The House Next Door

It's hard to pick five, but here goes:

1. "The Last Detail." (1973) For all the reasons Odie mentions. As the movie unreels, you really get the sense that every aspect of Buddusky's life is a kind of retreat: being a career military man makes it unncessary to interact with civilian society in any sustained way; it seals him off from many potentially deep relationships with women; it allows him to submerge his sensitivity beneath a foulmouthed tough guy facade; and on and on. This guy isn't a man's man, he's a perpetual teenager, and it's only in his rare introspective moments that he almost, almost realizes it.

2. "The Shining." (1980) Twenty years ago, I was inclined to agree with Stephen King that Nicholson's performance was too unmodulated, and that it hurt the movie from the get-go because the second he walked onscreen, you said, "He's Jack Nicholson, so of course he's crazy." But this is a horror movie anyway, so we know it's going to be a doom spiral; armed with that certainty, we expect a performance that will guide us en route to the inevitable, taking surprising turns along the way. Nicholson's largeness and his ferocious stylization suit Stanley Kubrick's movie, which is obsessed with repetitions, patterns, numbers, geometry and the circularity of time. Beyond that, the actor's self-awareness -- his fascination at the prospect of losing his sanity, his bemusement at his own capacity for hatred, and the thrill he gets from doing and saying unspeakably frightening things -- takes us deeper into male anxiety, creative frustration and resentment of domestic responsibility than any other horror film, with the possible exception of "Rosemary's Baby."

3. "Terms of Endearment." (1983) Nicholson manages to be bigger than life yet life-sized in this one; he's one hell of a charming bastard, and he deserves a special citation for making potbellies and a receding hairline sexy (at least on certain guys).

4. "Wolf." (1992) A wild card choice, but even though I don't particularly care for this horror satire by director Mike Nichols (who also directed my #5 choice) I am endlessly fascinated by Nicholson's performance, which is not your typical guy-turns-into-a-werewolf arc, but a mordantly funny and often quite poignant look at a career professional whose age and complacency have made him a ripe target for corporate bosses, and for a society that has no respect for age and experience.

5. "Carnal Knowledge." (1971) As Jonathan, the eloquent chauvinist hero of this post-60s psychosexual drama, Nicholson is a poster boy for the dark side of the sexual revolution: it gave certain men an intellectual justification for piggishness. This is the movie "Your Friends and Neighbors" wanted to be; Jason Patric's character in the latter is like a cartoon version of Nicholson's hateful skirt-chaser.

I love Nicholson in both of your first two selections, and have no argument with them. But...and here let me preface by noting that I know that you should be able to (theoretically) separate the performance from the picture, I'm too much of a holistic type movie-loving guy to pull that off. So, while Jack's just fine in About Schmidt, and steals the show in Batman, I don't like either film enough to consider these performances among Nicholson's best. And I must confess that I've never seen The Raven, so I've got nothing to say about that performance.

So moving past the preamble, that gives me a few slots to play with in this game. I'll start by inserting Nicholson's Hollywood breakthrough performance in Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider. While the film hasn't aged terribly well from a purely stylistic vantage point (it's still a very cool piece of anti-establishment movie-making despite any perceived weaknesses on my part), Nicholson's rebel lawyer turn certainly has. In a film full of stoners, Nicholson's exuberance (and clarity) leap right off the screen atcha. Second, I'll point to Nicholson's Hollywood breakthrough in a lead performance, which you can find by digging up a copy of Bob Rafaelson's Five Easy Pieces. Not only was it filmed in my backyard (Vancouver Island), I can still delight (heh) my kids by playing "spot the location" on road trips up island. More importantly, the film gives us the sorta introspective and self-contained Nicholson that we seldom see anymore. And his scene where he tells the waitress in the diner to stick it between her knees, still worth the price of a rental.
For my third and final selection, I had to pass over a lotta really good material, such as his work as Jack, the psychotic writer, in Kubrick's The Shining, and his role opposite Meryl Streep, as the drunkard Francis Phelan on the adjoining bar stool in Babenco's Ironweed. I also liked him plenty in Huston's Prizzi's Honor, and of course he was terrific in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (though the film falls far short of the novel. That's such and English teacherly thing to say, isn't it?). No, my last spot on this list is reserved for his late-career defining performance as the well-named retired cop Jerry Black, a sad soul determined to solve a child's murder in Sean Penn's dark and disturbing The Pledge. Here we have Nicholson The Actor, not Nicholson the Movie Star (which is how I view his work in Batman, for instance). Nicholson, a good man obsessed with doing the right thing who ends up in a terrible mess, restrains his hammier instincts in order to get back to the sort of tormented introversion that made his work in Five Easy Pieces so interesting.

