The Passenger (1975)

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Writer: Mark Peploe, Peter Wollen and Michelangelo Antonioni, based on a story by Mark Peploe
Stars: Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider

Index: The First Thirty.

As with Chinatown and the three remaining films in Jack Nicholson’s First Thirty, I’ve seen this one before. However, that was as long ago as 2008 and even then I realised that it wasn’t a one watch film. A fresh viewing at a different time in my life elevated it considerably for me.

It has a plot, but it’s not the point. Jack plays David Locke, a journalist struggling to land an interview with the rebels in a country we later learn is Chad. He’s on his own and he’s failing consistently. People guide him so far and then walk away, stranding him. His Land Rover gets stuck in a sand dune. Walking back to his hotel leaves him seriously sunburned.

When he discovers a fellow traveller dead in the next room, of natural causes, he takes the opportunity to swap identities with him. Now he’s David Robertson and he’s shed his old life that has ceased to have meaning any more. He doesn’t yet know that Robertson is dangerous, an arms dealer who has promised weapons to the very same rebels Locke failed to meet.

Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

Director: Jean Renoir
Writer: Pierre Lestringuez
Stars: Catherine Hessling, Pierre Philippe, Maurice Touzé and Harold Levingston

Index: That's a Wrap!

1925 was the gift that kept on giving when it came to new directors. February saw Josef von Sternberg debut with The Salvation Hunters and René Clair follow him just one week later with The Crazy Ray. March means the debut of Jean Renoir, whose The Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game are often described as the greatest films ever made. If that wasn’t enough, April would introduce Sergei Eisenstein with Strike.

Whirlpool of Fate is a routine melodrama but there are moments to suggest that Renoir had what it took to become notable as a filmmaker the way his father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, had became notable as a painter. To be fair, he had co-directed a feature with Albert Dieudonné a year earlier, Catherine, but that wasn’t released until 1927. This second film was seen first and he directed it on his own.

One of those moments arrives at the start of the film, just after we’re introduced to Gudule, the young lady at its heart. She’s on horseback to lead the family barge forward. Her brute of an uncle, Jeff, walks backwards on the barge as it passes the camera at exactly the same speed, making it appear as if he’s making no progress at all. It’s not a particularly difficult shot but it shows how the young Renoir had a keen eye.

Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925)

Directors: Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack
Writers: Terry Ramsaye and Richard P. Carver
Stars: Haidar Khan and Lufta

Index: That's a Wrap!

Here’s something a little different: a feature film whose première was at the annual dinner of the Explorers Club in New York. Then again, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, a duo best known today for directing King Kong, could be fairly described in 1925 as explorers.

Initially a journalist, Cooper became a pilot, serving in multiple wars. He was shot down in action in the First World War and the Polish-Soviet War, resulting in time spent in German and Soviet POW camps. Marguerite Harrison, an American spy, who he had met in Warsaw, helped him out in the latter.

Back home, he returned to journalism and a job writing articles for Asia magazine, seeking the Missing Link in the Malay archipelago and visiting Ras Tafari in Abyssinia, where footage was shot by Schoedsack. They were grounded by pirates in the Red Sea but escaped, only for the ship to burn in Suez.

Chinatown (1974)

Director: Roman Polanski
Writer: Robert Towne
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston

Index: The First Thirty.

Apparently not content to successfully surf the changing waves of a film industry almost unrecognisably different from the fifties to the seventies, Jack Nicholson blistered his way to the end of his First Thirty. He ended it with an Oscar win for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but I’m just as eager to see Chinatown again, as it’s been almost two decades since I saw it last. It’s going to be interesting to see which of the two is the better film. It may well be this one.

Everything about it stands up, even though it’s inherently hindered by being a colour film noir. Something about noir demands black and white, more truly infinite shades of grey, but a sunbleached Los Angeles during a drought is a strong second best. Neonoir has never looked better in colour and anamorphic widescreen.

In fact, everything is tasty from the start, including the opening credits, with their sepia tones, elegant typefaces and smoky jazz score. Nicholson even looks somewhat elegant in his white suit and sumptuous office, compared to what the hardboiled dicks of the thirties lived in. J. J. Gittes even has a couple of assistants on his payroll, not just a beautiful secretary.

