Long before its gambling revival and later slow return to decay, long before Louis Malle’s 1980 drama “Atlantic City,” the historic but forlorn resort city had been emblematic of American ennui, a place of elegaic, baroque nostalgia and decline.
The boardwalk beachside town, immortalized on the board game “Monopoly,” is a most evocative setting for director Bob Rafelson’s “The King of Marvin Gardens,” another of his classic collaborations (“Five Easy Pieces,” “The Postman Always Rings Twice”) with his muse, Jack Nicholson.
It’s an essay in excess, depression and delusions, capturing an America that had turned the corner on Vietnam as it braced for the Watergate scandal to come. Downbeat, droll and thought-provoking, it lets Nicholson play the quiet, brooding and long-suffering intellectual younger brother to a mercurial hustler sibling, Jason (Bruce Dern).
Many of this classic film’s pleasures derive from this mismatch, Nicholson maintaining his “Five Easy Pieces” cool, Dern at his most bug-eyed, pattering “Great Gatsby” manic.
Nicholson is a Philadelphia radio host from the golden age of radio monologuists. He’s a considered, self-confessional storyteller — Jean Shepherd or Garrison Keillor without the laughs. He still lives with a grandfather (Charles LaVine) who mocks the stories he hears grandson David weave on the FM airwaves, with the story David is telling that opens the film a possible whopper about granddad and his two grandsons’ conspiring to let him choke on a fishbone.
There’s a message, a summons from Jason down Atlantic City way. “Get your ass down here fast! Our kingdom has come!”
David gets off the train, greeted by a fading beauty queen (Ellen Burstyn) in a “Welcome to Atlantic City” costume, accompanied by a decrepit five piece brass band.
Jason, it turns out, is in jail.
Dern devours the screen, shouting-down fellow inmates in the holding cell, bowling-over the viewer with his energy, his protests of “a misunderstanding” and that he can get this fellow “Louis” to make this all go away.
David? He’s got the resigned silence of the sibling who’s heard all this before.
“I love all the hustle around here,” Jason bellows. It’s out in the open!”
His latest scheme involves a developable island off the coast of Honolulu, some potential Japanese backers, and that mysterious “Louis,” whom David can never seem to track down.
Sally (Burstyn) is Jason’s paramour, staying in their pick of the aging, elegant and almost empty hotels of a tourist trap that’s trapped-out — we only ever see small clusters of little old ladies visiting — and off-season, to boot.
Beach towns in winter are always great settings, “Marvin Gardens” to “Ruby in Paradise” and beyond.
Sally’s aged out of her dream — kind of. Now she’s raised Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson) to be her next shot at Miss America.
In one bitterly funny scene, we get a taste of Sally’s “talent” as she plays the world’s largest organ in Atlantic City’s vast, pageant-friendly but empty “Boardwalk Hall” as David MC’s a fake beauty contest and Jessica tapdances to an older-than-old Irving Berlin number, “Steppin’ Out With My Baby.”
“I wish you didn’t think I was a part of all this,” she tells David. But she is, along with dizzy, desperate and short-tempered Sally, the antic Jason and everyone Jason can lure into his orbit.
David’s got a secret. And an obligation to try and help his brother, who can’t be satisfied with just deluding himself. Others have to believe, buy in and sign on. Maybe this time, his ship will really come in.
Nicholson’s the great reactor, here, unblinking at Dern’s boisterous sales pitches, tirades, threats and plots. Burstyn is an open wound, a victim of a faithless lover who is more interested in Jessica, a dreamer who has hitched her wagon to that last fellow dreamer to give her a second look.
The script suggests an ever-shrinking city and circle of hustles and hustlers — trading, making deals on faded hotels and attractions, or claiming that deals have already been made. The “Monopoly” allegory is pretty obvious, suggesting that it takes optimisim and chutzpah to play the game and win.
David? “He’s got only one thing,” Sally declares, ticking off that “one thing” on her fingers. “That’s depression, suspicion, and mistrust.”
Nicholson’s future “The Shining” co-star Scatman Crothers is impressive as maybe the one hustler/real-estate shuffler in town still drawing a crowd — to a strip club, back room gambling (pre-casinos) and who knows what else.
Rafelson, Nicholson’s pal and collaborater since The Monkees movie “Head,” wasn’t shy about laying on the surreal, from the daft “Welcome” ceremony for David at the train station to the faux pagaent to a random, wintry morning’s horseback ride on the beach as workmen labor over restoring the planks on the vast Boardwalk that made the city, and the board game, famous.
Rafelson is a big reason we say “They don’t make movies like this any more” and “The ’70s were the greatest decade in American cinema.”
“The King of Marvin Gardens” is quirky, downbeat and allegorical, a challenging film that unfolds with the patience of David’s opening (and interrupted) six minute monologue about himself, his brother, their grandfather and fishbones.
Its genre-defying oddness makes “Marvin Gardens” a stand-out credit in every career that participated in it. Bursytn’s run during this time included the even more nostalgic “The Last Picture Show” and the blockbuster, “The Exorcist.”
And Nicholson, the actor and secret screen-rewriter and scene-polisher, is a bespectacled wonder here, giving us no hint of the larger than life figure he hinted at in “Easy Rider” and eschewed in “Five Easy Pieces” and even “Chinatown.” The early ’70s were where he figured out he could make a big impact by underplaying.
The giant personality who would almost everywhelm in films from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to “Terms of Endearment” and “The Departed” and “As Good as it Gets” would become a screen icon, but the actor who could make us come to him in “Five Easy Pieces,” “About Schmidt” and “Reds” was always there, as well.
As edgy and understated as “Five Easy Pieces” was, “The King of Marvin Gardens” comes off as even stranger with the passage of time. And as the years and fads and business cycles pass, the Atlantic City seen here loom even larger in the memory, a pre-bankrupt casinos wonderland before the post-Trump wasteland it became.
Rating: R, violence, nudity
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn, Julia Anne Robinson and Scatman Crothers.
Credits: Directed by Bob Rafelson, scripted by Jacob Brackman. A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:43