IFI CLASSIC

Director Bob Rafelson and his leading man Jack Nicholson created a sensation together with 1970’s Five Easy Pieces, but their moody and melancholy second collaboration has never quite had the attention it deserves. Both are films about the family and its discontents, but where Nicholson played a restless free spirit in the earlier release, two years later he’s intense and somewhat buttoned-up as a late-night radio host who gets ensnared in his estranged sibling’s dangerously speculative business dealings. 

Here Bruce Dern is utterly memorable playing the kind of loose-cannon Nicholson himself usually essayed, though crumbling, out-of-season Atlantic City is just as much a character in the movie, whose title’s derived from the original American version of Monopoly. Dreams and desolation in a town where the party’s definitely over – made in 1972, but this really is a film for now. (Notes by Trevor Johnston.)