Seven Chances (1925)

Director: Buster Keaton
Writers: Jean Havez and Joseph Mitchell, from the play by by Roi Cooper Megrue
Star: Buster Keaton

Index: That's a Wrap!

This is a far more enjoyable feature than its one joke premise ought to warrant. Of course, it’s a Buster Keaton movie, which helps, but he wisely wraps it up early at under an hour and breaks that up into forty minutes of story and a sixteen minute chase scene.

As a story, it’s weak, but, as a warm up to an impeccable chase scene, it’s enjoyable enough. It probably doesn’t hurt that the opening is in early Process 2 Technicolor, which was almost a trend in 1925, with The Phantom of the Opera and Ben-Hur both following suit.

It was no pioneer: the lost 1917 film The Gulf Between was Process 1 Technicolor and The Toll of the Sea in 1922 and Wanderer of the Wasteland in 1924 were Process 2, and others, like The Ten Commandments, had Process 2 sequences. That said, the third Process 2 feature wouldn’t show up until 1926, The Black Pirate.

The Last Detail (1973)

Director: Hal Ashby
Writer: Robert Towne, based on the novel by Darryl Ponicsan
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Otis Young and Randy Quaid

Index: The First Thirty.

I was constantly faced with an odd question as I watched my way through Jack Nicholson’s First Thirty. Did he rise to stardom because he changed with changing times better than any other actor or did the times merely happen to change in a way that suited him best?

I still haven’t figured that out but this marks another change that worked either way. When The Last Detail was released, it contained sixty-five instances of the F word, thus breaking the record at the time. The script contained many more—hundreds more—but Columbia Pictures baulked at the quantity and required changes.

Watching in 2025, however, I didn’t notice it at all. That’s not even one a minute! The Wolf of Wall Street had three and a half every minute and it was three hours long. This was nothing.

The reason that scriptwriter Robert Towne gave for such frequent profanity is that “this is the way people talk when they’re powerless to act” and that’s ultimately what the movie is about. The protagonists of the film don’t have any power to do anything, even if the week we spend with them briefly makes them feel like they do. They don’t and the final scene makes that very clear indeed. We leave them bitching and moaning because that’s all they can do.

The Phantom of the Moulin Rouge (1925)

Director: René Clair
Writer: René Clair
Stars: Georges Vaultier and Sandra Milovanoff

Index: That's a Wrap!

I’ve already reviewed a 1925 René Clair film for this project, The Crazy Ray, but he shot that a year earlier, along with his debut, a surreal short called Entr’acte. This full length feature continues his love affair with fantastic cinema with a film that plays out like The Invisible Man but with an unusual spiritual twist.

Initially, however, it’s a routine melodrama about a young lady’s hand, which makes the eventual shift all the more wild. She’s Yvonne Vincent and she’s very much in love with her fiancé, Julien Boissel, a successful businessman who’s just as in love with her. Unfortunately, a scurrilous publisher, Gauthier, wants to marry her too and his claim wins out because he has blackmail material on her father, some sort of shady deal he made when he was a diplomat.

There’s a bit more depth than that because Julien has made a major deal as the film begins that all the papers are happy about except the Streets’ Echo, run by—guess who?—Gauthier! So Julien therefore has a pair of grudges against the man about to steal his fiancée.

The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

Director: Bob Rafelson
Writer: Jacob Brackman, from a story by Bob Rafelson and Jacob Brackman
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn, Julia Anne Robinson and Benjamin "Scatman" Crothers

Index: The First Thirty.

This journey through the First Thirty of Jack Nicholson feels like it has a gap in it. He began shakily and gradually became the best actor in films not known for their acting. He found his footing as a counterculture anti-hero but took film jobs in other roles to diversify his talent.

And then, almost overnight, he was turning out award-worthy performances as natural as breathing. Suddenly he was nailing deep roles in movies like Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge and this one. It’s like he woke up one morning as a jobbing actor in exploitation movies and decided to suddenly win a bunch of Oscars.

That realisation hit especially hard here, as Nicholson and Bruce Dern were both in Psych-Out and The Rebel Rousers a few years earlier, two films shot by László Kovács. Suddenly, all three of them were back together again but on a film about as different as could comfortably be imagined. The times they were a-changin’.

A Safe Place (1971)

Director: Henry Jaglom
Writer: Henry Jaglom
Stars: Tuesday Weld, Orson Welles, Philip Proctor, Gwen Welles and Jack Nicholson

Index: The First Thirty.

