) as a pair of estranged brothers reunited in Atlantic City to try to get scam artist Dern's ill-conceived property development dreams off the ground. Ellen Bursten rounds out the cast as an ageing beauty queen struggling with the realisation that her young protégé, played by the previously and subsequently unknown Julia Ann Robinson, has surpassed her. Shot in a bleak, wintry Atlantic City that contrasts sharply with Dern's vision of a happy ending for the quartet in Hawai'i, the film is a compelling and meditative character study that doesn't shy away from or glamorise the problems of the people who inhabit it. The three leads give superb performances as characters who are all in their disparate ways seeking redemption. Made in the brief period of the 1970s when the big American studios were hoodwinked into financing films that were singular, intelligent, and challenging, The King of Marvin Gardens is a must see for any fan of the cinema.