"Forget it Homer, it's Chiro-town."

-Moe the Bartender

Oh, good lists by all, but I have to chime in for "Five Easy Pieces."

Of course the chicken-salad sandwhich scene is one of Jack's most famous, but for me, his final speech with the maestro-condcutor father is one of the best scenes of his career.

It seems perverse to not even mention Five Easy Pieces, Cuckoos Nest, King of Marvin Gardens, The Passenger and Reds.

The Raven?

Okay. Whatever.

My 5 Jack Faves:

Heathers
Mobsters
Kuffs
Vey Bad Things
Pump Up The Volume

The Monte Hellman Minimalist Western Doube Feature of The Shooting and Ride the Whirlwind.
The Border
Man Trouble
The Crossing Guard
The Last Tycoon

Worst Performance: Hoffa, Batman, Goin' South

Anon: "It seems perverse to not even mention Five Easy Pieces, Cuckoos Nest, King of Marvin Gardens, The Passenger and Reds. The Raven? Okay. Whatever."

Well, I've never seen "The Raven" either, so I can't argue that choice. But the others you mention are terrific. Nicholson is good even when he's bad, so picking just five means omitting some landmarks. "The Passenger" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" nearly made my cut, as did "A Few Good Men," which isn't a very deep movie, but contains one of Nicholson's most ferocious and charismatic supporting turns.

Also "The Pledge" and "The Crossing Guard." Sean Penn asks Nicholson to go places he rarely visits post'70s.

Anonymous: It seems perverse to not even mention Five Easy Pieces, Cuckoos Nest, King of Marvin Gardens, The Passenger and Reds.

This isn't a top 5 list of Nicholson's greatest performances (though 1 and 2 certainly are his best); this is a list of movies that struck me when I thought about the subject. You have great Jack performances on your list, even if some of the movies are less than great, and if I had a 10 for the day, I might have included at least the first three. I left them off because I hoped somebody would chime in on them and explain why they love those performances.

As for your "whatever," regarding The Raven, my response is "you're damn right." There should always be a curve ball in one's rotation. It got a reaction, and that's what I wanted. You swung. :) I chose it to offer a pre-Jack Jack Nicholson.

Matt: Those Jack performances from 1970-75 are deconstructions of different aspects of the human male. For all his swagger, he showed a lot of below-the-surface insecurities and anxieties. Imagine if he and Mickey Rourke did a Michael Mann movie.

Dan: I know that you should be able to (theoretically) separate the performance from the picture, I'm too much of a holistic type movie-loving guy to pull that off.

That's fair, but I think I'd be in trouble if I tried that.

Thank you for bringing up The Pledge, but I feel about it the way you feel about Schmidt. Still, it's a very intriguing Nicholson performance.

Chaz, I totally forgot about Hoffa, and you are right!

And those was some really great Christian Slater latex masks on Nicholson in Heathers...

Picking five is brutal, but I'll give it a brief try. In no particular order:

1) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Really, this is the quintessential Jack. The movie wouldn't be as good as it is without his McMurphy.

2) About Schmidt. I concur with Odie. I think this is an incredily underrated performance. It's a shame they wasted a third Oscar on him for As Good As It Gets because this is the one he should have won for.

3) Prizzi's Honor. Wagstaff and I recently argued about this, but I love his Charley Partanna.

4) Chinatown. Here's a case where the film is so great it actually raises his work to a higher level.

5) Terms of Endearment. I'm not sure who should get the credit here: James L. Brooks for inventing Garrett Breedlove, who didn't exist in Larry McMurtry's novel, or Jack's devilish glee at getting to spout memorable line after memorable line -- and having the courage to let his beer belly flop out like it does when he finally gets in Shirley MacLaine's bedroom.

