Quintessential Jack

by Scott Edwards

  Nicholson portrays Charlie as being comfortable only when he has his uniform on and his cop glasses down. This shift in the interior of the character that contrasts his home life (lacking in rules and structure) with his career life (aided by those rules and that structure) is real. Jack’s demeanor changes based on Charlie’s comfort with where he is and his assigned role.

  To pay for a lifestyle he does not want and cannot afford, he must compromise on his promise to protect the U.S. border. Charlie becomes a dirty cop, helping an illegal immigration ring.

  The Border was directed by the great Tony Richardson, interesting because a British director helms this story of Mexicans crossing into the U.S. Here, the Bureau of Naturalization & Immigration is seen as a game, a give-and-take show that’s more about quotas that are just for the record rather than with any real purpose.

  The film is one of social commentary, likely chosen by the star to bring attention to the plight of Mexicans seeking an honest and hard-working life, chased down by crooked cops driven to greed and materialism and to cynically play the system both ways for their own gain. In fact, it could very well be that this film could not have been made (or at least could not have been anything more than a small-scale independent and unknown production) without Nicholson’s interest. Here’s a “social message”: One border agent asks another, “How do you spell ‘illiterate’?”

  Charlie’s domestic life is undomesticated and his work life is spent wastefully rounding up domestics they call “the wets.” Nicholson’s characterization of this man’s process of giving up and giving in takes him from a clean cop in a dirty system, to a dirty cop who plays the game, to one who rethinks it all.

  Most comfortable in uniform and within rules, Charlie looks his most smooth and natural in a rifle formation saluting a dead partner. Duty becomes perverted by his personal home obligations. Nicholson takes the character places where Charlie himself could not have anticipated and about which he could not have been at ease. He’s relaxed when on the job but pressured and trapped at home.

  Tony Richardson’s The Border (1982) may be more topical now than upon its release in 1982. This confrontation between Charlie Smith (Nicholson, right) and Cat (Harvey Keitel) presents the intensity of two powerful actors in a battle of wills.

  He has a classic Jacksplosion when unsuccessfully putting his foot down with his wife, screaming, “No more means no more!” and that he “can’t afford a fucking dream house,” spewing the words through his teeth to the extent that you can almost feel the spit pushing the point home.

  After witnessing a gratuitous food fight at the couple’s show-off-the-house-and-its-accouterments barbecue, Charlie rolls a grill right into the pool, sarcastically announcing “soup’s on” in a pure Jack moment.

  This transformation is not all lightness. In fact, it is painful to watch. Charlie feels trapped, so he gives in—and gives up his conscience—to join the exploitation scheme. Nicholson portrays the emptiness of full compromise, the loss of self and humanity that comes from selling out. Smith is given no choice but to face this pressure head-on, and when showing this distress, Charlie rubs the lower part of the palms of his hands on his forehead.

  Nicholson takes that desperate man further, reaching the core that can slowly form a scab around indifference and covering conviction. Charlie’s choice is a conviction to change, to change himself and the sick system. He starts with a confrontation with Cat (Harvey Keitel), in a scene that presents the intensity of two powerful actors battling with each other’s reality, concerning the murder of drivers illegally transporting Mexicans across the border. That border, not the physical one, but the border of honor, is one that Charlie Smith cannot cross.

  The actor is completely convincing and honest as a man who gives up everything to go on a crusade that takes him from looking for a baby with a pimp to busting top cop Red (Warren Oates) and taking on J.J. (Jeff Morris), the lynchpin to the entire on-the-take enterprise.

  When Charlie shoots out Red’s tire, it is striking that Keitel (with whom he’d reteam eight years later in The Two Jakes) is crushed beneath a big earthmover in a way similar to Jack’s demise in The Departed.

  Charlie’s only true moment of warmth is with the Mexican woman, Maria (played by Elpidia Carrillo), who yearns to find her child. He wants nothing from her, just to “feel good about himself,” the saddest commentary of all about this man.

