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.

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.

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 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.

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).

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970)

Director: Vincente Minnelli
Writer: Alan Jay Lerner, based on his musical
Stars: Barbra Streisand and Yves Montand

Index: The First Thirty.

Regular readers will know that I’m hardly a fan of most musicals and, for a while, this fell into the category of engaging story plagued by annoyingly bland songs. In fact, it opens that way, with gorgeous time lapse photography of flowers growing from seeds to being delivered to market, accompanied by the strong voice of Barbra Streisand singing a boring song.

By the time we get another boring song, the film has set up a serious amount of story and it’s rather fascinating. Yves Montand, playing Dr. Marc Chabot, teaches a psychology class about hypnosis by taking Preston back to his childhood but that’s paused as Daisy Gamble is accidentally hypnotised in the audience too.

She’s not a student; she came to him to help her quit smoking, for weird reasons that tease her as having ESP. She knows both what he’s looking for in his office and where to find it: in the dictionary under X. She knows when the phone’s about to ring, any phone. And she has feelings when people think about her so goes to see them in preparation.

The Rebel Rousers (1970)

Director: Martin B. Cohen
Writers: Abe Polsky, Michael Kars and Martin B. Cohen
Stars: Cameron Mitchell, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd

Index: The First Thirty.

Oh dear, oh dear. Going strictly by the dates of release, Jack Nicholson ended the sixties on his highest note thus far, with Easy Rider being his first bona fide classic and bringing his first Oscar nomination, but he started the seventies on his lowest note thus far, with this debacle.

I’ve seen it before and reviewed it too, and it remains just as bad as it’s always been, but it’s a little more interesting when seen in context of Nicholson’s career.

The first important thing to know is that it wasn’t shot in 1970 in the wake of Easy Rider. It was shot in 1967 at the peak of outlaw biker movies but only released in 1970 in the wake of Easy Rider. It has more in common with Hells Angels on Wheels that was actually released in 1967, hardly a great outlaw biker movie either but a heck of a lot better than this with a far better part for Nicholson.

Easy Rider (1969)

Director: Dennis Hopper
Writers: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern
Stars: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson

Index: The First Thirty.

Well, here’s the gamechanger, the film that made Jack Nicholson a star, even though he’s not in it for as long as I remembered and then not until almost halfway. His role here landed him an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor, a real wake-up call to someone who had been writing and producing films to diversify after a decade of bit parts and B-movies.

It’s been fascinating to watch him grow as an actor, from the weak lead of The Cry Baby Killer and The Wild Ride to entertaining support in The Broken Land and Flight to Fury to the best thing about the movie in Back Door to Hell and Hells Angels on Wheels.

It’s also been fascinating to see so much of those earlier movies combining here. It’s like he was waiting for the counterculture to show up to see what he could do. This film too feels like the natural child of acid westerns like The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, outlaw biker movies like Hells Angels on Wheels and drug movies like Psych-Out and Head.

Head (1968)

Director: Bob Rafelson
Writer: Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson
Stars: Peter Tork, David Jones, Micky Dolenz and Michael Nesmith

Index: The First Thirty.

Going into this movie, I noted that it’s been a couple of decades since I last saw Head and I don’t remember much about it, just that it was a Monkees film with Frank Zappa and a mule.

Then I realised that I’d written a review of it in 2007, in which I mentioned that “It’s been a couple of decades since I saw Head and I don't remember much about it, except that beyond the Monkees, there was Frank Zappa and a mule and not a lot of sense.”

So, nothing’s changed. Including that it was a bull not a mule. I clarified that at the end of my previous review and it’s even on the poster if you look closely enough, but I forgot again anyway. The one thing I remember about this film isn’t in this film, which may actually be oddly appropriate. To borrow actual dialogue, I “can’t distinguish between what’s real and what’s vividly imagined experience”?

Psych-Out (1968)

Director: Richard Rush
Writers: E. Hunter Willett and Betty Ulius, based on a story by E. Hunter Willett
Stars: Susan Strasberg, Dean Stockwell, Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern

Index: The First Thirty.

Back in 1968, when Psych-Out was released, the names AIP felt would draw the public into buying tickets were Susan Strasberg and Dean Stockwell. The former is the lead, doing a good job at playing deaf. The latter, however, isn’t particularly prominent, though he does a very good job and exits the film in notable style.

