After spending the better part of the 60s stealing scenes in independent films like Little Shop of Horrors and Easy Rider, Jack Nicholson announced himself as a leading man with Bobby Dupea – and, in turn, introduced a decade where flawed characters like him were possible. He won’t allow her to see the real him, whoever that might be.įifty years later, Five Easy Pieces still puts us in Catherine’s shoes, puzzling over this charismatic mess of a human being. “You faked a big response.” That doesn’t mean Catherine is wrong to notice some flicker of soul in that moment – later scenes reveal that he really does feel something for her – but Bobby has spent his adult life trying to extinguish it. If she believes it reflects some heretofore masked inner feeling, she is mistaken.

He tells her it’s the easiest piece he could think of, and that he played it better when he was eight years old. The performance moves Catherine to tears, just as Bobby intended, but her reaction stirs the contempt and self-loathing that’s always simmering below the surface. (That’s another thing he and a rock musician like Nigel have in common.) Though part of an upper-class family of classical musicians, Bobby hasn’t sat on a piano bench since returning to home to Puget Sound, Washington, but he’s willing to make an exception for his brother’s fiancee, Catherine (Susan Anspach), because he wants to get laid. Only here it’s Jack Nicholson behind the keys as Bobby Dupea, doing a soulful rendition of Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor, which at a minimum sounds like the second saddest of all keys. Perhaps the similarities are merely coincidental, but the most important scene in Five Easy Pieces plays out in essentially the same way.

Easy rider jack nicholson