Drive, he said

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Summary

Jack Nicholson's first directing effort is a sports movie as it might have been conceived by Jean-Luc Godard, rife with kinetic editing and easy eroticism (as well as the casual sexism of the time)...

Jack Nicholson's first directing effort is a sports movie as it might have been conceived by Jean-Luc Godard, rife with kinetic editing and easy eroticism (as well as the casual sexism of the time). Hector (William Tepper, who later played Tom Hanks's father in Bachelor Party) is a rising college basketball star in a troubled relationship with dance student Olive (Karen Black, Five Easy Pieces), while his roommate, guerrilla theater student/political activist Gabriel (Michael Margotta, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?), keeps himself awake so long to avoid the draft that he slips into madness. There is no plot per se, though the ebb and flow of Hector's relationship with his bullying coach (Bruce Dern, Silent Running) runs throughout the movie. Drive, He Said is mostly a state-of-consciousness film, striving to capture the mood of student unrest of the late 1960s/early '70s, a mix of manic frustration and existential dislocation (some scenes were shot during an actual student riot). The opening sequence, in which the guerrilla theater troupe disrupts a basketball game, is stunning, and the raw immediacy of how Nicholson, a notorious basketball fan, shot the playing was hugely influential.

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