Reception
The film opened to positive reviews and huge business at the box office and holds an 86% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 35 reviews. It immediately became the movie that Bob Rafelson would be known for. He worked before on counterculture comedy as in the Monkees TV show and their famous cult film Head. Now he made a movie which considered the other side of youth, in this case, those that left the good life behind and were not content. For this movie, he won praise. It would also be remembered as the movie that got Jack Nicholson noticed in Hollywood. He was quickly approached to play modern day rebels with or without a conscience. The one scene in this film that Nicholson was liked for was the part where he fights with a waitress over eggs, toast, and a chicken sandwich, demanding that she hold the chicken 'between her knees.' He later worked with Rafelson on four more movies over the next twenty six years.
The film received Academy Award nominations for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Karen Black), Best Picture, and Best Original Screenplay. Nicholson lost to George C. Scott, but was nominated several times before getting the Award for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Read more about this topic: Five Easy Pieces
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)