How Jack Nicholson’s “best part” went off the rails: “The finesse just didn’t work”
Jack Nicholson is now one of the most legendary and respected actors of his generation, so it can be easy to forget just how many risks he took in his career.
Easy Rider was a renegade road movie with more drugs and leather than the rest of Hollywood cinema combined up to that point, and it could have gotten him, and everyone else involved, struck off the casting roster for decades to come. Carnal Knowledge took that provocation into the realm of sexual exploits, and Nicholson somehow managed to walk away with the film despite playing an indiscriminately cruel misogynist.
Throughout his career, the Oscar winner has dominated every challenge so completely that you could never imagine anyone else in his roles. Even though a formidable list of significantly more famous actors had been vying for the lead in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Stephen King was vehemently opposed to him playing Jack Torrance in The Shining, he still managed to make those characters synonymous with himself.
However, despite all these improbable successes, there are plenty of risks in Nicholson’s back catalogue that did not pay off. One film that he still regrets is 1975’s The Fortune, which saw him reteaming with his Carnal Knowledge director, Mike Nichols.
The film is set in the 1920s and tells the story of two incompetent hoodlums (Nicholson and Warren Beatty) who attempt to steal the fortune of a naive young millionaire who is heir to a sanitary napkin empire (Stockard Channing). They prove to be so terrible at the business of conning and murder that even after she falls in love with one of them, they still fail at their objective.
There is a hint of Bedtime Story about the plot, which was a film from 1964 in which Marlon Brando and David Niven similarly try to con a naive heiress out of her money through seduction. However, where that film was mildly successful at evoking laughs, The Fortune was something of a disaster. Nichols, who had made some of the defining movies of the New Hollywood movement (namely The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge), was out of depth with slapstick comedy, and Nicholson and Beatty are just too good at specificity to convincingly play two-dimensional dullards.
Later, the Easy Rider star opined that they had been hoping to make something unusual with The Fortune but had failed on the execution. “I did it because that, too, was adventurous,” he said, “But the ‘finesse’ just didn’t work.” It made him sad, he continued, because it was “the best part” he ever had.
That’s a curious statement, although perhaps we should expect to be constantly surprised by Nicholson at this point. There is basically no way to argue that Oscar Sullivan is his greatest role. Maybe if you were only counting his work up to 1967, when he was rattling around in the B-movie universe of Roger Corman, but even then, he was pretty mesmerising in The Cry Baby Killer and The Raven.
It’s hard to see where he thinks the finesse was lost in The Fortune, because the issue seems to have been that three filmmakers with an abundance of finesse (Nichols, Nicholson, and Beatty) were trying to fit into a throwback genre that they themselves had helped to dismantle. It’s no wonder it went tits up.
