Saturday, October 12 @ 11:30 AM / Music Box Theatre — 3733 N Southport Ave
Unfortunately the print of THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS we received has significantly faded color. We will still screen the print, but no admission will be charged.
Directed by Bob Rafelson • 1972
After charting the course for a new kind of American art film amid the bowling alleys and oil fields of Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson embarked on a sullen and perplexing follow-up. Named after a moderately desirable Atlantic City parcel familiar to Monopoly players everywhere, The King of Marvin Gardens imparts much the same message as the board game: property is a racket. Nicholson stars as David Staebler, a morose, anti-affable radio host, a penny-ante Paul Harvey for Philadelphia’s night owls. He wanders home at dawn, to be fact-checked by his only listener — his grandfather. (“I never stuck a model train in your hamburger. It was a cricket from a Cracker Jack box.”) Summoned to Atlantic City by Jason, his temporarily incarcerated wheeler-dealer brother (Bruce Dern), David gets pulled into a long-shot real estate scheme to bring gambling and revelry to a neglected Hawaiian isle. Ensconced at an aging boardwalk hotel once favored by Woodrow Wilson, Jason boasts of 96%-finalized deals, dines over lobster with potential Japanese investors, cavorts with his girlfriend (Ellen Burstyn) and her squirt gun-wielding stepdaughter (Julia Ann Robinson, stunning in her only major role), and throws around the name of a local underworld financier (Scatman Crothers) one too many times. Beautifully photographed by László Kovács in the winter light of an Atlantic City boardwalk that would soon be demolished to erect a new class of casinos even Jason Staebler would find gauche, this tonally weird, self-consciously (and self-mockingly) literary film remains one of the mordant glories of seventies American cinema. (KW)
104 min • BBS • 35mm from Sony Pictures Repertory
Preceded by: “Organ Grinders Swing” (Fleischer Studios, 1937) – 7 min – 16mm
NEXT UP: Trouble in Paradise on Wednesday, October 16 at NEIU