Looking back from 2025, it’s different names that would draw us in. Strasberg’s male lead is really Jack Nicholson, the most famous actor in the film now. The MacGuffin of the piece is Bruce Dern, who’s also still going strong.

More hardcore cinema junkies might focus on Richard Rush or László Kovács, the director and cinematographer respectively, as well as Henry Jaglom, not yet a notable experimental director, but memorable for a scene in which his character freaks out and tries to cut off his own hand believing it to be that of a zombie.

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967)

Director: Roger Corman
Writer: Howard Browne
Stars: Jason Robards, George Segal, Ralph Meeker and Jean Hale

Index: The First Thirty.

I’m not going to be able to review this Roger Corman picture from my usual perspective of the part Jack Nicholson plays in it, because he has very little to do at all.

Let’s just say that it’s a docudrama about the real massacre of the title, in which men hired by Al Capone gunned down seven members of his rival Bugs Moran’s North Side Gang on the famous day in 1929 and Nicholson plays one of that crew, a gangster named Gino. He’s not one of the killers, but he’s there as it happens, waiting outside the S. M. C. Cartage Company as their getaway driver.

We first see him after Heitler buys the car, because he backs it into a garage and unloads it. He also delivers a line as the killers prepare, pointing out in a rather rough voice that one of them coats his bullets with garlic because, if a victim survives, he’ll get blood poisoning.

Hells Angels on Wheels (1967)

Director: Richard Rush
Writer: R. Wright Campbell
Stars: Adam Roarke, Jack Nicholson and Sabrina Scharf

Index: The First Thirty.

Early on, before Easy Rider utterly changed his career trajectory, Jack Nicholson served as a reliable regular in the stock companies of a select few directors. Out of his first seventeen features, eleven were directed by either Monte Hellman, Roger Corman or Richard Rush.

This was his second for the latter, after the wildly different Too Soon to Love, but it bears a lot of similarities to the third, Psych-Out, which would follow in 1968. Both focus on particular American subcultures whose participants have opted out of regular society. Both look at how leaving norms behind is freeing but have big drawbacks. Both end in tragedy.

Here, the subculture is bikers, especially the Hells Angels of the title, who provided extras from four different chapters. Also credited are the Nomads of Sacramento but it’s the Angels who stamped an official approval on the film through Sonny Barger, their “leader”—quoted from the poster as he often denied that he was the president his credit calls him—having an unspeaking role early in the film.

Ride in the Whirlwind (1965)

Director: Monte Hellman
Writer: Jack Nicholson
Stars: Cameron Mitchell, Millie Perkins and Jack Nicholson

Index: The First Thirty.

The second of Jack Nicholson’s westerns for Monte Hellman, shot back to back in the Utah desert with the first, The Shooting, isn’t quite as stripped down but it’s almost as nihilistic and it’s an excellent companion piece.

Like with The Shooting, the poster is notably misleading as this predates Easy Rider and Jack is not the star of the film. This time out, that’s Cameron Mitchell, as Vern, the leader of three cowboys heading for Waco, with the other two being Wes and Otis, played by Nicholson and Tom Filer respectively.

The Shooting (1966)

Director: Monte Hellman
Writer: Adrien Joyce
Stars: Will Hutchins, Millie Perkins, Jack Nicholson and Warren Oates

Index: The First Thirty.

Before this project, I hadn’t seen any of the four movies Jack Nicholson made for and often with Monte Hellman, given that he wasn’t just an actor; he wrote Flight to Fury and Ride in the Whirlwind and he co-produced Back Door to Hell and The Shooting. After seeing the first couple, shot back to back in the Philippines, I can’t say I had much hope for the second couple, shot back to back in the Utah desert.

How wrong I was! These two westerns turn out not only to be good movies but important ones too. They’re arguably the very first acid westerns, which weren’t necessarily all about drugs but about flipping a genre on its head. It has been said that westerns are a path towards freedom and justice, while acid westerns are a path towards death.

It was first used as a term by Pauline Kael in a review of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo in 1971, but Jonathan Rosenbaum later applied it to these earlier films. I’ve long appreciated the alternative list he put together to counter the AFI’s annoyingly safe 100 Years... 100 Movies list, including films that dared to be different and sparked change in film. The Shooting is on that list, because that’s precisely what it did.

