my favorite movie of 1970:

Five Easy Pieces

(Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Susan Anspach. Directed by Bob Rafelson.)

Now we’re halfway through the list of my favorite movies from each year of the past 101 years, and this movie at the beginning of the 1970s is fundamentally different from what had come before. If you’ve ever watched an indie movie that’s hard to categorize as either a comedy or a drama, and that feels less concerned with traditional plot than following the characters as they wander through life, it’s likely you saw something that was influenced by Five Easy Pieces.

Ebert recalled how this movie struck the audience when it came out (this excerpt doesn’t have spoilers, but the review does):

We’d had a revelation. This was the direction American movies should take: Into idiosyncratic characters, into dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, into a plot free to surprise us about the characters. …

“Five Easy Pieces” is about a character who doesn’t fit in the movie. There’s not a scene where he’s comfortable with the people around him, not a moment when he feels at home. The movie’s story traces a journey back through a life where Bobby [Jack Nicholson] (in his own view) disappointed people, could not be counted on, misbehaved, underachieved. … [H]is family and his waitress girlfriend [Karen Black] overlook or forgive his flaws, but he can’t forgive himself.

I move around a lot, not because I’m looking for anything really, but ’cause I’m getting away from things that get bad if I stay. Auspicious beginnings, you know what I mean?

You can see stills of the beautiful cinematography (by László Kovács) starting at 8:55 in this video analysis (from Learning About Movies, a YouTube channel by Dr. Josh Matthews):

Stream Five Easy Pieces on these sites.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.