  But Charlie’s smile at the film’s end, when passing the baby to its mother, is priceless, and the only time in the movie we see this open, relaxed, expansive and real smile that comes from the unrestrained joy of caring.

  To be on the border is to be on the edge, and Nicholson’s Charlie Smith is on the edge between corrupt and clean, honest and compromised, devoted and cheated, dedicated and renegade, materialistic and magnanimous, cop-cold and humanity-warmed.

  As union organizer Brimmer in The Last Tycoon, Nicholson has no such edge, nor a need for one. His mission is that of his business, but he doesn’t allow himself to take it—or a ridiculously contemptuous and aggressive Monroe Stahr (Robert DeNiro)—too seriously.

  The film itself is a slight conclusion to the monumental film career of director Elia Kazan, based on an unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. DeNiro appreciated the director’s supportiveness and technique of improvisation, not on the screen, but “improvising behind the scenes to find other colors.” However, the actor saw the weaknesses in the script, to which Kazan adhered “practically word for word” to make good on a promise to screenwriter Harold Pinter.9

  The chief miscast in The Last Tycoon marks the film’s biggest mistake. What we don’t need is a toned-down DeNiro, a thoughtful Taxi Driver, a reflective Raging Bull, or a cerebral Cape Fear. The choice of DeNiro at this point in his career should be a choice for intensity and power, just dangling over the dangerous edge. Instead, the actor’s explosiveness gets tamped to the point of becoming nothing more than boring. Monroe Stahr is a powerful person without being a powerful character.

  In what amounts to nothing more than a cameo, Nicholson plays a union organizer for screenwriters as a professional and inquisitive man. Jack is playful in this portrayal, boorishly pushing his food in and exhibiting his contempt for DeNiro’s character as he discusses helping the writers. There’s much irony in Brimmer’s voice, while sideward glances, tics, smiles and eyebrows all punctuate his words. He’s openly playing with Stahr, going after food stuck in his teeth with his lips just as he relentlessly goes at Stahr without disguising his low opinion of the studio’s star producer. Brimmer shoots a happy, perky “Oh, yes!” when challenged that he’s not “a Red.”

  To Brimmer, this is a serious game. He eats Stahr’s food like a pig and with a sort of artistic flourish; he drinks his coffee; he takes his cigar; and finally, he essentially takes Stahr’s girl.

  In her film debut, Theresa Russell plays Cecilia Brady, the daughter of studio chief Pat Brady (Robert Mitchum). She’s fresh and insouciant, both innocent and too-knowing. She becomes the reason for the next challenge, a ping pong contest between the two men. Stahr plays with an increasingly out-of-control aggressiveness that’s near violence, while Brimmer handles himself with aplomb by not reacting to provocation. Then, Stahr gives up with disgust, leaving Brimmer to play a friendly game with Cecilia. Their game is just for fun, which further enrages Stahr, as does the obvious attraction between the participants. Brimmer and Cecilia are adept and flirty, until the besotted Monroe Stahr challenges Brimmer for a third time, this time to an actual fistfight.

  Brimmer remains patient with Stahr’s juvenilia to the point that when pushed beyond any reasonable retreat, he cleanly decks the producer—even gingerly lowering the vanquished to the ground with Cecilia’s help.

  This scene also served as a duel between the more experienced Nicholson and the de-energized DeNiro. Brimmer remains steady and cordial as he thanks Cecilia for the game and retreats into the shadows.

  * * *

  Sometimes, a man�
�s mission is set by others, like the intel-recon mission on the Filipino island Luzon by the Americans in 1944. Even soldiers handle the same situation differently, as depicted in Monte Hellman’s gritty Back Door to Hell, made 20 years after the actual event.

  Lieutenant Craig (played by singer Jimmie Rodgers, whose biggest hits were “Honeycomb” and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine”) freezes when he needs to kill one of the Japanese occupying the island. Jersey (co-screenwriter and Nicholson pal John Hackett) has no problem with such a chore, not seeing the Japanese as humans nor caring much for people in the first place. Nicholson, as radio operator Burnett, is somewhere in the middle. He still is tugged by lingering humanity but gets through it all with sardonic jokes mixed with philosophical observations.

