Drive, He Said - 1971
Wednesday, March 22, 2023 at 08:22PM An apparently forgotten 50 year-old artifact: Jack Nicholson's directorial debut. With the author, he adapted a terrific hipster graveyard-humor novel about basketball in all its poetry (my jam ENTIRELY) slamming head-on into Vietnam.
Bruce Dern is a perfectly modulated psycho head coach and Karen Black, at her most garishly insanely beautiful, for once gets to play a character as intelligent as she really is. Too bad she always had to play po'buckers and psychos – she was always so much smarter than that. And Black gets to showcase her perfect comic timing. She more than holds her own with screenwriter Robert Towne, of all people, playing a cuckolded professor.
This is back when Nicholson still embraced his complex sensibility and sought ambiguity in the narrative - I mean, think of the deflating cartoon that was GOING WEST. Here he also got to be as smart as he really is.
At about the 75% mark the focus unfortunately shifts from the b-ball star to his psycho roommate, which leads to a truly harrowing - and possibly triggering - attempted rape. Despite this unsettling sequence, Nicholson proves a master of stoned pacing, in the manner of Monte Hellman. Though the film at first seems kinda off-hand or even improv, it's beautifully structured and a true portrait of the endish of the '60's.
I have the Criterion DVD so I hope it's on the channel. There's actually nothing quite like it...
PS: At one point the lead b-ball guy climbs a huge stone wall to preach his love for Karen Black. There's only one enormous graffito on the entire wall: HD STANTON