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
Lois Smith making a film until "The Way We Live Now" in 1970. She then earned critical acclaim for her role as Partita Dupea, the sister of Jack Nicholson's character in "Five Easy Pieces" (1970), and Smith won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress. Supporting roles in films in the 1970s and 1980s included "Up the Sandbox", "Next Stop, Greenwich Village", "Resurrection", "Foxes", "Four Friends," "Reuben, Reuben", "Reckless", "Black Widow", "Fatal Attraction", and "Midnight Run". Supporting roles in the 1990s and 2000s included "Green Card", "Fried Green Tomatoes," "How to Make an American Quilt", "Falling Down", "Holy