Quintessential Jack

by Scott Edwards

  The Dicks Versus the Hoods

  The place was filled with more suspicion than most places could contain. Their professions demand suspicion in order to be successful, if not to be successful at remaining alive. Honor amongst thieves was as much of a myth as an honest private eye.

  Put some dicks in one place and put hoods together in that same place, and you’re asking for trouble. You’re also asking for acting worthy of Academy Awards. The only question is about who lies better. The detective trying to mete out a meager living or the career criminal grasping to gain the blessings of “the organization”?

  The sleuth and the crook are archetypes of cinema and standards for any actor. Nicholson has played his share, often choosing the misfit over the genius, to show the struggle instead of the triumph.

  The Joker was a freakish hood, bent more on revenge than fortune. The hapless brothers of The Fortune spend more time fighting than hustling. After all the planning, everything goes wrong for Alex Gates in Blood and Wine due to poor execution. Charley Partanna and Frank Chambers let women double-cross them, two victims of love’s blindness in Prizzi’s Honor and The Postman Always Rings Twice, respectively.

  Watching them all is Jake. J.J. Gittes spends his time recording married infidelity, yet he too suffers a double-cross when he lowers his guard to a woman.

  * * *

  But no one loses more to a woman than Postman’s Frank Chambers. Chambers is the hood equivalent of the dick Gittes—small-time and struggling, aimless and distracted, superficial and vulnerable.

  A remake of the John Garfield–Lana Turner noir classic, the film brought together a powerhouse combo of producer and director Bob Rafelson with director of photography Sven Nykvist; a David Mamet screenplay based on the James M. Cain novel; and Nicholson paired with sultry Jessica Lange, who was completely credible in the role of a woman who could make a man do anything.

  Author Douglas Brode called the story “a modern variation of Greek tragedy … in which a man kills his adopted father figure to sleep with a substitute mother, setting a terrible fate into motion for himself.”1

  Nicholson convinces as a drifter and con man using faux mess-ups to give Christopher Lloyd the impression that the latter is duping the former, all the while continuing with compliments and warm conversation to complete his own set-up.

  He’s also believable as a woeful and down-on-his-luck auto mechanic who positions himself to make time with the boss’ younger wife and connives himself a place to gain bit by bit. Nicholson advances Frank’s nerve in a neatly transitional way, edging from admiring looks to little nothings to abandoned boldness, expanding the character with each step.

  The initial sequence between Frank and Lange’s Cora starts with what today would be considered sexual assault and turns into action reminiscent of the spinning and banging on the walls with Sally Struthers in Five Easy Pieces, which then escalates into a fairly explicit sexual representation (for a mainstream movie of the time). There is a lingering close-up of manual foreplay between her legs; a long and loose belt that suggests we are seeing more of Nicholson than we actually see; and prolonged pounding and plunging by the pair. The film’s trailer spotlighted the frankness of the sex scenes, with a Playboy magazine quote calling it the hottest since Last Tango in Paris (yet another Brando connection for Nicholson). In a later scene, smart continuity shows Nicholson’s belt end tucked around because it is too long.

  The primal connection between the two actors and their two characters make the movie. Without it, there would be no motivation for desperate acts. With it, the audience is seduced, pulled in by passion and its blinded hope.

  After their second kitchen scene, which is not fully sexual, Jack looks at Jessica as she walks up the stairs in a way that shows his animal power and betrays his own assumed prowess. Yet appropriate to the unfolding narrative, the actor hints at the false understanding, unaware that he is the prey. This adds another touch to Nicholson’s nuanced journey with the character.

  As they seemingly come closer through escape, Frank and Cora seem like newlyweds in Chicago’s train station, but Chambers’ questionable nature surfaces as he gambles and pushes Cora away. When Nicholson is in his gangsterish mode of a hood, he employs a clipped, down-gestured pattern that we occasionally see in Jimmy Hoffa and more directly in Prizzi’s Honor mobster Charley Partanna, at the same time as his Italian dialect creeps up.