I know this is off-topic, but the Christian Slater comment got me thinking about young actors who have been inspired by the great 70's star/actors (Nicholson, Hoffman, De Niro, Pacino, Hackman, Duvall) and how few of them they are. While Slater is clearly doing an impersonation for no other reason than to glom some of Jack's aura for himself, no one else has based their an entire performance on another famous performance, which would only seem natural in the media-saturated environment we live in. If, as Thomas De Zengotita and countless other sociologists (Goffman especially) postulate, that we are all actors giving performances every moment of our lives, then how come more actors don't incorporate that into their craft? The only young actor I can think of who plays characters who dominant mode of being one of performance is Ed Norton (Primal Fear, Down in the Valley) and the only singular performance I can think of off the top of my head that seems like a character choice instead of a celebrity/persona choice is Elias Koteas in the otherwise forgettable Some Kind of Wonderful. I just wanted to bring this up and see if Odienator or Matt had anything to say about this because I've always been curious why there aren't more (for lack of better term; forgive me; I'm really not trying to be pretentious) Post-modern, i.e., an actor whose performaces are nothing more than an obvious pastiche of other recognizable performances. It seems like all the great young actors these days are very singular in their personas, and if they are collaging themselves it's not very noticeable what kind of material they're using. Take Benicio Del Toro. I guess you could say that he reminds you of Mitchum or whoever, but there is no indication of this. I'm just thinking out loud. Where is the Godard of Acting? Someone who decontructs cinematic acting and lets you see the seams? Am I making any sense? is this so off-topic that someone's going to call me a troll?

Edward re: "Chinatown" : "Here's a case where the film is so great it actually raises his work to a higher level."

Quite true. Nicholson's an actor one can rarely say that about; often he's the deepest thing in a merely very good or passable movie, or the only entertaining thing in a bad one. In "Chinatown" he's great indeed -- attuned to hardboiled cliche yet finding the humanity beneath it -- but the movie's so complex, disturbing and surprisingly moving that it lifts him up. He's like the angular hood ornament on a shiny Studebaker.

Chaz: There is no such thing as off-topic at the House, as long as there's the merest whisper of a connection to what was originally being discussed.

My pick for a contemporary actor strongly influenced by 70s stars would be Sean Penn. Early on he had the young De Niro's jagged intensity and surly machismo, as well as his propensity to transform himself. More recently (nothwithstanding throwbacks like "The Assassination of Richard Nixon") he's reminded me more of James Caan in the late 70s and early 80s, when he lost a bit of his swagger and let melancholy rise to the surface. I also sense a kinship with Nicholson in Penn's "Mystic River" and "21 Grams" performances -- a sense that he's deconstructing heterosexual masculinity as he enacts it. Those two performances could have been given by Nicholson in the 70s; it's a credit to Penn to say that Nicholson would have been different but not necessarily better.

Chaz-

I'm not sure of one actor that I would say does that, but one performance would be Nicolas Cage's in "Wild at Heart," which is kind of like Marlon Brando doing an Elvis impersonation. Or Elvis doing a Marlon Brando impersonation. Whatever.

(Come to think of it, Cage often sort of has the same wounded masculinity thing going on that Nicholson and Penn do.)

Chaz: Where is the Godard of Acting? Someone who decontructs cinematic acting and lets you see the seams?

Sean Penn is an excellent choice. As is Meryl Streep, who is just about the best actress out there, moving from genre to genre with apparent ease and to great effect. She clearly does her homework, tearing each part back to the studs and rebuilding from the foundation up. Unlike the actors who disappear into their roles, I know when (and that) Streep is acting, but she's so damned smart in her choices that it doesn't bother me at all.

Streep has taken a lot of heat over the years from some critics for being artificial, a composition of tics, accents and mannerisms, but I think that's mistaking the craft for the gesture, the trees obliterating the critic's view of the forest.

Odienator,

Great piece! Jack has done so much work that can be classified as incredible that you were ensured nobody would agree with you completely. If Chinatown were a woman, I'd marry her and if she wouldn't have me, I'd kidnap her and lock her in an attic. The movie runs on a constant feed in my head; to me, it symbolizes the idea that when you reach a point in life where you think you've got it all figured out, you actually find out that you don't know jack. The Shining, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, Cuckoo's Nest - I can't pick a favorite among them. However, I recently saw Terms of Endearment again and only now do I finally realize how ungodly great he is in this movie. Garrett is so real to me and encapsulates all of the good and bad traits we men carry around in us; the ability to be cruelly insensitive, the ability to love someone so much that their life orbits around it, and the ability to put aside our selfish needs from time to time when someone we love really needs us. The scene between Jack and Shirley at the airport, when he tells her he loves her in a way only Jack can, brought tears to my eyes.

