Quintessential Jack

by Scott Edwards

  Compare the charming scene when Nicholson and Keaton walk on the beach and talk about each other with the troubling scene when Louise the prostitute (Rita Moreno) attempts to bring the flaccid Jonathan to life. Jack and Diane have a great interplay that is smooth and casual, unforced and with a little healthy sarcasm that’s underscored by their grudgingly growing affection.

  In shocking counterpoint, Nicholson looks like Jack Torrance at his worst upon entering Louise’s apartment. An actor has to be willing to give all to the role and be a man who’s confident enough in his manliness to dive into the final, ritualistic and pathetic scene in Carnal Knowledge.

  Moreno told me that the best performers with whom she has worked were, in order, Marlon Brando in The Night of the Following Day and Nicholson in this film—calling him “extraordinarily talented.”4

  Louise had to go through elaborate playacting, carefully devised to help Jonathan feel confident and manly and capable. Instead, Diane and Nicholson have lunch on the beach in a scene without audible dialogue, looking beautiful together, both all in white and both desirable and desiring of each other. Louise and Jonathan play roles of sexual potency; Erica and Harry are spirited and mature, beyond the need to play games yet playful enough to flirt and be romantic. Their beauty belies the Hollywood cliché of sexiness as equal to youth and perfection.

  There is nothing romantic going on in Louise’s flat. Everything is base and sad (except for the performances). Louise is knowing and calculating, yet she supplies a tinge of care and concern about Jonathan. There is complete power in Jonathan’s weakness, and fulfillment in his emptiness. He is slumped back, inert, and only receiving. He cannot feel, externally or internally, letting Louise do all the surface work. She shows just what a fully realized reaction shot can become, when it’s in reaction to the true failure of a real life.

  Nichols called Carnal Knowledge “the darkest movie I ever made,” and a mannerist film that without planning was reminiscent of Jules Feiffer’s cartoon panels.5

  In this sick, staged pantomime of an intimate relationship, Nicholson shows the void, with the most subtle of external clues to Jonathan’s inner struggle—a struggle to be alive. Sex was all the character had left, and now he no longer even has that, replaced by an Invasion of the Body Snatchers–like pod people of plastic, teleprompted sex play. She’s fierce and feeling. He’s needy and gasping for the oxygen of emotional life, masterfully rendered in nuanced detail.

  The couple in Something’s Gotta Give could not be further from the transaction depicted in Carnal Knowledge. While Erica has a late night dinner in the kitchen after a date with Dr. Julian Mercer (Keanu Reeves), she shares a look with Harry that’s touching and priceless, with true depth and feeling. Louise and Jonathan don’t even portray a real relationship, with everything surface artifice.

  The actor’s journey between living as Jonathan and becoming Harry is as interesting as the contrast between the relationships in the films themselves. His transformation in Carnal Knowledge is not growth or development but decay and descent. Nicholson’s range, successfully playing Jonathan’s dark and lost character as well as Harry’s enlightened character of self-discovery, is remarkable. His transformation as Harry, from overgrown playboy to sentimental boyfriend, shows a realistic and restrained seemingly casual side to the intense and studied actor. Both roles take a character energy equally vital, but with the energy pointed in different directions and with widely varied styles.

  As an actor—romantic or comic or otherwise—he has grown, at times seeming Bogartesque (interesting because of Keaton’s co-starring role in Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam) and at others cute and coy, such as when he returns to Keaton’s bed after they make love for the first time so he could try “sleeping with her.” In another Woody Allen connection, Erica’s play about their relationship is very Annie Hall.

  Harry and Erica are the antithesis of Carnal Knowledge’s Jonathan and Bobbie. Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton portray a healthy, mature relationship through their smooth and casual interplay in Something’s Gotta Give (2003).

  Nicholson portrays warmth when Harry visits Marin and meets her husband, and even cries in Dr. Mercer’s office in a fittingly complex manner that’s both softly comic in its misery and touchingly vulnerable in its dramatic tenderness.

  All this is so far removed from his on-screen destruction of a bright, appealing young man 32 years earlier. Nicholson drags Jonathan from an open and lively college student to a defeated and deflated clown in a way so painful yet so beautiful in its ugly truth. Disillusionment decays his character completely, as physically as Jonathan’s spine seems to disappear when he slides down on Louise’s couch. That couch is no place for psychoanalysis, but one for psychosis. In portraying a feeling that’s less than nothing, Nicholson makes us feel everything.

  His Harry shows a different kind of connection in a different kind of relationship. When he parts with Erica, as Keaton leaves La Grand Colbert restaurant with Keanu Reeves, it is sweet … and bittersweet. He cries as he laughs in regret and self-reflection on the Pont d’Arcole bridge over the Seine. When Erica returns, you believe it’s true that he’s 63 years old and in love for the first time in his life.

  Harry comes alive after a heart attack. He feels more and feels more deeply, allowing himself to love and to make love, and without retreating afterwards. Jonathan cannot feel, he has no depth, and he cannot perform as a man. His balls were not only busted, but tossed to piranhas. By himself.

  10

  * * *

  The Developing Delinquent

  A malt shop, night club, drive-in and race track can mean burgers, dancing, double features and competition. Or it can mean hostages, rape, attempted rape and manslaughter. The difference is the difference between the “good kids” and the J.D.s.

  Names like Jimmy and Weary and Buddy and Johnny sound wholesome enough. But what about Randall P.? Where does the juvenile delinquent go when he is no longer juvenile? You do not want to know.

  Like many young actors from the mid–’50s to the early ’60s, Nicholson started his career with teens-in-trouble exploitation quickies, B-movies short enough to need another feature to make a legit night of it. A troubled youth, who strays because of the wrong circumstances or the wrong friends, could have gone either way. That youth could have delivered papers and joined the debating team … or he could have drifted from pranks and scuffles to light shoplifting and heavy gang action and finally to crime and violence, jail and asylum.

  What happened to Jimmy Wallace after The Cry Baby Killer ends the standoff and gives himself up? Do Weary Reilly and Buddy ever realize what they’ve done and change how they view and treat women? And does Johnny Varron get out of jail to go back for clean competition and race for all the right reasons?

  If the answers aren’t positive; if true progress has not been made; if the chip on the shoulder remains firmly in place and attitudes against society, women and authority stay steadfastly counter to the culture, these troubled kids can be rejected, dejected and suspected. They can become Randall Patrick McMurphy.

  Nicholson’s first Hollywood role was the title character in Roger Corman’s production The Cry Baby Killer. Jimmy Wallace is beat up by four guys, bullying that sets him on a path from good kid to troubled teen who turns to a gun. Jimmy was cornered by his attackers, and eventually allows himself to be cornered in a storage shed with hostages. Nicholson is intense in this early role, broad and overwrought, as likely to be so due to the nerves of a young and inexperienced actor as it is due to a conscious effort to portray a high-strung kid.

  Ed Nelson, who played the TV reporter covering the incident, explained, “It’s a big advantage to know what’s going on around the set and Jack had never done any films at all.” Nelson was less than impressed at the time, adding, “I just found him to be different, he was very inside of himself and I’m not used to that.”1

  Jimmy becomes an unintended J.D., more juvenile than delinquent. He is driven to de
speration and Jack plays him in a desperate manner, pushing the explosiveness perhaps more than necessary, but in the end the character just doesn’t have killing in him (the movie title is a misnomer) and gives up. Only when ending the standoff does Nicholson let Jimmy Wallace truly relax, an essentially good kid doing the right thing after making a mistake.

  His second J.D. character, Johnny Varron, also gives himself up to custody, but only after it’s too late.

  In less than two years, Nicholson shows so much more poise and personality in The Wild Ride, creating a true character rather than simply playing at acting. We also get our first glimpse at the “Jack” we’ve become accustomed to over the years. The twang, the sneer, the smile, swagger and explosiveness are all there in this early incarnation. Nicholson successfully swings from happy-go-lucky party boy who’s also a domineering gang leader to an overconfident womanizer who occasionally betrays vulnerability with other men.

