News and Commentary – Karen Black: The New Hollywood Years

Of all the things I learned during what better heeled writers refer to as “book leave” – that is, some time away from the regular beat so that the magnum opus might be attended to – was that Karen Black has a new album out. This was surprising, for a number of reasons, not least of which is that Blackie, as Jack Nicholson used to call her, left us in 2013.

The news also served as a chastising reminder that we had not yet given Black the “New Hollywood Years” treatment. Arguably more of a cult figure than a big time movie star, Black is, nevertheless, after Faye Dunaway and Jane Fonda, perhaps the signature female actor of the New Hollywood era. She appeared in twenty-one feature films from 1969 to 1977, and on the strength of five of them in particular – the 1970-1971 Grand Slam of Five Easy Pieces, Drive, He Said, Cisco Pike, and Born to Win, as well as Nashville (1975) – her prominent place in the pantheon of the seventies film is inarguable.

Five Easy Pieces is surely her best known (and arguably her greatest) performance. We have written about this one extensively, but it is worth repeating that director Bob Rafelson was reluctant to cast Black in the role of Rayette (opposite Nicholson, whose career was transformed by the film), because audiences would intuit that she was “too smart” to plausibly embody that character. “Bob,” she famously promised, “when you call ‘action,’ I will stop thinking.” The proof is on-screen—and comparing Black’s Rayette with her outstanding turn as the whip-smart Connie White in Altman’s magisterial Nashville is an eye-opening reminder that the actors we see on screen are . . . uh . . . acting.

A similar conclusion could be drawn from her performance in Drive, He Said—Nicholson’s debut effort as a director which followed closely on the heels of Pieces. Black’s Olive – the most complex character in the film – suggests not a trace of Rayette or White. Drive, well worth seeing, is ultimately an uneven film, but its greatest strengths derive from the contributions of Black and Bruce Dern. Drive was the first of three notable turns in 1971. Next up was the odd but meritorious seventies obscurity Cisco Pike, in which she played the love interest of Kris Kristofferson and shared the screen with Gene Hackman and Harry Dean Stanton; Black followed that with the similarly intriguing and under-seen Born to Win, opposite George Segal in Czech new-waver Ivan Passer’s first American film.

Unfortunately and curiously, as confirmed by the mini Karen Black festival inspired by the anticipation of this essay, the balance of her films in the decade that followed were uneven. For which we do not blame her, an invariably welcome presence whenever she graces the screen—even, as a quick review of some of our old notes confirm, in a few out-and-out clunkers. Yet again this is a lesson in the magic of the movies, and of the enormous role that luck plays in shaping both films and film history—or as screenwriter William Goldman put it, “no one knows anything.” Black’s choices are hard to second guess. Consider some promising literary adaptions: Portnoy’s Complaint (1972) and The Great Gatsby (1974). What could possibly go wrong? Well, everything. (And keep in mind that Portnoy was helmed by Ernest Lehman and featured Richard Benjamin and Lee Grant; Gatsby was written by Francis Ford Coppola and boasted a cast that included Robert Redford, Bruce Dern, and Sam Waterson. Those sure sound like green light projects.) And who can quibble with signing on to star in films by great directors like John Schlesinger or Alfred Hitchcock? Yet despite her estimable work on each picture, Day of the Locust (another impressively cast, impeccably-pedigreed adaptation) and Family Plot simply fail to gel. What about taking the lead in a major Hollywood Blockbuster? Well, maybe that one was predictable. To be fair, Airport ’75 in invaluable for providing the source material for about half the jokes in Airplane, and if you’re eager to see Charlton Heston effortlessly ease his way from a moving helicopter through the smashed out window of the cockpit of a speeding 747 and arrive with nary a hair out of place, saving both aircraft and love interest—well, this is the movie for you. But we’re with Ebert on this one: “a compelling performance by Karen Black . . . [who is] too good an actress for a role like this.”

“Compelling performance by Karen Black” is pretty much par for the course. And to close on a winner, consider her extraordinary work in Robert Altman’s Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean—as good as anything she ever did. A complex role of nuance and subtly—and once again, in a different tone and key than all that which had come before. Yes, Jimmy Dean is from 1982. But even when you take Altman out of the New Hollywood, you can’t take the New Hollywood out of Altman.