However, the one performance I can't seem to stop thinking about is from About Schmidt. I love Payne's films, every one of them, and I don't agree that he has disdain for his characters. On the contrary, I think he takes on subject matter that almost always has a flawed protagonist who can be challenged to grow, or fail trying. In Citizen Ruth, I think the most important scene is where Ruth has miscarried and through some hidden well of humanity, is about to make herself vulnerable for the first time in the film and admit the truth to Diane, Swoozie Kurtz's character. Unfortunately, Diane can't hear what she's saying since all she's focused on it the whole "let's get you to the abortion clinic" situation. So, Ruth gives up trying to change, steals the money and probably ends up huffing every cent of it away. Jim McAllister in Election thinks he's a good, moral and ethical man (what's the difference between moral and ethics? Anyone?), but his flaws become his undoing and eventually consume him. In Sideways, Miles simultaneously overestimates and underestimates his value to the world and makes a series of morally questionable decisions throughout his life. Unlike his other protagonists, though, Miles actually has an epiphany and the ending is by far the most hopeful of any of Payne's films. The saddest of these is most definitely About Schmidt, though. From the opening of Warren Schmidt, marking time on his last day in the office like he had every day of the past twenty years, as he prepares to retire so he can mark the time counting down to his eventual demise, Schmidt is a walking cautionary tale. The film abuses him incessantly, as you see what a pathetic harvest a life of compromise will get you. The complete disregard he is shown by his co-workers and successor that show how unimportant his career really was. The exceptional contempt his wife and daughter have for him is difficult to watch, and Warren's realization of this as he pours out his heart to Ndugu is some of Nicholson's very best work. This man, who had allowed himself to be caged for so long, realizes his plight but has no concept of how to escape it. His wife's last words to him, "Don't Dilly Dally", as he departs to run some errands, show the hierarchy of his life that he has chosen to be restrained by, and I love his little rebellion at the Dairy Queen, as he chooses the medium, his wife's wishes be damned. Throughout all of this, and especially at the final moment of realization of what his life means while reading the letter about Ndugu, Nicholson does things I, as an actor, couldn't even comprehend how to do. How does Jack Nicholson, one of the most vital, randy, and exuberant actors ever to cross the big screen find within him the ability to portray someone whose essence, soul and joie de vivre have been completely drained by a life of easy choice. It's by far a more nuanced and amazing performance than the one in As Good As It Gets, and it's sad that he got his most recent Oscar for the latter than the former.

Thanks for bringing up such an interesting subject! Now I have to watch Chinatown this weekend.

Matt: Nic Cage in Wild at Heart is a great example of what I'm talking about.

I'm just wondering why acting is the least experimental and innovative of all the arts.

Music, painting, literature, etc., all seem to absorb changes in society, whether they be political or psychological. Other than Brando, when was the last time someone made a gigantic leap forward. Maybe De Niro's extreme approaches to character, a la Raging Bull and Taxi Driver and Bang the Drum Slowly and Godfather 2 and King of Comedy. It doesn't seem like the current style of acting echoes how people really behave anymore. I see people acting thoroughly unnatural and self-conscious, and I'm including myself. Actors have been taught to behave truthfully in fictional circumstances, but how about people acting dishonestly in fictional circumstances. I'm waiting for performances that jar, that seem out of place in the world in which a movie takes place, but intentionally so, not by accident. Yeah, David Lynch does that pretty well, especially in Wild at Heart, and especially with Diane Ladd's performance. I don't know. I wish I could articulate this better. It feels like an idea that is trying to bubble to the surface, and I don't quite have the language for it yet. All I know, and I'm repeating myself here, is that the world we live in demands a new type of behavioral representation, and I haven't seen it yet, although the Theatre of Richard Maxwell might be a step in that direction. How does this relate to Jack Nicholson? Maybe his style of acting is becoming anachronistic, just as Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable were becoming anachronistic when Brando decided to explode all the conventions and go in the opposite direction, making everything hyper-natural. I'm thinking that maybe the next great acting genius is going to be more at home with the conventions of silent film acting, somehow hybridizing them with the Bressonian model and the 70's Method Model. We'll know it when we see it, though. Which is why I agree with what Matt said about Nic Cage in Wild At Heart, and now that I'm thinking about it, perhaps Nic Cage was onto something and got sidetracked, as his performances in Peggy Sue Got Married and Vampire's Kiss were beautifully grotesque. It makes me sad that Cage got thrown off the path, because he could have been the one to change filmic acting. Or maybe he was. But I don't see his influence anywhere. There are hardly any young actors that don't mind making fools of themselves. They're not brave. Sure, they'll gain some weight or cover their faces in prosthetics, but were are the actors who don't mind doing embarassing things? Where are the courageous actors? Why is there no new Peter Sellers (although I have a good feeling about Sascha Cohen)? Filmic acting seems stale. The best performance I've seen in the last ten years was Emily Watson in Breaking The Waves. Now I'm babbling.

