Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Once a child piano prodigy from a professional musical family, an ill tempered young man (Jack Nicholson) now works on oil rigs in the oil fields. He lives with his uneducated girlfriend (Karen Black), who work as a waitress. When word gets to him that his father (William Challee) is dying, he drives up to Washington state. Directed by Bob Rafelson (KING OF MARVIN GARDENS). One of the key films of the "new" Hollywood of the 1970s, Nicholson's alienated character doesn't fit in anywhere. He feels superior to the lower class company he keeps like his brainless girlfriend and his oil rig pals but he loathes the intellectual pretensions of the artistic upper class where he came from. You can feel Nicholson's rage and contempt bottling up but he has no idea what he wants or where to fit in. Thematically, the film is a riff on the superior SOME CAME RUNNING (1958), Nicholson's character echoing Frank Sinatra's novelist. I wasn't sympathetic to Karen Black's country singing waitress either, she was clinging and annoying, no wonder Nicholson wanted to get away from her. Compare her to SOME CAME RUNNING's poignant Ginny (Shirley MacLaine). With Susan Anspach, Lois Smith, Billy Green Bush, John P. Ryan, Sally Struthers, Fannie Flagg, Helena Kallianiotes, Ralph Waites, Toni Basil, Irene Dailey and as the waitress in the famous chicken salad scene, Lorna Thayer.