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 handle the role, saying, "There is James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, and Henry Fonda. After that, who is there but Jack Nicholson?" During the filming, Nicholson struck up what became a lifelong friendship with co-star Garfunkel. When he visited Los Angeles, Garfunkel would stay at Nicholson's home in a room Nicholson jokingly called "the Arthur Garfunkel Suite". Other Nicholson roles included Hal Ashby's "The Last Detail" (1973), with Randy Quaid, for which Nicholson won for Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, and he was nominated for his third Oscar and a Golden Globe. Television journalist David Gilmour writes