Five Easy Pieces

Dom Robinson reviews

Five Easy Pieces He rode the fast lane
on the road to nowhere. Distributed by

Columbia TriStar

• Cat.no: CDR 91846
• Cert: 15
• Running time: 94 minutes
• Year: 1970
• Pressing: 1999
• Region(s): 2, PAL
• Chapters: 28 plus extras
• Sound: Mono
• Languages: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish
• Subtitles: 20 different languages available
• Widescreen: 1.85:1
• 16:9-Enhanced: Yes
• Macrovision: Yes
• Disc Format: DVD 5
• Price: £19.99
• Extras : Scene index, Filmographies
  

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  Director:

  Bob Rafelson

  (Black Widow, Blood and Wine, Head, Man Trouble, Mountains of the Moon, Poodle Springs, The Postman Always Rings Twice, TV: The Monkees)

Producers:

Bob Rafelson and Richard Wechsler

Screenplay:

Adrien Joyce

Cast:

Bobby Dupea: Jack Nicholson (Batman (1989), Blood And Wine, Chinatown, The Crossing Guard, Easy Rider, A Few Good Men, Hoffa, Little Shop Of Horrors (1960), Man Trouble, Mars Attacks, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, The Shining, The Two Jakes, The Witches Of Eastwick, Wolf)
Rayette: Karen Black (Airport 75, Burnt Offerings, Drive He Said, The Great Gatsby, Invaders from Mars, Nashville)
Catherine Van Oost: Susan Anspach (Montenegro)

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Five Easy Pieces stars Jack Nicholson as a classical pianist who hasn’t followed the vocation of his gift or the lifestyle of his well-to-do family and spends most of his time drifting from oddjob to oddjob with best friend Elton, while dating the dizzy Rayette (Karen Black). The other drifting he does is as an opportunistic philanderer when he goes chasing after other women.

But home comes a-calling when his father takes ill and off he sets with Rayette, via a partially-amusing skit when they pick up two female hitchhikers with very negative attitudes, but Bobby’s loins begin to stir at the sight of America’s answer to Tara Palmer-Tompkinson, Catherine Van Oost (Susan Anspach). What’s a guy to do? Stick with his girl who’s now carrying his child, or go for a walk on the wild side?

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The film may be 30 years old, but the picture quality shows it. It needs a good remastering but we’re not going to get that here. It may be anamorphic and in its original widescreen ratio, but the print is poor with grain most of the time and bizarrely, vertical white lines all over the picture for about a minute, 61 minutes into the film.

The average bitrate is an above-average 5.29Mb/s, occasionally peaking above 7Mb/s.

The sound is in its original mono but very muffled and I had to turn up the volume to hear it more clearly.

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Extras :

Chapters : The usual 28 chapters are applied here but there is no trailer, unlike the “menu” on the back cover would have you believe.

Languages/Subtitles : Mono in English, French, Italian, Spanish and German, plus subtitles in TWENTY languages : English, French, Arabic, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Icelandic, Hindi, Hebrew, German, Turkish, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Greek, Norwegian and Dutch.

And there’s more… : Well, just brief filmographies for the film’s two principal stars and director.

Menu : Static and silent, it can be seen on the back cover, although that’s the American version presumably, since this disc has nothing to do with “Bonus trailers” whatsoever.

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The problem with Five Easy Pieces is that it’s a very standard tale of family life, only offset on the very odd occasion by Jack’s trademark standoffish behaviour (for which, here, he somehow was Oscar-nominated). Just a shame that I could count on my hand the number of times he exhibits this here.

Add to that a poor picture, muffled sound, next to no extras and you have no reason to buy this disc, other than the staggering number of subtitles which the otherwise, similarly anamorphic and featureless Region 1 DVD can’t match. FILM : * PICTURE QUALITY: ** SOUND QUALITY: * EXTRAS: ½ ——————————- OVERALL: *

Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2000.