After charting the course for a new kind of American art film amid the bowling alleys and oil fields of Five Easy Pieces, Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson embarked on a sullen and perplexing follow-up. Named after a moderately desirable Atlantic City parcel familiar to Monopoly players everywhere, The King of Marvin Gardens imparts much the same message as the board game: property is a racket. Nicholson stars as David Staebler, a morose, anti-affable radio host, a penny-ante Paul Harvey for Philadelphia's night owls. He wanders home at dawn, to be fact-checked by his only listener — his grandfather. ("I never stuck a model train in your hamburger. It was a cricket from a Cracker Jack box.") Summoned to Atlantic City by Jason, his temporarily incarcerated wheeler-dealer brother (Bruce Dern), David gets pulled into a long-shot real estate scheme to bring gambling and revelry to a neglected Hawaiian isle. Ensconced at an aging boardwalk hotel once favored by Woodrow Wilson, Jason boasts of 96%-finalized deals, dines over lobster with potential Japanese investors, cavorts with his girlfriend (Ellen Burstyn) and her squirt gun-wielding stepdaughter (Julia Ann Robinson, stunning in her only major role), and throws around the name of a local underworld financier (Scatman Crothers) one too many times. Beautifully photographed by László Kovács in the winter light of an Atlantic City boardwalk that would soon be demolished to erect a new class of casinos even Jason Staebler would find gauche, this tonally weird, self-consciously (and self-mockingly) literary film remains one of the mordant glories of seventies American cinema. (KW)

Preceded by:  "Organ Grinders Swing" (Fleischer Studios, 1937) – 7 min – 16mm