Chaz, I can't argue with the choices of Penn and Streep, but I do sometimes find her a tad artificial. I'm in the minority for loving her when she does comedy.

If we're going to skew a little younger: I always liked seeing what incarnations show up in the work of Toni Collette and Tilda Swinton. And even though he gets on my absolute last nerve, how about Gary Oldman?

Mr. Copeland: Prizzi's Honor. Wagstaff and I recently argued about this, but I love his Charley Partanna.

This is the movie the writer of that hideous Mr and Mrs. Smith should have studied, before realizing there was no way in hell he could top it. Wagstaff, get out here and defend why you don't like Charlie!!

Tully: I love Payne's films, every one of them, and I don't agree that he has disdain for his characters.

Fascinating comments, and you've made me take another look at Payne's treatment of his characters. But despite your well-crafted and well-rendered argument, we'll have to agree to disagree. I still think many of Payne's characters, especially the supporting ones, are set up solely so that Payne can mock them (Kathy Bates' character in Schmidt, for example, or Chris Klein in Election). Payne treats his characters the way Altman would treat his if he actually pretended to give a damn. Still, I've enjoyed all his films because, let's face it, I'm mean.

Tully: However, I recently saw Terms of Endearment again and only now do I finally realize how ungodly great he is in this movie.

Jack deserved his Oscar for that. I'm glad Terms is getting some much deserved love out here, but my favorite James L. Brooks-Jack collaboration is his cameo in Broadcast News. Just seeing him in that role made me crack up.

I'm really going to go out on a limb and add his comedic perf in Something's Gotta Give to the list too.

I won’t claim that Nicholson’s never given a bad performance, but to be honest with you that’s only because I never caught up with ANGER MANAGEMENT. He’s been one of those rare actors always worth watching. Even in his miscalculations, which inevitably offer, at the least, a sly bit of business here, a gripping explosion there, and most important the reassuring sense of an intelligence at work: He’s made wrong choices, but they’ve been choices all the same, not the desperate floundering of an actor lost in a part he misunderstood.

THE SHINING. All the carping over the years over how inappropriate Nicholson was to portray a slow descent into madness (um, except yours, I’m sure, Matt) overlooked what a brave, strange, and utterly uncharacteristic performance this was. Nicholson was the go-to guy for explosive derangement, sure, but (save CARNAL KNOWLEDGE) all his great ‘70s characters were more importantly marked by a moral sense so affronted it had to feign indifference. (Am I stealing that line from a critic? It feels that I am.) Gittes, Buddusky, Staebler, McMurphy, even happy-go-lucky Hanson and burnt-out David Locke; all want a break from their string of failures and compromises, all have the jumbled sense that fixing their new problem will somehow atone for past calamities, all—however jovial their demeanor—are mournfully longing for one god damned thing to go right in this world.

But Jack Torrance, though he shares the background, follows his urges to the opposite pole. As he becomes aware of the price being asked of him—the murder of his wife and child—the idea transforms from horrifying to intriguing to an arousing, self-evident necessity. Nicholson (and Kubrick) ratchet up the tension by paradoxically making Jack a funnier, more engaging screen presence as he deteriorates. The laugh he gets from his description of breaking Danny’s arm (“a momentary loss of muscular coordination”) is as genuine as it is gruesome. And the shot of Nicholson’s savagely grinning, Neanderthal face rising into frame isn’t merely the scariest part of the picture; it’s the id unshackled, and loving it.

CHINATOWN. Well of course. What second of his performance here isn’t one of the loveliest ever captured on film? My personal favorite bit: the expert glance about the library and just a hair too forced cough when he rips the land deed out of its binding. It shows how professional Gittes is, and how he’s too amateur for what he’s about to enter into.

BLOOD AND WINE. Nicholson’s loyalty to Rafelson hasn’t always been rewarded with films equal to the actor, but it has led to four of Nicholson’s greatest performances. (Since you’re probably thinking differently, my odd-man-out choice is POSTMAN.) And actually I think this is the best of the batch. Middle-aged Nicholson is a subtly different beast from the young man, sterner, self-righteous, possibly even hungrier but slower to show it. Rafelson has tracked the change as well as anyone—where once he saddled Nicholson with the middle name Eroica or the mocking surname Staebler, here he’s Gates, fenced in and shut closed. The horrific scene where Nicholson gingerly paws Judy Davis’s bloody body for the jewels, muttering hollow assurances all the while, might be the most monstrous moment Nicholson has ever dared play—as well as the smallest and most pathetic.

BROADCAST NEWS. Only a cameo, you say? Sure, but a delicious one. It’s a tribute to Nicholson’s work ethic that even when we only see him onscreen in the background, he seems every inch the committed newsreader. And further proof of his lack of vanity that Bill’s ultimate appearance is so hilariously, unctuously vile: absorbing and passing along the names whispered in his ear by a flunky as if greeting old, dear friends; attention-grabbing in his supposedly helpless commiseration about the layoffs; flashing the hint of a dangerous rival indeed when a joke is made about his salary. Nicholson packs a lot into his five minutes, and looks damned good in the suit while he’s at it.

THE PASSENGER. Antonioni’s best film, because Nicholson wrestles from it the most humane presence in the director’s career. When you can remain the most memorable icon amid Antonioni’s typically ecstatic shots of deserts, Gaudi, and Maria Schneider, you’re a hell of an actor.

Chaz: Maybe I’m misunderstanding your question (I’ve never heard of De Zengotita or Goffman, so don’t know what their argument is), but Johnny Depp has frequently acknowledged that his characterizations are based upon other public personas: Ronald Reagan and Casey Kasem for Ed Wood, Richard Grant’s Withnail for Ichabod Crane, Keith Richards of course for Jack Sparrow. (I’ve a friend who swears Depp’s doing a Matthew McConaughey impersonation in THE ASTRONAUT’S WIFE, and it absolutely fits if you’re looking for it.) Of course this is certainly a common practice among actors, who have to base what they are doing upon something, but Depp seems especially upfront about the practice.

If instead you’re wondering why modern day actors don’t mimic older actors more (I confess I couldn’t understand what you were getting at with your Norton and Koteas examples), didn’t you answer this in your second post? Older styles can become (at least seem so to modern audiences, which is not necessarily the same thing) anachronistic and why try to become successful emulating a mode that is currently scorned?

“There are hardly any young actors that don't mind making fools of themselves. They're not brave.”

You have to respect your actors because they’re the ones who tell your lies, to paraphrase Robert Altman. Being in a movie is making a fool of yourself all the time, since it’s just playing dress-up, and you’re supposed to outgrow that before your teens. I’d honestly say that anyone who’s ever stepped up on a high-school or church stage and, in front of others, pretended to be something they’re not has been braver than I ever have.

Chaz: Maybe De Niro's extreme approaches to character, a la Raging Bull and Taxi Driver and Bang the Drum Slowly and Godfather 2 and King of Comedy.

What do these movies have in common that a lot of today's movies don't have? A GOOD SCRIPT. You're not going to see the kind of change you seek until we get better writing in movies.

It's a different world, and I can't think of who will be "the next Brando" or "the next DeNiro" or (just because he's my fave actor) "the next Mitchum" because these originals came along in a different time and place.

I will agree with you that a lot of celebrities are so concerned with their images that they act safely on screen, saving the fearless, embarrassing stuff for their mug shots. This relates to Nicholson because you never got the impression that he was below doing crazy shit onscreen, no matter how he looks.

Chaz, good call on Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves, but I'd have to say that Bjork's turn in Dancer in the Dark was damned courageous too. I also really liked Kidman in Dogville, so entirely possible that I simply have a hard on for the way Von Trier abuses his lead actresses. Come to think of it, Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of my all time favourite performances as well. What the hell is wrong with me?

Still, turning our attention to European and Asian actors might not be a bad idea. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, anyone?

1. The Pledge - One of the more painful performances I've seen, in a good way. This man just falls apart before our eyes and it's all the more painful because he's right, and a twist of fate prevents his own personal happiness and sanity in the end.

2. Chinatown - Jack is perfect here, smooth and modulated and restrained and handsome and tough. I think The Two Jakes is highly underrated as well, with a couple of all-time great tragic lead performances from Jack and Harvey Keitel.

3. The Last Detail - The best 'angry' performance in Jack's career, I echo all that has been said.

4. As Good As It Gets - I have issues with the film overall, but the performance is for me his ultimate over-the-top, charismatic lead role. The Shining comes close in this category, though.

5. Batman - I think this was the first Jack Nicholson film I saw! It says something about his role that the film is nominally about the Dark Knight but the top actor on the poster was Nicholson. Not a great film, but he's fantastic in both roles, the conniving noir villain Jack Napier and the manic comic book evil of the Joker.

I have a good feeling about his forthcoming role in The Departed, as well; Scorsese and Nicholson has me salivating.

Little Shop of Horrors. The 1960 version. Come on, you know it belongs on this list.

Odie, for the site now...
I'm sorry to say I haven't seen THE LAST DETAIL nor THE RAVEN. Otherwise, I'd pretty much agree with everything you've got there.

Personally, my favorite Jack performance is...

1. AS GOOD AS IT GETS
He manages to somehow make a grumpy, ODC, curmudgen lovable throughout the course of the movie. And, I'm almost embarassed to admit this -- I saw AS GOOD AS IT GETS in the movies 5 times, making it second on my list for "Most Times Seeing a Movie In The Theatre." I can't explain it. James L. Brooks always manages to work his magic on me.

2. CARNAL KNOWLEDGE
I think gets overshadowed by many people. While the film is too stagey at times, Jack gets his second most vulnerable performance (ABOUT SCHMIDT, a terrific choice, on my Jack 5).

3. EASY RIDER
I'm surprised this hasn't had a passing mention yet. His character is probably the most enduring of the film's three leads. Jack keeps the film from merely being a counter-cultural artifact today. George Hanson's shedding of the demands of society is much more resonant to me than either Peter Fonda's or Dennis Hopper's.

My other two... damn, I want three... Everything's been said...
CHINATOWN (how does that ending not make you angry?). ABOUT SCHMIDT (how does that ending not make you at least tear up?). BATMAN (how can any one ever play this character again? I'm looking at you, Heath).

One quick bit of trivia... In ABOUT SCHMIDT there was a scene cut from the film where Jack playfully did a variation on the infamous truck stop scene from FIVE EASY PIECES (deserves a mention, too). Jack's Warren Schmidt orders a plain omlette but asks for tomatoes in place of potatoes. The waitress reminds him, "no substitutions." Jack plainly says, "I'll have the potatoes."

Everything Nicholson did from "Five Easy Pieces" to "Missouri Breaks" is pretty fantastic.

Let me put in a word for a worthy obscurity: Henry Jaglom's "A Safe Place." In that movie, he is very much playing himself, but not in the frisky "Jack" sense. The quiet tenderness he shows towards Tuesday Weld is very touching. It was all improvised, I think.

Great Jack Moment: The way he says, "Louise..." after driving Louise Bryant out of the room and out of his life in "Reds."

The sense of decency he captures as "The Border" goes on is also memorable---and that's a very underrated, overlooked film.

Nicholson is the bridge between those newer style actors who disappear into a character and the Hollywood Stars of yesteryear, whose big personalities needed to be cast in the right vehicle.

Buddusky is essential Jack; McMurphy is quintessential Jack. He's great in the underrated Carnal Knowledge -- with its doozy of a last scene. Talk about exposing what a feeble house of cards the male ego can be!

He's awful good in Five Easy Pieces too. How about that sex he has with Karen Black? He slings her around like a rag doll and demolishes the entire room. And how about that ending? It's hard to imagine that kind of ending going over today. The audience would be more confused than if it was a mind-blowing metaphysical sci-fi trick ending. But that kind of thing was almost standard then. I think Easy Rider is a silly movie in many ways, but back then when Peter Fonda said "We blew it" I bet the audience had at least some inkling about what it was that was blown.

For my money, Chinatown contains Jack's finest, richest, most nuanced performance. Jake Gittes having lunch with Noah Cross is probably the best acted scene I've ever seen, period.
"You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't. Why is that funny?"

"It's what the district attorney used to tell me in chinatown."

"Yeah? Was he right?"

Just then the look on J.J.'s face speaks volumes. The final scene is devastating. Jake is a man who has looked helpless into the face of evil. He can't get anyone to listen.

"I can explain everything. He's rich, do you understand, thinks he'll get away with anything. Just listen to me for five minutes!"

Compare the look in Jakes eyes to Brad Pitt at the end of Se7en, when the squad car carts him off in a state of near catatonia. Forget about it indeed. Sorry, I will never forget Chinatown.

The Last Detail, The Border, The Pledge. These films make a new Nicholson mustache rule: a mustached Jack never gives a bad performance.

3. EASY RIDER
I'm surprised this hasn't had a passing mention yet

Take a look at my first post.

This is the movie the writer of that hideous Mr and Mrs. Smith should have studied, before realizing there was no way in hell he could top it. Wagstaff, get out here and defend why you don't like Charlie!!

Ding, ding. Huh ..what? Where is he? Where'd he go? Jack's Charlie was just a kind of put-on type performance that didn't work for me. I tend not to like it when he does funny stuff with his voice and face. I didn't like him in Hoffa either. On paper I should've liked Prizzi's Honor -- in fact I remember enjoying the book. The movie had a contract out on my funnybone, and it never made the hit. But that was twenty years ago. Someday I'll watch it again in light of all the great gangster stuff I've seen since then. I will readily grant that it's worlds better than Mr. and Mrs. Smith which I just saw recently.

Watching that Bradgelina movie reminded me of the discussion about broken glass, and what a dangerous obstacle it was for John McClain in the Die Hard thread a few weeks ago. Mr. and Mrs. Smith's house gets shot up real good, and there is a shitload of broken glass everywhere -- but its just so much backdrop for the impervious couple. They lounge in it; they frolic in it; they have coitus and post coitus in it; they eat breakfast in it and drink from shattered juice glasses. This is getting to be a peeve of mine. Am I the only one who sees broken glass and always thinks "Ouch! That looks sharp!"? We've come such a long way from that single devastating shard in Persona.

Odie: Gittes is a private eye on a case so complicated that, on my last viewing, I finally discovered the answer to a question that had eluded me countless times before.

Odie, you gotta tell us what this was.

I'll start by inserting Nicholson's Hollywood breakthrough performance in Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider.

Apologies, Dan. We're both on the same page.

Wagstaff: "I tend not to like it when he does funny stuff with his voice and face. I didn't like him in Hoffa either."

I'm in agreement there, for the most part. While I have a lot of affection for Prizzi's Honor, I never entirely accept Nicholson's character as anything but a rich and entertaining caricature; he doesn't live and breathe for me with the same intensity as Nicholson's performances in, say, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider, The Shining, The Border, Broadcast News, even About Schmidt (which was artificial in the sense that he wasn't playing an obviously Jack-like persona, just playing a quiet older man with an unsatisfying life; he used a subtler version of his own recognizable voice, though).

Hoffa was one of the most spectacular and ambitious failures of the 90s. There was so much to like in it -- Danny DeVito pretended he was Orson Welles and really thought through every camera move, every composition, every shadow, every transition. And there were some juicy supporting turns, particularly by Frank Whaley. Between David Mamet's script--which sophomorically and tastelessly superposed New Testament parallels to paint a mythic portrait of a self-sacrificing union boss crucified by the mob and his government--and Nicholson's contrived diction and accent and the horrendous false nose that hampered his expressiveness and seemed about to fly off his face during the character's fits of rage, I didn't know whether to laugh at the movie or feel sad over what might have been. Nicholson's performance in this one always baffled me -- he seemed to be muffling his own considerable charm to make the character seem more "mythic." Brian Dennehy would have done a much better job. In fact, he sort of did, in the HBO movie "The Jackie Presser Story."

That said, I have since had a number of very intelligent people attempt to defend that movie as one of the overlooked masterpieces of the 90s, containing one of Nicholson's most surprising and original performances. Sorry, but I just don't see it.

As a director, George Clooney is the new Danny DeVito. He works pretty hard to be inventive, and it comes out fairly well. I'm basing this on the pretty good Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and on only my idea of Good Night, and Good Luck which I haven't seen.

Sorry coming in way late at the party, but I had the honor of being an extra on " Postman Always Rings Twice" & I gotta tell ya,The man is awesome,A pro.There were about 25-30 extras & many other spectators & he just made everyone feel like we were family,if only for the one day I was lucky enough to be there. I love Jack since I first saw " Chinatown " on a double bill [ remember those ? ] with an obscure flick called " Peeper " with Michael Caine & Natalie Wood.It changed my life, and have relished each performance the man has given ever since, good, bad or indifferent.