  Everything turns when Cora’s intension become clear, in a revealing scene in the diner backyard. Nicholson’s close-up shows a man suddenly seeing reality with fear mixed with desire, and excitement with hesitancy, all accomplished in a few mostly wordless moments accented with slight eye widening and subtle expression.

  Nicholson probed and prodded to find his way in the character, digging in with determination. Once in, he held on with possession and tenacity—just as Cora discovered the depths of Frank Chambers’ being to control him with that insight. The actor owns his character just as her character owns her man. Nicholson is comfortable in his discomfort, while his false confidence and delusions of partnership with Cora never betrays the actor’s knowledge of the truth behind the surface. We aren’t seeing someone pretend to be in charge prior to the point in the script where he finally has to understand the truth. Instead, we see someone who lives the lie because he can’t see that it is a lie; not acting, but spontaneously reacting. This is the “in the moment” creed mentioned so much but experienced too infrequently. Nicholson resides in his character. Therefore, he can only be “in the moment,” because there is no other moment, no foreknowledge to suppress, no disbelief to suspend.

  Desperation and hope and lust meet at a crossroads called Frank Chambers. We can tell that his character knows that his “way out” may not have a way out, yet Jessica Lange looks, acts and taunts to the degree that wishful plotting seems plausible enough to drag him along further and further. Cora delivers Frank to the ultimate point, when their plot to murder her husband moves from an idea to a deed, and when good and bad are no longer available choices.

  As he waits for Lange to do the deed, Nicholson looks stunned and terrified, furthering the moment’s truth with an overlaid impression that Frank is at the same time trying to hide his reaction while appearing in charge of the situation. He simultaneously exhibits both emotions to us, making the scene more powerful through the character’s depth of dimension.

  Frank’s little childlike near-screams as he stands over her husband Nick’s injured body represents a real reaction from someone not worried about how he looks or sounds to anyone else. Reaction just happens, naturally. Concern over appearances would instead have required detachment and considered thought.

  When people who are not bad do bad things, they look different than when bad people do bad things. Both Nicholson and Lange convey this unnaturalness and unease, in the act, in the aftermath, and as they enter their next chapter together as premeditated murderers.

  Frank is suitably disgusted with the visual result when he bashes in Nick’s head, shocked at his own act and his own fall from con man to killer. After all, hustlers do no real harm, they rationalize to themselves, but murderers don’t benefit from the same chance at justification to themselves, let alone to others.

  Bob Rafelson said the prior adaptations missed the point. “What do they know about making violent, dirty movies? This is why I made the movie—because they didn’t do it. It’s a book about sado-masochism.”2 Brode described this as “the intense bond that can grow between two people who despise each other, how such a relationship can prove more obsessive than one based on love.”3

  The Frank Chambers of Postman is not the broad Jack, but the understated and disciplined actor who helps the audience believe his is an unsuccessful and uncertain person. Bombast and outburst are not part of the character’s makeup. Instead, Jack’s character energy injects little pieces of action and reaction, motion and emotion, but only in small pieces until the point when Cora changes her plea in court.

&
nbsp; Chambers and Cora must beat each other up to mask their staged car accident and manufacture injuries in order to advance its credibility. As they pick up enthusiasm for this depraved act, Nicholson and Lange mirror their first sex scene, while their erotic S&M romp—which proves to be their undoing—prefigured David Cronenberg’s Crash.

  After the heights of their murderous collusion and passionate concealment, the workaday lies and ongoing cover-up had to seem a letdown. Without the adrenaline and the thrill, unaided by the struggle for self-preservation, Frank and Cora must rely on their wits rather than instinct (not a particular strength for either).

  They also retreat to their original selves. Interrogated by cops while in his hospital bed, Chambers returns to his bad lying and faux-innocent guise from the beginning of the movie. Later, when Cora leaves to check on her mother, he reverts to his old appearance (the backward cap), his old stance (hapless) and his old future (non-existent).

  Nicholson unveils another side of the character in his light, but restrained, treatment of a comical brief interlude with Anjelica Huston, while yet another puts his savagery on display when he beats Kennedy (John P. Ryan) for attempting a shakedown, repeatedly banging a door against the man’s head.

