Five Easy Pieces of four: The title of "Five Easy Pieces" refers not to the women its hero makes along the road, for there are only three, but to a book of piano exercises he owned as a child. The film, one of the best American films, is about the distance between that boy, practicing to become a concert pianist, and the need he feels 20 years later to disguise himself as an oil-field rigger. When we sense the boy, tormented and insecure, trapped inside the adult man, "Five Easy Pieces" becomes a masterpiece of heartbreaking intensity... The movie is joyously alive to
Jack Nicholson for actor Rip Torn, who withdrew from the project after an argument with Hopper. In interviews, Nicholson later acknowledged the importance of being cast in "Easy Rider": "All I could see in the early films, before "Easy Rider", was this desperate young actor trying to vault out of the screen and create a movie career." Nicholson was cast by Stanley Kubrick, who was impressed with his role in "Easy Rider", in the part of Napoleon in a film about his life, and although production on the film commenced, the project fizzled out, partly due to a change in ownership at