5 Easy Pieces

Director: Bob Rafelson
Writers: Carole Eastman Bob Rafelson
1970
1h 38min
(IMDB info)

"A dropout from upper-class America picks up work along the way on oil rigs when his life isn't spent in a squalid succession of bars, motels, and other points of interest. "

(She shoulda allowed substitutions)

The people behind Bobby Dupea titter. The waitress is showing him a sign 'we reserve the right...' behind her while saying 'You see this sign? You'll have to leave.'

Then Bobby (Jack Nicholson) clears off the table. Cups, juice, plates forks all go flying off in all directions 'Oh yeah, you see this sign?'

Who hasn't at one time wanted to do that? It inspired me so much that an earlier version of my comic where the only similarity was the motorcycle I had a young asian man start a fight in a diner after being called a 'chink'.

There was something about the time, the era of the early 1970s that seemed to light a fire under everyone. Everything was incendiary.

I simply love this movie. Not only for this scene but the grumpy (Lesbian?) hitch hiker in the back seat with her diatribe about 'crap.' 'The whole world is full of crap, you can't escape it.' And then (brilliantly portrayed by Karen Black) Bobby's girlfriend in the front seat cranes back and says 'No it's not, there's lots of good things.'

And there's a very sad one-sided talk between Bobby's stroke-addled father and him, alone in a field. He tries to open up to him and say sorry for how miserably his life turned out and how he couldn't make Dad proud of him. This movie is full of scenes like that, which is why I like the early 1970s cinema because so many movies were like this, uncompromising, blunt, open-ended, without neatly tied up story lines, movies that made you work a little at taking it in.