  The latter part of the movie shows the couple’s high-profile, sensational trial that lets them trade on their notoriety for self-promotion, which pays off after they return to their non-bustling diner, perhaps a warning premonition about today’s obsession with uncelebrated celebrities and reality non-stars.

  Frank and Cora’s relationship becomes strained. How could it not when it was formed on duplicity and murder? Suspicion and tension grow, leading to the film’s true climax, Frank’s second moment of realization. The first was when he came to understand Cora’s real intentions. Here, he comes to understand her real nature as well. When Lange discloses that she did not need his confession because she had already been tried for the crime—that doublejeopardy is “in the Constitution”—his eyes show the shock, the pain, the hurt and the worry, all in a mere few seconds. Those telling eyes get wider, in disbelief, and then narrow intently as if attempting to see inside his double-crosser, using the same look Nicholson employs in Freddy Gale’s final confrontation with his daughter’s killer in The Crossing Guard.

  But Postman goes on too long, with a false happy ending unnecessarily destroyed with tin “irony” and ham-fisted dramatics. Cora informs Frank that she is pregnant. They narrowly avoid a serious auto accident. That death would have been more stunning and less contrived, if more sudden (like the ending of Chinatown). Instead, the audience is also double-crossed with an abrupt “Now it’s for real” accident that kills the only thing that Chambers ever loved, though it was a deeply flawed love.

  Cora and Frank would have deserved the first type of destruction, taken together just as they took from others together. Chambers did not deserve the destruction that actually happened, alone suffering the pain of solitude and regret. He wails at the end, as much for himself and his guilt-filled fate as for the death of Cora. She got off easy. That is his true suffering, through a typically bleak Rafelson ending, the kind characterized by Peter Tork as never allowing anyone to escape their particular “black box.”4

  Nicholson plays Frank Chambers as a lesser man than the original portrayed by John Garfield. Garfield is tougher, yet brought down through supplication and obeisance, in contrast to Nicholson’s Chambers, who is raised up by desire for a woman and by the lure of twisted success. Cora’s influence weakens the first Chambers’ reserve and lowers his standards to become her conspirator, while the second is strengthened through Cora’s attention and by how she lets him think he succeeded with her, a sick orchestrated pantomime of seduction.

  * * *

  The 1981 Frank Chambers enters the film a loser. In a succession of stages, he becomes more and more pathetic, culminating in the darkest loss of all, to be left alone with himself and his own failures. The J.J. Gittes of Chinatown had seemingly been a success of sorts, undefined but implied. He then lost what he had built, both in his career with the district attorney’s office and with the love of his life.

  This all happens before the film begins, so we are introduced to another loser, this time one who—unlike Chambers—knew some good times. Chambers had always been a drifter and undistinguished hustler, but Gittes became someone drifting through his second act as an undistinguished private eye and hustler of his own sort.

  Nicholson bites into the Chinatown role with gusto, displaying so many facets of one man, with a depth of meaning rarely enjoyed in a Hollywood movie. He’s catapulted through the combined strengths of the triumvirate of director Roman Polanski, producer and Paramount studio head Robert Evans and screenwriter Robert Towne.

  Evans described Polanski as a martinet, yet on occasion the director allowed for the spontaneous to define character reality. One example was a scene in which Nicholson couldn’t get his cigarette lighter to function. Always searching for the moment, Nicholson was “playing through,” and kept the action going despite this accident, and incorporated the result into his portrayal. Polanski preserved the take “not only because it lends a quality of verisimilitude, but because it makes us vaguely aware of the actor behind the performance.”5

  Nicholson is obviously having fun with this part, sensing its scope if not its iconic proportions, his fully realized character energy the key to the success of this challenging and complex portrayal.