  A Korean War veteran, Rodgers was understandably unhappy with this aspect of his character. “I was discouraged with it because I had to play a coward in the film, which I really didn’t like, but I thought, ‘Well, it’s important for the story.’”10

  In this role, Nicholson is approaching the Five Easy Pieces Jack, though a little less relaxed in his dialogue delivery. In one scene, tightrope-walking to cross a river, his high-pitched laughter is reminiscent of Wilbur Force’s in The Little Shop of Horrors.

  This American-Filipino co-production was shot together with Hellman’s Flight to Fury. Filmed in documentary style, in black and white on location in the Baco Region of the Philippines, Back Door to Hell is an oddly dark choice for the exploitation of a pop star. A somewhat cynical war-antiwar story isn’t the typical vehicle for crooners, particularly a narrative that involves an occupier’s threat to execute one Filipino school child for every hour U.S. soldiers remain free.

  Rodgers described the challenging conditions, from bugs and killer snakes to praying mantises that played catch with Nicholson and the singer using balled-up newspaper. The crew could be challenging as well, mostly due to their status differences at the time. “Nicholson was the only one who spoke to me and when I walked through the door he looked up at me and he said [imitates Nicholson’s drawl], ‘How you doin’, Ro-o-o-gers?’ They didn’t like me there because it was their group, it was Nicholson’s group, and I got the feeling that I wasn’t wanted because I was the star and they didn’t want a star. They wanted somebody to come in to be one of the boys.”11

  They did eventually come together, with the inevitable practical jokes that can result from being stranded in a remote location. Rodgers stills laughs about how he got back at Nicholson with Hackett’s help. Nicholson had found a secluded spot where he could jump in and swim away to come out behind a rock where nobody could see him. When he didn’t come out after 20 minutes, they thought he was dead. When he finally emerged, “he thought that was funny, so when we were doing that scene in the old Catholic church, Nicholson had to crawl up a wooden ladder and he was reading his script up there and Hackett and I waited and we got even with him by ringing the bell and we rocked him out of that place for 20 minutes. He came down there and he couldn’t hear and he couldn’t talk for two days.”12

  Much of the mission depicted in the film centers on radio access, as the trio of soldiers has been sent to establish the extent of the Japanese defense in the days leading up to MacArthur’s return to liberate the island. Their radio is destroyed, necessitating a raid on a Japanese communications outpost.

  The small cast and Burnett’s role as radio operator provide Nicholson a chance to explore his range. He portrays a wiseguy, joking his way through tough situations while working with dubious Filipino guerrilla partners. He is the techie geek, fixing the radio and hedging confidence with caution as he sums up, “I think it’s ready.” He is a thinker, examining his own reaction to war in a bar scene when he observes, “Don’t even know if I’m even supposed to feel anything” in a suitably existential manner. He is educated and well-trained, not only speaking but translating Japanese quite credibly, to the point of taking the opportunity to toss “shitty” into the mix, just because he could get away with it.

  Popular singer Jimmie Rodgers (right) never heard of Jack Nicholson (far left) before they worked together on Monte Hellman’s Back Door to Hell (1964), along with John Hackett (middle left). However, he saw something special. Nobody knew Nicholson in those days, but Rodgers sensed his potential: Jack “was a star when I met him.”

  Nicholson is action star and war hero (within the limitations of this story in this production), with his character performing a pivotal function by planting a grenade in the top level of a church during the main assault; serving as sniper in its bell tower; and finally succumbing to a hail of bullets while in the act of getting his reconnaissance message out. Burnett singlehandedly makes certain that they complete their mission, retreating behind and nearly beneath a desk in order to communicate by Morse code while under attack.

  Rodgers recalls noticing Nicholson’s potential, even in a limited role in a small film. “I didn’t know who he was at this time, in those days nobody did. He was a star when I met him. He didn’t know it at the time but, boy, this guy was so good on-screen and I knew that he was going to make it. And I admire him a lot. He’s a character, but he is very talented.”13

  Nicholson makes Burnett a real person as much as possible in a low-budget potboiler that’s just over an hour in length, with a believable and understated glimpse at his abilities as a developing and aspiring actor as of 1964.

