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Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Captivating movie !

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Before he became a journalist, Eugene McCarthy's speechwriter, and then an Oscar-winning screenwriter (The Candidate), Jeremy Larner was a successful novelist. His first effort, Drive, He Said (Delacorte Press, 1964) won the $10,000 Delta Prize for best first novel, beating out over a thousand other manuscripts. The protagonist of Drive, He Said is Hector Bloom, "a half-hick, half-Jew, left-handed neurotic basketball player from the green hills of California" who attends a small, upstate New York university on the Hudson River. The book's other protagonist is Bloom's roommate, Gabriel Reuben, a New York City Jew from an affluent family who nonetheless harbors revolutionary political sentiments. Bloom plays great basketball, sleeps with a professor's wife, and confusedly ponders his future with pro recruiters while Reuben plots seditious mayhem—and eventually acts out by burning down the campus! Written before America's full engagement in Vietnam, Drive, He Said is more centrally concerned with early 1960s cultural vertigo, the vagaries of American Dream ideology, and arms race anxieties. Scripted just after the Sixties by first-time director Jack Nicholson in collaboration with author Jeremy Larner (and un-credited help from Robert Towne and Terrence Malick), Drive, He Said zeroes in on the radicalization of an All-American college jock during the era of Vietnam War protests—which were at their height when the movie was being filmed on the campus of the University of Oregon (Eugene, OR). The somewhat chaotic structure of Drive He Said, while off-putting to some critics, nicely enacts the turmoil of the time. Performances are, however, a mixed bag. The redoubtable Bruce Dern is excellent as Hector's mean-spirited coach. Karen Black is equally convincing as Olive, Hector's troubled mistress. Michael Margotta, who plays Hector's roommate, the increasingly psychotic campus radical is also good. Unfortunately William Tepper, an unknown cast as Hector lacks the charisma to carry off the lead role. Filmmaker Henry Jaglom and screenwriter Robert Towne both play professors and David Ogden Stiers and Cindy Williams appear in minor roles. Screened at the 6th Annual CineVegas Film Festival (2004) where Jack Nicholson was honored with the Festival's Marquee Award, Drive, He Said has not been released on VHS or DVD.

Poorly developed and fragmented movie about a confused college basketball player with a host of predictably militant and/or cynically unhappy acquaintances characteristic of 1960s academia where the film is set. I'm not sure whether we are supposed to like or even care about the characters or not, but in any event I didn't feel much of either for any of them. Jack Nicholson directed this movie with a taste for profanity and nudity. I guess he thought he was being provocative and progressively mirroring the changing cultural mores of the time. He would have fared better by putting his energy into developing characterization and refining the script that he co-wrote instead. All in all a disappointing movie which left me with a feeling of indifference about it.

Fashionably fragmented, yet infuriatingly half-realized character-study, an examination of the different personalities of two college roommates: a talented but undisciplined star basketball player, and a pot-smoking, womanizing rabble-rouser. We never learn why these young men are friends. They may share confusions about the world and their places in it, but they don't seem to have anything else in common. Making his directorial debut, Jack Nicholson--who also co-wrote the screenplay with Jeremy Larner, based upon Larner's book--doesn't introduce us to the characters with any clarity, nor he does shape the scenes to help us identify with anyone on the screen. There are some very decent performances here (particularly from newcomer William Tepper in the central role), but most of the picture is unformed (perhaps intentionally), sketchy or unsure. Bruce Dern plays the hard-driving basketball coach, Karen Black is the older, married lady Tepper is having an affair with, and Michael Margotta is Tepper's wayward friend (in an off-putting, over-the-top performance). Nicholson fails to set up the sequences with any particular flavor, preferring (I assume) to let the character interaction dominate the film's tone; his script is no help either, and as a result it is unclear whom we're supposed to sympathize with. Small, random moments do work (a supermarket fight between Tepper and Black, Dern visiting Tepper in his dorm-room, all of the scenes set on the court), however the entire third act of the picture is an excruciating mess. Hoping to juxtapose an all-important b-ball game with a sexual assault, Nicholson shows no style at his craft (nor does he earn points for chutzpah, as his staging of these events is squashy and ugly). When a director goes out of his way to humiliate his actors, one has to question his motives in doing so. Perhaps if "Drive, He Said" ultimately made some sort of powerful statement in the bargain, audiences could forgive the filmmaker for his lapses in judgment and taste. Unfortunately, the perplexing closer is as dumbfounding as is much of the rest of the movie. *1/2 from ****

Drive, He Said (1971) ** (out of 4) Jack Nicholson's directorial debut is a confussing mess but here goes. The film deals with a troubled basketball star (William Tepper) who's caught in an affair with a teacher's wife (Karen Black). The only person trying to make him go straight is his coach (Bruce Dern) but outsiders keep stepping in the way. The film was also co-written by Nicholson and most of the blame can start right here. The film is all over the place and it seems there are enough story lines for at least five other movies. There's also a subplot with a friend who's trying to dodge the draft, which goes no where and leads to some pretty over the top, wannabe serious moments. The one thing going for the film are some pretty good performances, although it appears Dern is trying to give a Nicholson impersonation. Nicholson's direction hits a few good notes but in the end this seems like something that would have only been shown on TV. Needless to say it's never gotten an official release on home video.