Back Door to Hell (1964)

Director: Monte Hellman
Writers: Richard A. Guttman and John Hackett, based on a story by Richard A. Guttman
Stars: Jimmie Rodgers, Jack Nicholson, John Hackett, Annabelle Huggins and Conrad Maga

Index: The First Thirty.

This is the second of four pictures in a row that Nicholson made with Monte Hellman and there’s some powerful irony in play this time.

Flight to Fury was his tenth picture and none of the ones before it had established him as an actor, so he began to diversify his roles off the screen. He wrote that one, he co-produced this one and he did both for Ride in the Whirlwind, two films on. He got the opportunity because producer Robert Lippert had been impressed by his writing for Thunder Island a year earlier.

After all, if he wasn’t going to make it as an actor, then maybe he’d make it as a writer or a producer. Those jobs paid well. Given all that, it’s acutely ironic that this be his first film in which he is without a doubt the best actor.

Flight to Fury (1964)

Director: Monte Hellman
Writer: Jack Nicholson, based on a story by Fred Roos and Monte Hellman
Stars: Dewey Mann, Fay Spain and Jack Nicholson

Index: The First Thirty.

This is not a good movie. Let me get that out there right away. However, it’s an interesting movie, the first of four that Jack Nicholson did for director Monte Hellman and the first of a pair shot back to back in the Philippines. It’s also a thoroughly enjoyable movie with an odd charm to it. It’s much more enjoyable than it really has any right to be.

That’s because it’s a cheap pulp flick with an over-complex story built on no background at all and which is reliant on its characters to do a whole lot of things that aren’t believable. It ought to suck royally. However, it grabbed me early and it kept me all the way, even while I acknowledged a host of problems as it went.

For a start, I have no idea where we are and I’m not sure anyone ever tells us. All we know is that it’s a city and a bunch of people in a car watch another man arrive at the docks by taxi, surreptitiously take something from a man on a boat and then leave in another taxi.

They’re interesting characters, at least. The three in the car include a young driver, exotic muscle and a beautiful woman. I recognise the muscle as Vic Diaz, a memorable villain in a lot of memorable Filipino movies. He channels his best Peter Lorre for this one.

Ensign Pulver (1964)

Director: Joshua Logan
Writers: Joshua Logan and Peter S. Feibleman, based on the novel Mister Roberts by Thomas Heggen
Stars: Robert Walker, Burl Ives, Walter Matthau, Tommy Sands, Millie Perkins and Kay Medford

Index: The First Thirty.

Ensign Pulver is a sequel to an adaptation of a play that was an adaptation of a novel, and it’s something of a scar on that franchise.

It began as Mister Roberts, a novel by Thomas Heggen, published in 1946 and based on what he went through in the Pacific theatre during World War II. It was soon adapted to the stage by Heggen and Joshua Logan, the play opening on Broadway in 1948 and winning five Tonys. It took seven years to bring it to the big screen but Henry Fonda came with it and delivered a seriously good performance, even if it was Jack Lemmon who won the Oscar.

Fast forward nine more years and the play’s director helmed this sequel, with precisely no returning actors and no Mister Roberts, hence the new name and focus. The former turns out to be a small problem but the latter a big one.

The Terror (1963)

Director: Roger Corman
Writers: Leo Gordon and Jack Hill
Stars: Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson and Sandra Knight

Index: The First Thirty.

The Terror is one of those movies that’s a lot more interesting than it is good. Then again, it really had no business being any level of good, given that it was shot on the sets of The Raven during the two days Roger Corman had before they would be torn down, the same two days he had the continued use of Boris Karloff.

He didn’t have a script, just a vague idea, so had Karloff and a few other actors do generic things like walking down hallways or through doors and, of course, talking to each other, as people do, so a writer could conjure up a story around it later. The idea was coherent enough, at least, to have Karloff spend a few hours in a tank of cold water for the finalé.

That writer was Leo Gordon, a co-writer of The Cry Baby Killer. Once his script was written, Corman brought in another director to shoot everything else, because he was union and he didn’t have the budget to shoot extra footage according to union rules.

More footage was needed but that director had taken another job, so a friend of his shot some scenes. Then a fourth director took care of some exterior shots, a fifth supposedly took care of the rest but a sixth shot the last day. A two day shoot therefore ended up taking nine months and the results are about as coherent as you can imagine, with creative input from all of those different people.