  * * *

  One doesn’t have to be a cop or soldier or even a parent bent on revenge in order to have a mission. Sometimes it just takes dying. The Bucket List pairs Nicholson with Morgan Freeman as men thrown together in a hospital room and joined by the short time remaining to them (six months to a year at best). When told how long they've got, their eyes—the actor’s soul—meet in a powerful and expressive way. These are two veteran actors, and they are the best you can be at this.

  During the period when I was writing this book, both of my parents passed away. They had no bucket list. They lived hard lives trying to bring us something better. They never would even have considered the possibility of such personal self-indulgence as they neared their final days. Instead, they got sick, they suffered and they died. But that isn’t the only reason I view this movie with skepticism.

  There’s a contrivance at play, with so much seemingly constructed rather than plausibly lived. The audience is manipulated into sympathizing with and projecting themselves into these main characters.

  Edward Cole (Nicholson) is a billionaire hospital magnate and Carter Chambers (Freeman) a black auto mechanic. In life, they are far removed. In impending death, they become partners.

  Cole’s rich, so he needs the poor guy to teach him about life. Chambers is black, necessitating a false irony as much more literate and appreciative of knowledge and science and culture. Edward’s successful yet estranged from his daughter, contrasted with Carter, who struggles to provide for his family while enjoying a loving life with them.

  So, if you don’t have Edward Cole’s kind of money, you just sort of die. If you do, you can finance a feel-good adventure for yourself and another terminal case.

  The actual “bucket list” part’s pretty boring and lacking in emotional reality, featuring a series of vignettes of two old guys jumping out of planes, getting tattoos, racing cars and hitting some famous sites.

  People adore this movie … and the idea it represents. However, only the acting rescues the Rob Reiner film from being a complete audience-pandering confection.

  In Nicholson’s establishing scene, showing Cole’s presentation to a hospital board, he portrays his character almost as if giving a glimpse of what he might think we envision Nicholson to be like in real life, all about personal pleasure and superior to others in an artful way. Reduced to experiencing his own hospital as an actual patient, Edward fights his physical reality, yelling, “I hate tubes!” in a struggle worthy of Five Easy Pieces. When Cole gives us a glimpse of himself, telling us, “I’ve never been sick before,” we painfully witness a
real moment of a real man, not a fictional hospital executive.

  Nicholson plays it quite physical for a guy in bed, but then the actor’s use of his body has always been an important part of his technique. Clearly, Nicholson feels that an actor shouldn’t need dignity, but should pursue character energy no matter the means or the surface sacrifice.

  Does the car race scene take him back to his early juvenile delinquent role in The Wild Ride? Was the Cole-plus-Chambers journey supposed to serve as their Wyatt-plus-Billy Easy Rider road trip?

  In terms of contribution to the work, the acting beats the locales. In France, Nicholson’s reaction shot to Freeman in a bathtub consists of doing nothing, yet the moment is real and human. At the pyramids, Nicholson looks worn, but builds true character energy when telling the story about his abused daughter and how he “fixed it” with his wife-beating son-in-law. When Cole mentions how she responded that he was “dead to her,” we feel the father’s emotion and loss.

  As Nicholson describes taking care of the abusive husband, only with generalities (“Don’t know what they did”), he’s like Hoffa declaring “I’m gonna do what I gotta do…” but with thoughtful retrospect instead of bombastic threat.

  Later, Edward cries while facing a window, alone—a solitary release that is an on-screen rarity for the actor.

  The Bucket List is really Freeman’s movie. Chambers is the stronger, more fully realized character, exhibiting a love for his limited life and the wonder of new experiences, while Cole’s arc is a narrower one that opens the door from cold businessman to caring human being.

  While the two men look at each other back at the hospital following their shared adventures (with a throwaway “pea soup still sucks”), they are actually looking at their own mortality.