The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Bob Rafelson · a film · 1970 · 98 minutes · screenplay by Adrien Joyce (Carole Eastman), from a story by Joyce and Rafelson
Mode
New Hollywood character study; the road picture and the family drama of return, in a naturalist register
Mythos
The prodigal son who comes home to a father who cannot hear him and, against the parable, leaves again; a family named as a repertoire
Phase
Some weeks, from the oil fields and the bowling alley of Kern County through a road north to an island in Puget Sound, and on to a gas station on the road beyond
Presentation
Feature film in colour, 98 minutes, mono, in English, in its one released version; recorded classical piano and Tammy Wynette’s songs, no conventional score
Register
Flat, sunlit and comic, from bowling-alley farce to chamber drama in a house of musicians; rising rarely, and exactly
Scale
One man between two worlds, a waitress, a family of musicians, the country from south to north
Governing Proposition
A pianist from a family of musicians works on the oil rigs of California, lives with a waitress, and goes north to the island house when his father is dying. The wager of the film is that a man who refuses his inheritance does not thereby join the life he flees to: his refusal is a form of the inheritance, a contempt that wears two sets of clothes, and its root is an inability to feel, which he can confess only to a father who cannot answer.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens in the oil fields of Kern County, California, flat and dusty under a plain sun. Robert Eroica Dupea, played by Jack Nicholson, works on the rigs. He lives with Rayette Dipesto, a waitress, played by Karen Black, who loves Tammy Wynette’s songs; the songs play, and there is no other score. His friend on the rigs is Elton, played by Billy Green Bush, the one man in this life who looks up to him.
The days are bowling and a double date. Bobby’s charm is a defence, with rage and tenderness in the same face, and the film watches him from outside, through what he does. Nothing in the first scenes says where he comes from. The rigs’ banter is the speech of this world, and he speaks it well enough to pass, and badly enough to show that he is passing.
Bob Rafelson made the film as a BBS production, with Bert Schneider as executive producer, and Columbia Pictures released it in September 1970. Carole Eastman wrote the screenplay under the name Adrien Joyce, from a story by Joyce and Rafelson; László Kovács photographed it, and Christopher Holmes and Gerald Shepard edited it. It runs 98 minutes, in colour, with mono sound, and one version exists. It is built in two halves joined by a road, and this is the first half: the far country, before the viewer knows it is far from anything.
Movement II
On a freeway the traffic stops. On the back of a truck ahead stands an upright piano. Bobby climbs up, sits and plays, and plays well, while the cars wait. Then the traffic moves, and the truck carries him off the road, still playing. It is the most joyful scene in the film, and in one comic image it says what the rest will show: the gift is intact, and he will use it only where it costs nothing and reaches no one.
Elton is arrested, and the one man who looked up to Bobby is taken out of his life. Bobby goes to Los Angeles, to a recording studio where his sister Partita, played by Lois Smith, is at work. The family’s art is seen first as labour: a woman in headphones, a recording, a session. Partita is the warmest person in the film, and she belongs to the house he left.
The father is dying, and Bobby goes north. Rayette goes with him. The prodigal turns toward the father’s house, and the film turns with him, from the flat south toward cold and the edge of the map.
Movement III
On the road they pick up two hitchhikers, Palm Apodaca and Terry Grouse, played by Helena Kallianiotes and Toni Basil. Palm is going to Alaska, away from filth toward a cleaner north, and talks of the filth she is leaving. Her flight rhymes with Bobby’s: two people going north to get clear of something, neither with a destination that could hold them. The passage is the most remembered of the road, and the most detachable in structure; it stays for its rhyme and for what happens at the next stop.
At a diner Bobby is refused a substitution, and builds an order to defeat the rule, a chicken salad sandwich with the chicken held back: “Hold the chicken.” The table is swept clear and he is thrown out. He has won against a waitress, and he admits that he leaves with nothing. Eastman builds the scene as one sustained rhythm, and it is the film’s clearest act of its own pattern: a performance that reaches no one, ending in departure.
On the way he leaves Rayette at a motel. The woman who has come with him is set down outside the family before she reaches it. The film does not ennoble the motel, or her, and it does not hide what the leaving costs her.
Movement IV
The family house stands on an island in Puget Sound, grey under a Washington sky, and Kovács photographs it in the same plain light as the oil fields. Here are Carl Fidelio Dupea, played by Ralph Waite, his fiancée Catherine Van Oost, played by Susan Anspach, a nurse, and the father, played by William Challee, mute in a wheelchair. The family is a repertoire: Robert Eroica, Partita, Carl Fidelio, named for the music they were raised to make.
