Drive, He Said (1971)

Masterful Movie

Fantastic!

Better Late Then Never

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Hector (William Tepper) is a star basketball player for the College basketball team he plays for, the Leopards. His girlfriend, Olive (Karen Black), does not know whether to stay with him or leave him. And his friend, Gabriel (Michael Margotta), who may have dropped out from school and become a protester, wants desperately not to get drafted for Vietnam.This film marks Jack Nicholson's directorial debut, a chair he would not return to often. The casting was nothing special (though Karen Black is always great); the best part may be Bruce Dern as the coach. Some day he will get the full respect he deserves.Roger Ebert found the film "disorganized", but also said it was "occasionally brilliant" with the performances being "the best thing in the movie", including the "laconic charm" of Tepper. This seems fair. For all the good things that can be said, it never really hits home hard enough, and may be dated.

As most people know, Jack Nicholson is a rabid basketball fan. He has his own center seat at the L.A. Lakers games and even before becoming really famous, according to Roman Polanski in a CHINATOWN interview, he furiously demanded to watch a televised game in his trailer...So it may come as no surprise that Jack's directorial debut, a few years before that, would center on a college basketball player drawing crowds during the "turbulent" hippie era.The games and practices are filmed nicely, combining a shaky documentary style with creative editing that went into other BBC productions like EASY RIDER, in which Jack co- starred, and surreal aspects of HEAD, that he co-wrote.Bruce Dern's hard-nosed Coach Bullion wants to win games, and his star player Hector, played by William Tepper, best known as Tom Hank's uptight brother in BACHELOR PARTY years later, is the perfect fit for the role – but only in one important aspect: He's tall and can play the game really well.Unfortunately Tepper isn't interesting enough to carry the story along. Remaining in peripheral rhythm with Gabriel, his rebellious roommate, Hector, like the film itself, isn't sure whether to center his attention on basketball or the student revolutionaries, and winds up meandering pointlessly in-between.As the bushy-haired radical, Michael Margotta's Gabriel is the token messianic anti-hero. From heading a non-violent guerrilla raid during an opening game, to feigning insanity to avoid the Vietnam draft, he eventually takes personal wrath on Karen Black's Olive, who, as Hector's on/off girlfriend having an affair with an enigmatic character played by writer Robert Towne, is, compared to her standout performance in FIVE EASY PIECES, ultimately wasted in a filler role.Nicholson juggles noisy basketball games and the hippie students gathered with Henry Jaglom's radical campus professor, while June Fairchild, best known as the Ajax-snorting lady in Cheech and Chong's UP IN SMOKE, appears as a cheerleading hippie. The soon to-be- famous Cindy Williams turns up in a quick cameo and future HILL STREET BLUES actor Mike Warren, as one of the players depending on Hector's talent, simply wants the team to go all the way.DRIVE, HE SAID tries really hard to capture drug culture angst and, straying from a sport providing the core of the film's energy and purpose, and with two leading actors not strong enough to carry either the athletic or protest story lines, is more of a curio for anyone interested in what Nicholson was up to before blasting off into cult, and then mainstream, superstardom.

This may be the only film that actually comes close to capturing on film the essentially uncapturable world of the American college experience of the late 60s-early 70s. Go ahead, name another movie that even approaches this one: "Getting Straight"? "RPM"? These are caricatures. "Return of the Secaucus Seven" has its moments, but that's a retrospective film about (self-obsessed) individuals more than a film about a time and a place depicted *in* that time and place. "Drive, He Said" portrays-- with subtlety and nuance where it should, and a swift kick in the shorts where that's the only appropriate way-- the anti-draft movement, the ambiguity of big-time college sports (especially when there's a war on), the sexual revolution of the period, and the general unreality of the day. Believe me, it was like that.The whole cast deserves commendation (as does the director, of course) but particular praise should be reserved for Bruce Dern, as the basketball coach, and Karen Black, the hero's very unusual-- except for that time-- love interest. William Tepper, as the lead, also rates a real round of applause both for his perfect capturing of the student-athlete of the period and for actually playing real college basketball in the film (remember Anthony Perkins in "Tall Story"? Yikes!).All in all, a classic of a kind-- and the last film someone currently in 6th grade should be writing comments on ("boring", "repellent"-- um, right, sonny, please go back to your Arnold movies). Why isn't this film available from imdb?

Some movies are repellent but still fascinating (Pulp Fiction); others are simply boring. This movie has an almost unique feature of being both utterly repellent and totally boring. By the end I didn't care about any of the characters, I just wanted all of them dead so I could get out of the theatre.