Country: US
Director: Bob Rafelson
In the fun house how do you know who's really crazy?
Bob Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens is the last of seven films produced between 1968 and 1972 by BBS Films, the production company co-founded by Rafelson. These films include oddities like Rafelson's Monkees movie Head, works of historical importance like Easy Rider, and two bona fide masterpieces, Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show. All seven BBS productions have now been released by Criterion in the collection America Lost and Found: The BBS Story. (Not included in the collection is an eighth BBS production, Hearts and Minds, the Oscar-winning 1974 documentary about the Vietnam War.) The King of Marvin Gardens was Rafelson's follow-up to Five Easy Pieces and, perhaps because that generously praised movie raised expectations so high, got a tepid critical reception when it was released. The film has its admirers, though. David Thomson, for example, calls it "Rafelson's most intriguing picture." Leonard Maltin calls it a "genuinely haunting, original drama." After seeing it recently for the first time, my own reaction is that those descriptions aren't inaccurate but that the film isn't wholly successful either and is something of a letdown in comparison to Five Easy Pieces.
The King of Marvin Gardens stars Jack Nicholson as David Staebler, a Philadelphia late-night radio broadcaster whose show includes long narrative monologues. The movie opens with one of those monologues, although it isn't clear at first that David is in fact doing a radio show. All we see for the first five minutes of the movie is Nicholson's face in tight close-up as he speaks in a darkened room, sometimes looking at the camera, sometimes looking away from it. For all we know, he might be speaking directly to the viewer or even to a therapist. The story he tells is about himself and his older brother and how they silently conspired to let their grandfather choke to death on a fish bone rather than help him. As David tells his tale, it seems shockingly authentic.