6/18/2023 0 Comments 5 easy pieces![]() And then, most importantly, the Italian neo-realist setting (at least for the first half, with Dupree surrounded by the wonderfully loopy likes of great character actors Billy ‘Green’ Bush, soon-to-be-television-star Sally Struthers and the slightly off-kilter, cross-eyed, yet always glowing Karen Black, as well as a bunch of non-professionals milling about adding life to the environment) within the milieu of the poor and working class perhaps the most admirable attribute of the films of this decade (many of them anyway) was their unvarnished, socially conscious gaze at the problems plaguing the lower classes (for the last time, mind you, as the decades that would follow would begin the consistent neglect and abandonment, both politically and by any Hollywood representation, of the growing majority of Americans known as the working poor - with the 80’s bringing Reagan and his ‘New Day in America’, followed by the great Clintonian master plan – the one that continues whole hog today - of selling out the Democratic Party to massive corporate interests - until, of course, just as Tobe Hooper cautioned us with his unrelenting masterpiece Texas Chainsaw Massacre back in the mid-70’s – the abandoned finally boiled up and returned in monstrous form, as MAGA-hat wearing Trumpers looking to – understandably, mind you - chainsaw the privileged classes who’ve rejected and dismissed them into little tiny bloody bits). There’s the looser narrative feel of the 60’s hipster French Nouvelle Vague. There’s the intimate Ingmar Bergman-style chamber piece approach (especially once Jack Nicholson’s Bobby Duprea, having run away from his feelings of shame over his early privilege, growing up in an upper-class bourgeoise household, dropped out and escaped into a working class facade, working on oil rigs in the desert to make ends meet, reluctantly returns to the wealthy autumnal-leafed island enclave of that rich family – with all of them, in that grand Bergman tradition, renowned pianists and artists – to pay final respects to his dying father). ![]() While I wouldn’t call “Pieces” a great film, it’s certainly a good one, and filled with a kind of who’s who of influences on the incoming New Hollywood brats for the next decade. ![]() Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces is one of those early 70’s films that illustrates how that great period in Hollywood cinema isn’t just worthy of the praise us film afficionados heap upon it just because of the enormous gobs of on-screen sex and violence it started openly slinging about (I mean, there’s only a few casual boob shots at most in the film), but also because of the more challenging, auteur-minded and oft-Euro flavor the new generation of filmmakers brought into the Hollywood sphere.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |