After years of minor and starring roles in low-budget independent pictures (mostly exploitation flicks produced by Roger Corman), Jack Nicholson achieved star status playing unaccommodated outsiders in two major countercultural films, Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970). Thus began a string of critical and popular successes that included Carnal Knowledge, Chinatown, The Last Detail and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. But there was, in 1972, the critical and box-office disaster of The King of Marvin Gardens, now a rarely revived cult classic back in cinemas and on DVD thanks to Park Circus.
One of the most downbeat movies of the time, it features Nicholson as the deeply depressed, anti-charismatic David Staebler, who earns a modest living telling miserable tales about his family in the early hours of the morning on a Philadelphia FM radio station. He's lured at the height of winter to the once grand, now decaying New Jersey resort of Atlantic City by his estranged brother, Jason (Bruce Dern). This fast-talking, ever hopeful wheeler-dealer and con man is involved with gangsters in a dicey project to buy a Hawaiian island and turn it into a casino.
Atlantic City is the model for the original 1930 Monopoly board, launched at the height of the Depression, and the game and the city are here a symbol for the despair and false hope engendered by the American dream. Jason is in prison without a get-out-of-jail card, and when he's bailed out he leads the weary, incredulous David on what is ultimately a dance of death, accompanied by an over-the-hill former beauty queen, Sally (Ellen Burstyn), and her whimsical, spaced-out stepdaughter (Julia Anne Robinson).
The movie is a flawed masterpiece full of menace, surreal moments and obscure dialogues, with the city photographed in all its desolate, decaying beauty by László Kovácscorrect, who also shot Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. Probably the greatest sequence has the four main characters recreating the Miss America pageant in the desolate, deserted Convention Hall. Marvin Gardens (a misspelling by the game's creator of Marven Gardens, a township south of Atlantic City) is a yellow property on the Monopoly board. The movie is best viewed alongside Louis Malle's masterly Atlantic City, shot a decade later while the town was in the process of getting a multimillion-dollar facelift.