Bobby and Catherine begin an affair. He plays Chopin for her in an empty room, and plays well, and then tells her he felt nothing. The beauty is given and then denied by what he says, and the scene states the film’s disclosure in image and sound: the cultivation of the house is genuine, and in him it is dead. An evening with Samia Glavia, played broad, shows the same cultivation as pretension.
Catherine refuses him, and the island ends, as every place in the film ends, with Bobby turned away and about to go. The prodigal has been received; there is no feast, and no one in the house to whom he can say why he came.
Movement V
Bobby wheels his father out into a field, into the grey light, and speaks to him. The father cannot answer. Bobby tries to account for himself, and breaks down. It is the one place where the film enters him from within, and the summit of the film: a confession to the only listener who cannot reply, from a man whose emptiness is not rebellion but an inability to feel.
Then he leaves again. On the road, with Rayette, he stops at a gas station. She is pregnant. He leaves her at the pumps and rides away north on a logging truck. Against the parable, the son has come home and gone out again, to colder country, with nothing.
The camera stays behind. The last shot is held on the station after the truck has gone, Rayette left at the pumps. Kovács holds it, and the verdict is carried in duration and position alone. The film has refused a climax because its hero cannot have one; it ends by leaving him, as he has left everyone, and looking at the one he left.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, and the structure is episodic by design, so the subtractive test bites harder than in a plotted film. Much of it resists. The piano on the truck shows in one comic image that Bobby’s gift is intact and that he will use it only where it costs nothing. Elton’s arrest removes the one man in the oil-field life who looked up to him. Partita in the studio shows the family’s art first as work. The field with the father is what the whole journey exists to reach, and the gas station completes the pattern of leaving. What gives: the double date and the bowling alley make one point twice, and the Samia evening restates what the house has shown.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a man of talent and class who refuses his inheritance does not thereby join the life he flees to; the refusal is itself the inheritance, a contempt in two sets of clothes, rooted not in rebellion but in an inability to feel. The film shows the American class line from both sides without sentiment. The oil fields and the motel are not ennobled; the island’s cultivation is shown as genuine, in Partita’s work at the studio, and as dead, in Samia. The scene with Catherine carries it in image and sound: he plays well, and tells her he felt nothing. The limit stands: the film’s view of Rayette half shares Bobby’s.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The register is flat, sunlit and comic, and the film distrusts elevation as Bobby does. It rises at four points, and they are exact. The freeway jam, where he climbs onto a truck and plays and the truck carries him off still playing, is comic transport, music lifted out of its class into traffic. The Chopin in the empty room is beauty given and then denied by what he says. The field, the father in a wheelchair against the grey light and Nicholson’s breakdown, is the summit. The last shot, held on the gas station, is a cold height. What holds the axis lowest: between them the bowling, the motels and the family manners are played level by intention, and the axis rewards frequency.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The pattern is the prodigal son, and it is built rather than cited. The son who left the father’s house for a far country of oil rigs and waitresses comes home when the father is dying, is received, and finds no one to confess to, since the father cannot speak; then, against the parable, he leaves again. The names are a second thread: Robert Eroica Dupea, the heroic symphony in a man who will not perform, with Partita and Carl Fidelio beside him, a family named as a repertoire. The flight north rhymes with Palm’s Alaska, the wanderer’s road without a goal. The particular stays particular. What holds it: the prodigal frame carries the second half only, and the north is evoked rather than built.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The inheritance is double: the Hollywood drama of family and return, and the youth road picture that BBS had just proved with Easy Rider (1969), in which Nicholson had broken through; behind both, the drifting heroes and open endings of European art cinema of the 1960s. The turns are real and several. A lead without a cause, neither rebel nor victim, unlikeable by design; a man of the cultivated class who has chosen manual work and is not redeemed by it; classical music as a family burden rather than an elevation; an ending in which the hero abandons a pregnant woman and the camera stays with her. The stake was moderate, a low budget and a new company with a hit behind it, and the path freshly opened.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The two halves are the knowledge: the same man in two worlds, each showing the falseness of his place in the other, so that the structure is the class line and his failure to stand on either side of it. Episodic drift is the shape of a life lived as leaving. The film has no climax because Bobby cannot have one, and the nearest thing is addressed to a man who cannot reply. The final long take, the camera staying with the station and Rayette after he has gone, carries the verdict in duration and position alone. What holds it: between these, the scenes run in the inherited grammar of observed behaviour, used well rather than made.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Evidence across fifty-six years, and the questions have stayed open. Does the film share Bobby’s contempt for Rayette, or expose it? Is the diner his rebellion or his cruelty, since he wins against a waitress and leaves with nothing, as he admits? Is the ending liberation, cowardice or the start of a death? What is he fleeing: his family, his talent, or feeling itself? The film has been read in the history of the New Hollywood and of BBS, in Nicholson’s career, and as a portrait of a generation’s class anxiety, and on return the two halves rhyme more closely. What holds it: the literature is smaller than that of the decade’s larger films, and the readings cluster on Bobby’s emptiness.