Quintessential Jack by Scott Edwards

Author:Scott Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Published: 2017-12-11T05:00:00+00:00

His acclaimed performance as Weary Reilly meant a lot to the then-struggling Nicholson, according to Gary Kent. Studs Lonigan (1960) portrayed 1920s Chicago juvenile delinquents in an adaptation of the James T. Farrell trilogy made topical to the youth crisis of the early 1960s (reproduction lobby card signed by Nicholson’s fellow gang member Frank Gorshin).

Reportedly, Nicholson coveted this role. He expressed his pride in having played the part a few years later to fellow actor and master stuntman Gary Kent. Kent related that Nicholson seemed a bit rankled that “he was more or less ignored…. He kind of felt that people should maybe pay a little attention to him and weren’t doing it yet.”6

In contrast, star Christopher Knight is extraordinarily terrible, so laughably overwrought and comically over-emotive that he’s almost a throwback to the worst of the early silent cinema “photo players,” twisted up and contorted, suffering as if he’s about to void himself.

Nicholson instead makes the most of his well-gained opportunity. In a close-up with an aging party girl at a speakeasy, he has a suitably snarky, sneering attitude that’s accompanied by a quick, clipped delivery of impatient superiority. Weary is smart and smart-assed. After cracking a joke to the sad, sodden hustler (unfortunately, the joke was on her), he busts out laughing—laughing the joy of someone who has hurt the helpless, the kind who lays it on thick only to pull the rug out.

In a burlesque club scene, Jack goes out of control watching the womanly entertainment. He bounces in his seat; taps a booze bottle on his head; grabs the guys in the row in front of him and next to him; hoots, hollers, yells, whoops, becoming more like a monkey than a boyish gang member. He’s too excited and worked up to handle himself, perhaps a foreshadowing of his forthcoming sexual assault and downfall, and perhaps his best early acting sequence next to the brief Little Shop of Horrors dentist scene.

Reilly and the gang attend a political party, not the kind that elects candidates, but the type that brings men and booze and women together and the kind where a politician makes the ultimate campaign promise by proclaiming, “The drinks are on me!”

Weary gets crazy drunk, with Nicholson convincingly so, and grabs a showgirl to drag her up the steps, forcing and practically carrying her to a room for the purpose of forcible sexual congress. Afterward, he is grabbed by two police officers and struggles to break free, accented by a strong Jackish “You ain’t got nothing on me!”

The character destroyed himself, a juvenile delinquent who took it too far like cop killer Johnny Varron in The Wild Ride. But Gary Kent drew the comparison of the quintessential Jack with the Studs Lonigan gang member before he descended from bad boy to convict. “One of the things I remember was the Weary Reilly part, because Studs Lonigan was one of my favorite books and Weary was one of my favorite characters. And every time I see

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