  Despite the tension between the writer and director, Nicholson was fully ready for this chance at a romantic lead role. When Jack arrived on set, he was “getting his nuts off, his smile on full, sucking up the lunacy of his pals’ mutual disdain,” recalled Evans.6

  Actor James Hong, whose 500 credits in a career of 64 years include Blade Runner and Big Trouble in Little China, called Polanski very detailed and precise in his quest to get exactly what he envisioned in a scene. Much rehearsal was invested by “the master director and the master actor … trying as hard as they could to accomplish what the other one wants in the scene,” shooting an average of 20 takes for each angle. Every scene had an underlying mood. Hong described filming as a learning experience for both men, as well as for himself. “These two creative people are geniuses. The way they can move a scene is brilliant.”7

  Gittes can’t possibly care about petty matrimonial skirmishes, but he has to feign involvement to make a living. “There’s nothing worse than sitting for ten hours and watching the side of a building that will never move,” observed real-life high-profile Los Angeles private investigator Scott Ross. “You can never prove that someone isn’t having an affair. You’re seen together, there are photos, and even if it’s two friends having dinner, you can’t prove nothing is happening.”8

  As the third-rate dick provides proof of a wife’s affair to husband Curly, deliciously played by Burt Young, Nicholson reacts with beautiful impatience, while Young parodies an escalating overreaction to pictures of his wife’s infidelities. In establishing the Jake Gittes character, Nicholson plays against the other actors, responding to what happens in their lives and about their situations rather than acting in relation to his own. He remains detached from their circumstances and uninvolved beyond doing his job. Gittes is stickily insensitive and falsely caring toward former Rebel Rousers co-star Diane Ladd (as the phony Evelyn Mulwray).

  When Nicholson tells a dirty joke to his operatives, he is blissfully unaware that they are trying to warn him that urbane client, the real Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), is standing directly behind him. He takes such great delight and seems so natural in his camaraderie that we might think that this is what the actor is most like in real life. His broad laugh after the “screwin’ just like a Chinaman” joke is the same, open-mouthed cackle not seen nor heard since his Little Shop of Horrors scene in the dentist’s chair.

  He continues to react to others in order to define his character, with flourishes like the hat-salute to Roy Jenson’s Mulvihill that accompanies Gittes’ mo
cking cracks. Nicholson emphatically pounds his cigarette on its case in a gesture to receptionists. He also has some playful business with Perry Lopez as Lieutenant Lou Escobar and Dick Bakalyan as Detective Loach.

  Private investigator Scott Ross worked such infamous Hollywood cases as Robert Blake and Michael Jackson. He confirmed the enmity between the police and P.I.s depicted in the film. “If I get pulled over by a cop, I wouldn’t show my private investigator’s license, because they’d tear my car apart.” Ross explained the source of the conflict as competing interests, noting, “All they want is to get a conviction. I’m here to help exonerate my client. Even if there is evidence that can prove innocence, they won’t test that evidence and I can’t force them to do it.”9

  Nicholson’s characterization went beyond acting to include action more physical and dangerous. Because of the closeness of the shot, he even has to do his own stunt in rushing water that throws him against a fence, a scene that harkens back to his fight against the waves in The Terror.

  Nicholson’s sequence with Polanski is remembered for its realistic and stunning knife flick to the nosy “kitty cat,” an attack by the director on his star. However, it is more than that, also capturing a classic meeting of two established actors. Remember that Roman’s on-screen roles have spanned comedy, with wife Sharon Tate in The Fearless Vampire Killers; to voyeuristic weirdo in The Tenant; as well as a range of parts in his early films in Poland.

  Polanski also chose to give the film itself an active role in Gittes’ characterization, telling the story from the private eye’s perspective by shooting from behind him or over his shoulder. The director explained that though he read and loved Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, the movies based on their works missed the main element: the first person.10

  Much has been written about how a major star in a lead role could have much of his face covered with a face bandage for a sizable portion of the film. In Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood, Dennis Bingham views the bandage as a more calculated effort to call attention to the actor behind the character, making the spectator think that this star does not care how he looks. He even dares to appear ridiculous, to the extent that “as soon as one is tempted to think of Nicholson, the actor-as-hero, one is reminded that it is a problematic hero who comes dressed in adhesive tape and gauze, dripping blood from a nearly surreal attack.” Bingham is not the first acting scholar to label Nicholson’s approach as “Brechtian.” Here the actor telegraphs Jake’s fragilities and undermines his facade by coming on screen “accompanied by a banner explaining his character’s condition.”11