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1970s, entered at its first moment. Intrinsic force is real: the film gave American cinema its alienated, unredeemed lead in a realist register, a man with no project and no arc, and showed that a studio could release such a film to a large audience. It reorganised the American character study more than it changed what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: four Academy Award nominations, for picture, actor, supporting actress and original screenplay; the making of Nicholson’s screen persona, the gifted man in revolt against his own life; the BBS model of director-led, low-budget studio films that the decade followed; and the diner as a common reference for refusal. The reach is shared with Easy Rider and The Last Picture Show.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then surface, across fifty-six years. Form: whole, in one released version, nothing lost; restorations repair and do not revise. Presence: continuous, on television and home video, in revival programmes and in teaching on the New Hollywood, and the diner circulates far beyond those who have seen the film. It is steady presence rather than the widest, narrower than the decade’s largest films and than Nicholson’s best-known roles. Surface: the hitchhikers’ talk of ecology and the period styling fix it to 1970 more than its story does, a light charge; the oil fields and the motels age as history, not as fashion. The bar is cleared by a tenth.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in several places. Eastman’s screenplay gives each world its own speech, the rigs’ banter and the house’s careful diction, and builds its best scenes, the diner and the field, as one sustained rhythm. Kovács photographs both landscapes in plain, unflattering light, the oil field dusty and the island grey, and holds the last shot. Nicholson plays a man whose charm is a defence, with rage and tenderness in one face; Karen Black makes Rayette funny, needy and dignified against a script that half mocks her; Lois Smith’s Partita is the film’s warmth. The charges: Anspach’s Catherine is cool to flatness, Samia is caricature, and the cutting is efficient rather than load-bearing.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Bobby on the freeway truck, playing to a stalled traffic jam, broad and joyful comedy; and Bobby in the field before his mute father, weeping. One law governs both: he performs where it cannot reach anyone, and leaves before it can, and every encounter ends with his departure. The truck carries him away playing; the diner ends with him thrown out; the island ends with Catherine’s refusal; the field ends in a confession to no listener; the gas station ends with the truck going north. The range is wide for a small film, from bowling-alley comedy to chamber drama in a house of musicians. The strain is in the satire: Samia and Palm are played broader than the law quite governs.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what a film of 98 minutes holds. Consciousness, Bobby’s, held from outside and through behaviour, from within only in the field; the family as an institution of art, a father, three children, a fiancée and a nurse; class from both sides, the axis on which the film turns; labour on the rigs, glimpsed and real; art as practice, inheritance and burden; the couple in Rayette, Catherine and the double date; the country from Kern County to Puget Sound; the counterculture at the edges, in the hitchhikers. They are integrated, since class, family and art are one problem in Bobby. What holds it: Rayette’s and Catherine’s inner lives are withheld, and the state, history, the sacred and the politics of 1970 are absent by choice.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Inner Law at 8.4. A disclosure that can be stated and holds, of a refusal that is itself the inheritance and of the class line seen from both sides; a survival whole in one version with continuous presence; and one law, performance that reaches no one and ends in departure, governing everything from the freeway truck to the field.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.4: the film rises four times, exactly, and plays level between them by intention. Above it, The Encompassed at 7.6, where class, family and art are one problem but the women’s inner lives are withheld and the state, history and the sacred do not enter, and The Made at 8.0, where the screenplay, the light and two lead performances carry weight but Catherine is cool to flatness, Samia is caricature and the cutting is efficient rather than load-bearing.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.0, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 fall two tenths short and The Archetypal Deep at 8.1 four tenths short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.4, a tenth below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate, by the Universal Minimum and by its aggregate, 8.2 from a sum of 97.8, against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Five Easy Pieces as released by Columbia Pictures in September 1970, a BBS production, 98 minutes, in colour, mono, in English, from the oil fields of Kern County to the last shot at the gas station: directed by Bob Rafelson from a screenplay by Carole Eastman under the name Adrien Joyce, after a story by Joyce and Rafelson; photographed by László Kovács; produced by Rafelson and Richard Wechsler, with Bert Schneider as executive producer; edited by Christopher Holmes and Gerald Shepard. One version exists and is the one judged; restorations repair it and do not revise it, and bear on The Imperishable only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and otherwise described. Figures and details that could not be verified, among them the identity of every piece of recorded music beyond the Chopin, the order of the smaller scenes of the first half, the exact scene timings, the critics’ prizes and registry listings beyond the Academy nominations, and the particulars of Bobby’s departure at the gas station, are not given.