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
The King of Marvin Gardens which included the Monkees film "Head" (1968) and "Five Easy Pieces" (1970), which established both men as major figures in Hollywood. Dern and Nicholson had previously worked together in "Psych-Out" (1968) and "Rebel Rousers" (1970). Nicholson and Scatman Crothers subsequently co-starred in Miloš Forman's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975) and Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" (1980). Co-star Ellen Burstyn had previously worked in the TV series "Gunsmoke", in which Dern had also appeared, and would soon achieve worldwide fame with her starring role in William Friedkin's "The Exorcist" (1973). The film was one of the few screen appearances made