The Fortune (1975)

Director: Mike Nichols
Writer: Adrien Joyce
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Stockard Channing

Index: The First Thirty.

Going into this project, I believe I’d seen ten out of Jack Nicholson’s first twenty-five films; it would be fair to say that catching up on the rest was quite an eye-opening experience. I’d seen the last five in his First Thirty but found that I’d completely forgotten this and catching up on it was underwhelming. It’s not that it’s a bad movie; it’s just outshone by all the others.

It’s a Mike Nichols film, reuniting Nicholson with him four years on from Carnal Knowledge, but it feels tame in comparison. It’s set in the twenties, so just a little earlier than Chinatown, but it carries none of that film’s depth. And it’s based on a script by Carole Eastman, credited as Adrien Joyce, as she was for both Five Easy Pieces and The Shooting, but this isn’t up to the standards of either, probably because she was fired after objecting to the director’s cuts.

It probably doesn’t help that it’s a wild farce surrounded by serious dramas, much different from Nicholson’s previous comedy, Head, that was made before he had become a star.

All that said, it starts out well and not at all predictably. Warren Beatty picks up Stockard Channing from a huge mansion; she’s all over him while he’s driving. Then they pick up Jack Nicholson to visit a justice of the peace. Where she marries Jack while looking at Warren. And then she passes out drunk.

It’s a delightful tease of an opening and it’s got a couple of explanations.

One is that, from 1910, the Mann Act banned the transportation of women across state lines for “immoral purposes”. Its intended goal was to focus on prostitution and human trafficking but its wording was so vague that it was soon used for less noble purposes, to prosecute men and women having sex outside of marriage or across racial lines. One man’s immoral is just another man’s prejudiced.

Here, Channing’s character, who suffers the awkward name of Fredericka Quintessa Bigard, has fallen in love with Beatty’s, Nicky Wilson, but he’s already married. Their plan is thus to have her marry Nicholson, Oscar Sullivan, who is single and not going to complain when they revel in what would count as an affair in a new state. Travel would be safe, the affair secret.

The other is that Freddie, as she’s known, is also the heiress to a sanitary napkin fortune, while Nicky and Oscar are conmen seeking her money. The former has serious leverage over the latter too, because Oscar was a bank clerk who Nicky knows and can prove embezzled a bunch of money.

This is a great setup for a farce and it’s well written, with lines like, “Do you want to go to jail or California?” There’s a long conversation about menstrual pads that’s priceless. There’s the cramped flight to Los Angeles, with Oscar out on the wing. There’s Nicky trying to crank start a car. A lot of this is very funny.

However, it isn’t at all consistent. Beatty is deliberately overdone, delighting in slapstick, more clown than actor. Nicholson alternates, providing a wacky scene here—he’s downright goofy with his hair back—but a serious one there. And then he gets creepy, asking Freddy to sit on his lap and claiming his conjugal rights, because he’s legally her husband. It’s his right as a married man, yes?

Most notably, the men constantly bicker at each other. Freddie hates that they bicker and calls them on it often. I’m with her a hundred per cent. I hate that they bicker too. I get why the two of them had to clash but I found that I had no interest in watching them do it. Surely there was a way to build their characters and their conflict without so much bickering.

The end is often impressive too, because it’s delightfully contrary. With other approaches a disaster, Nicky and Oscar resort to murder but they’re so inept that we know going in that it wouldn’t work. What this film does that goes beyond the norm is to have them think it does but be caught and have to struggle to explain it away to the cops while Freddie’s both alive and completely oblivious to everything.

That probably counts as a spoiler but I think I’ll leave it in for once because we know it long before the characters ever do. It’s a spoiler for them rather than us. If Nichols and the actors have done their job right, then the joy is in the building of their characters to this point and a whole lot of chaotic back and forth during it.

To me, the reason the film is easily lost in a filmography like Nicholson’s and probably the others too, is that it only kinda sorta does that. I enjoyed the film but, even while watching it, it felt obviously more insubstantial than those around it. Of course, his next film was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a behemoth of a picture that would cast a shadow over any prior film, but Chinatown wasn’t that far in the rear view mirror and The Passenger won’t leave my brain. The Fortune was simply lost in the mix.

Apparently, Nicholson doesn’t talk about it, Richard Harland Smith at TCM suggesting two reasons beyond the film’s failure, both of them incidents that occurred during the shoot. One was the death of Cass Elliott, Mama Cass of the Mamas and the Papas, a personal friend, with much speculation in the press about the cause of her death. The other was the discovery by a Time journalist that the woman Nicholson had always believed to be his sister was his mother and his mother his grandmother.

After half a century, he may well have come to terms with those incidents but it could have made a difference at the time. And, of course, he went straight onto One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—in fact, he only did The Fortune because of delays in starting that shoot—and that stole the conversation. What’s more, Beatty starred in Shampoo the same year and that was also an impressive success, the fourth highest grosser of 1975 with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the second. Of course, Jaws made much more than both put together, but it changed the industry in far more overt ways.

The thing is that movies that arguably failed because of the quirks of timing are always ripe for rediscovery. Michael Mann’s Sorcerer failed because of a poor choice of title and facing off against Star Wars in theatres. It was also lost in the mix but is now regarded as an overlooked gem. This, well, isn’t.

Ironically, given that the stars going in were Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, both major names at the time, it was their brand new co-star, Stockard Channing, who landed the film’s only nomination, a Golden Globe as the year’s best female acting debut. That seems fair.