For Big Jack

News broke earlier in the month of the retirement of a true great in the shape of Jack Nicholson, a man that has produced some of the most inspiring and memorable performances to grace the big screen over the best part of the last 4 decades. So I thought I’d compile my favourite Jack Nicholson movies.

5. The Departed (2006)

Arguably in his last notable offering Nicholson fulfils one of the key functions of any noteworthy crime/thriller picture; that of the villain. Jack’s performance is every bit the contradiction of the Boston crime lord he depicts who alongside his Irish hoodlums possess a terrifyingly brutal snarl and swagger, yet is piloted by an intense cunning and calculative measure to stay ahead of the game, pitting Matt Damon and Leo DiCaprio against each other.
 

4. The Last Detail (1973)

 

This particular detail maybe Big Jack’s most humorous, two Navy men are tasked with transferring (by land) a hapless Randy Quaid to a Navy Prison for stealing for $40 from a collection box, however “Badass” Buddusky  (Nicholson) has other ideas and turns the job into an Odyssey of Booze, Broads and brawls by way of big city delights  in order to show his new found charge a good time before his 8 year stretch.

3. The Shining (1980)

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining  really is as good as horror can get and Nicholson’s contribution as twisted patriarch Jack Torrence is an essential piece of the puzzle. The Torrence family must endure the on screen descent and disintegration of Jack’s psyche in to a murky murderous mental state caused by the fortified surroundings of his temporary employment in a Colorado hotel with its mysterious effects. 

2. The Passenger (1975)  

 

Nicholson pairs up with Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger as he plays a Journalist going the extra mile for a story whilst stuck in sub Saharan Africa. When Locke (Nicholson) assumes the identity of a recently deceased gun runner it sets into play a gripping journey of chicanery, romance and escapism of attempting to live the life of a stranger.

 

1. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) 

Randal P. McMurphy (Nicholson) is born of a fiercely simplistic combinational philosophy: the love for the freedoms and liberties of life with a disgust for any form of restrictive and joyless boundaries. Mac as he likes to be known is faced  with a torturous test of his sensibilities, opting to spend the rest of his short jail term in a mental  ward in order to escape some hard time, he struggles to cope with his fellow patients physical and mental incarceration, which is embodied through his  newly acquired nemesis Nurse Ratched who sets out thwart and repress any form of emancipation.