  A classic J.D., Johnny has a bad attitude, a chip on his shoulder when it comes to adults and authority. He’s snotty to cops and cocky and mercurial with his peers. Though The Wild Ride was a quickie teensploitation flick of only 61 minutes, Nicholson’s Johnny is fully formed. He’s a hot roddin’ gang leader with a serious, broodin’ ’tude.

  The film’s Beat attitude and hipster slang feel familiar coming from Nicholson. Overall, the film is a rather tame ’50s view of the SoCal beach and racing scene, with a dig-those-crazy-cats vibe that’s a few years behind the times.

  With most of the crew and cast novices and Hollywood one-timers, it largely rests on Nicholson to inject some legitimacy as a veteran of two prior films and two previous television credits. More importantly, he was studying. As Shirley Knight told me, “We took acting classes together. It was in 1959 to 1960, around that time. It was Jack Nicholson, Robert Blake, Bobby Driscoll, Dean Stockwell, Sally Kellerman, Millie Perkins, me—and Sandra Knight, who of course Jack Nicholson married.” This was the Jeff Corey class, in his garage where he had chairs set up with a little stage.

  Shirley recalled, “Jack was an interesting character … at the time, I thought it would be hard for him to get work because he had such a baby face, kind of a round baby face when he was younger. He didn’t have that leading man aspect he got later.”2

  The Wild Ride (1960) is a J.D. second feature that just happens to spotlight a future film superstar as a juvenile delinquent. Nicholson’s characterization of Johnny is a fully formed depiction of a cocky gang leader with a penchant for trouble and a weakness for mindless violence; here he attacks co-star Georgianna Carter.

  Millie Perkins studied acting with Nicholson after a starring role in the celebrated adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank. She recalled, “He wanted to be there to learn. He was a person who wanted to grow and learn. He wasn’t the same as everyone else.” Though no more important than anyone in the group, “Jack was a very dominating, dominant person who didn’t let anything go by if he didn’t want to. He wasn’t shy.”3

  Johnny Varron was anything but shy in The Wild Ride. Jack enters dancing in a light gray sweatshirt, exhibiting more style dancing than acting at this point, at first playing the character flat and humorless. When brought in by the cops, he sits with style in the police station, slumping and rolling his eyes, bringing the J.D. attitude with plenty of dismissiveness as he grins and cracks himself up. Nicholson has a mostly physical embodiment of the character, strutting and gliding with wings outstretched. His brow furrows and his eyes blink fast when delivering annoyed dialogue.

  With his first Jack-ish explosion in a beach party scene, he swigs his beer and then violently throws the bottle while yelling to the gang to get going. There’s a nice bit of business as he bellows at his gang members for chickening out, forcefully pushing his cigarette into the beach sand and continuing to work it in until he ends the conversation and tosses sand to show his talk is officially over.

  He mentally attacks them by claiming that it’s only a matter of time before they would be sitting on the sofa watching TV “and that’s the end, you might as well be dead,” as if he had written the lines himself.

  The depth of Nicholson’s portrayal is most manifest in his relationship with his friend Dave. Johnny is undoubtedly the tough stud and leader of the gang, but there’s an undercurrent of an undefined tension that could be seen as a conflicted attraction to the other male. In a confrontation with Dave over a chick, Jack first blows up and then swiftly calms himself and becomes nice, even raising his arms in a bird stance to compose himself and “cool down.”

  He is still a true J.D. through his attitude toward women, deliberately hurtful and arrogant with his older lover as well as simply mean with friend Dave’s girlfriend. When Dave shows up, Jack reacts too strongly for the situation or the scene, blasting an extended yell of “I did it for youuuu!”

  The older woman isn’t the only trophy that matters to Johnny. He’s a race car driver willing to use any dirty trick to win. Like Johnny Strabler and his motorcycle in The Wild One (get it?), wild rider Johnny Varron ties a trophy to the front of his car.