The last time I saw Henry Jaglom was when Warren, his character in Psych-Out, freaks out on acid and tries to cut off the zombie hand on the end of his arm in place of his own. This is a film I could imagine Warren directing, even if it’s a tender portrait of a broken young woman with a distinct lack of zombie hands on show.

It was Jaglom’s first film as a director and he’s built a career for himself as an obscure but praised underground auteur, with people he trusts. He now has twenty-three films to his name as writer/director and the actors he cast are often the same ones he acted with.

Tuesday Weld, who ultimately is this film in far more ways than merely starring in it, shot in ultra-close up often, was a personal friend, as was Nicholson, who was in Psych-Out, which was Jaglom’s first film as an actor. Philip Proctor, who got an introducing credit here, was in his second, The Thousand Plane Raid.

Cash on Demand (1961)

Director: Quentin Lawrence
Writers: David T. Chantler and Lewis Greifer, based on the teleplay The Gold Inside by Jacques Gillies
Stars: Peter Cushing, André Morell, Richard Vernon and Norman Bird

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Richard Vernon may well be one of the least famous names whose centennials I’m covering this year but his is a familiar face to me from British film and television and I’m very happy I pulled this feature out to celebrate his life and career because it’s a hidden gem that I’ve never seen before.

It’s a Hammer but not a horror, as a strange sort of polite but nonetheless brutal heist film that ends up doing the same job as A Christmas Carol, a surprise I was not prepared for.

It’s a fourth opportunity for the leads, Peter Cushing and André Morell, to work together in film and in a fourth genre but with the power dynamic neatly reversed from The Hound of the Baskervilles two years earlier.

And it’s a remake that was made by many of the same hands. It was originally a teleplay for Theatre 70, a drama series produced by ATV, a year earlier, the episode called The Gold Inside. Morell and Vernon reprise their roles and the director, Quentin Lawrence, does likewise. The Cushing role was played by Richard Warner.

Carnal Knowledge (1971)

Director: Mike Nichols
Writer: Jules Feiffer
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Candice Bergen, Arthur Garfunkel and Ann-Margret

Index: The First Thirty.

I saw and reviewed Carnal Knowledge in 2009, but I remembered little of it from then, maybe because it’s such a pessimistic film. I have less tolerance for people like these today than I did in my thirties and attempt to keep their brand of toxicity out of my life. Subconciously, I may have forgotten it deliberately.

However, it’s a powerful film because it’s so raw and honest, especially so for the time, so soon after the demise of the Production Code. It feels like a film made in the early seventies, even though it shows us Jonathan and Sandy in three very different timeframes.

The performances are up front and visceral, often feeling like they’re delivered on stage, so there’s no surprise learning that Jules Feiffer wrote it as a play. The direction is quiet, often invisible, Mike Nichols’s touch obvious when he doesn’t do things instead of when he does.

When we want to look away, he cements the camera in place so that we’re forced to watch. When we want a couple to come together, he cuts back and forth between them to highlight the vast distance separating them. It’s like he’s picking off emotional scabs in front of us and the result is brutally honest if abhorrent.

Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Director: Bob Rafelson
Writer: Adrien Joyce, based on a story by Bob Rafelson and Adrien Joyce
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Karen Black and Susan Anspach

Index: The First Thirty.

I last saw Five Easy Pieces in 2008 and, while I don’t disagree with my review, I clearly didn’t get everything it was doing. Watching again in this flow of Jack Nicholson’s First Thirty, it’s a real gamechanger, even though the names are rather familiar.

The director was Bob Rafelson, who directed Head two years earlier from a Nicholson script. The writer was Carole Eastman, under a stage name, Adrien Joyce, as which she also wrote The Shooting. László Kovács shot the film, as he did four earlier Nicholson pictures, including Easy Rider. Leading lady Karen Black and Toni Basil were both in Easy Rider and the latter was also in Head. It’s all quite the reunion.

What’s different is that this is a seventies movie through and through, from an era when new filmmakers were changing the landscape of American film. There’s some of the nihilism of acid westerns like The Shooting here, but it’s otherwise unlike Nicholson’s earlier films that were just as clearly made in the sixties (even if some did feel like they were a decade late).