  Number 5, “the new boy” in the big race, shows a big Nicholson smile to the crowd as he waves during the lineup introductions, but this boy is anything but a sportsman. Jack is an amoral juvenile delinquent who killed a cop earlier in the film through recklessness and disregard, without looking back and with no remorse. He cheats his way to the win, a dirty racer and “top stud” who proceeds to alienate the crowd, his racing team, his gang and even the track PA announcer. Later, he causes Dave (“the chicken”) to fatally crash, in a repeat of his cop killing. Only this time, Johnny sees the evil of his way—though all too late—getting out of his car for the last time to kneel by his so-called friend and react to the crash death in a manner quite similar to that toward co-conspirator Cora (Jessica Lange) 20 years later in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Now Johnny gives himself up to the law, while Frank Chambers (for all intents and purposes a J.D. who just didn’t progress enough) suffered the bad choices and flaunting of laws and societal values enough for the both of them.

  Most J.D.s are against law enforcement. Others take their frustrations out on women. Some lash out at both, like Buddy and Weary. In Too Soon to Love, Nicholson is pushy in his establishing scene at an amusement park and later when way too aggressive at a drive-in with leading lady Jennifer West (as Cathy) until she is rescued by leading man Richard Evans (playing Jim) who punches out Jack and sparks a big brawl. Jack at this age quite convincingly comes across as a brash, sexually forceful type, a J.D. with a chip on his shoulder. His heavy-handed move on Cathy was edging toward what today would be recognized as date (or acquaintance) rape.

  Nicholson appears in only two scenes, first yelling “Get the show on the road” at an amusement park, and later driving two other guys to the drive-in while displaying his toothsome sneer.

  Cathy and Jim are the ones loving too soon, though this is pretty tame stuff, with “kids in trouble” merely staying out too late and making out. Too Soon to Love was an early credit for director Richard Rush (who also wrote the script); he later helmed Hells Angels on Wheels and Psych-Out, both of which featured Nicholson. Rush reminisced that he met Jack while casting the movie, giving him the role of the drive-in theater villain, and “once I had seen him work, I fell in love and he was starring in all of my pictures from then on.”4

  The morals of the time (1960) appear bizarre if not quaint today. Apparently, if you wanted to find out where to get an abortion, ask your barber. But the woman performing the abortion is in a dirty and rundown apartment she calls a respectable place. She sends Cathy to a really seedy side of town, past a “GIRLESK” theater and into a ghetto (or what passes for one in this white world) to a decayed, filthy and broken-down building. The young couple in trouble encounter a woman coming down the steps after having had her abortion, but she looks like a zombie movie victim, scaring the young couple away.

  Back then, the subject of abortion was worse than the attempted
date rape by Buddy. A true rape, a violent and public attack by a juvenile delinquent named Weary Reilly, was a different story entirely. Buddy suffers nothing but a hangover and some ribbing by his pals. Weary is grabbed and brought in by the cops, as an out-of-control and gangsterish nobody.

  Based on a James T. Farrell book from a trilogy that was important at the time but largely forgotten today, Studs Lonigan presented a socially aware study of the tough South Side of Chicago and its Irish youth in 1920. The film introduced Christopher Knight (who made only one more movie) in the title role. His gang included Nicholson and Frank Gorshin, who later played the classic villain The Riddler in the Batman TV series, coincident that Nicholson subsequently portrayed the Joker in its franchise reboot. Upon showing Gorshin an original Studs Lonigan lobby card at the Chiller Theatre convention, he proudly displayed it to all in the area while exclaiming, “That’s me with Jack!”5 (The Riddler and the Joker together.)

  Nicholson is first seen in a pool hall wearing a reverse flat cap (also reminiscent of the Joker), bearing the bright, sarcastic tone of youth. He exhibits what we would later see as “Jack,” the derisive attitude with what we would hear as the classic Jack voiced in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

  His acclaimed performance as Weary Reilly meant a lot to the then-struggling Nicholson, according to Gary Kent. Studs Lonigan (1960) portrayed 1920s Chicago juvenile delinquents in an adaptation of the James T. Farrell trilogy made topical to the youth crisis of the early 1960s (reproduction lobby card signed by Nicholson’s fellow gang member Frank Gorshin).