The King of Marvin Gardens Research

We was briefed on the alternative movie poster before we broke up for the Easter holidays. There was no set date to start the brief as this was an independent brief in which we submitted the first day back. We was all given a film that Jack Nicholson had featured in. The one I was given was:

The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

My first thoughts on this film, was that it was going to be an old film possibly black & white and that the title gave nothing away about the genre of the film...


This is when I started my research, I typed the title into Google and noticed that the star rating of the film was 3 out of 5, which I suppose is not too bad. I clicked onto the IMDb site as I knew that this information would be factual and the most accurate.

Its summary of the film said:
'It's Monopoly out there'. Jason Staebler, The King of Marvin Gardens, has gone directly to jail, lives on the Boardwalk and fronts for the local mob in Atlantic City. He is also a dreamer who asks his brother, David, a radio personality from Philadelphia to help him build a paradise on a Pacific Island - asking him to believe in yet another of his dreams, yet another of his get-rich-quick schemes. But luck is against them both and the game ends badly - real life reduced to radio drama. 

The "its a monopoly out there" instantly made me think about how the game could represent monopoly.


I searched to see if I could buy the film and how much it would cost me... I found it on Amazon amazingly the film was cheap within a boxset rather than on its own. 


I wanted to know more of a plotline of the film therefore I went onto another website. It was stating that this was an American new-wave film which when it was released the views were very low, until the re-release.

One of the most downbeat movies of the time, it features Nicholson as the deeply depressed, anti-charismatic David Staebler, who earns a modest living telling miserable tales about his family in the early hours of the morning on a Philadelphia FM radio station. He's lured at the height of winter to the once grand, now decaying New Jersey resort of Atlantic City by his estranged brother, Jason (Bruce Dern). This fast-talking, ever hopeful wheeler-dealer and con man is involved with gangsters in a dicey project to buy a Hawaiian island and turn it into a casino.
Atlantic City is the model for the original 1930 Monopoly board, launched at the height of the Depression, and the game and the city are here a symbol for the despair and false hope engendered by the American dream. Jason is in prison without a get-out-of-jail card, and when he's bailed out he leads the weary, incredulous David on what is ultimately a dance of death, accompanied by an over-the-hill former beauty queen, Sally (Ellen Burstyn), and her whimsical, spaced-out stepdaughter (Julia Anne Robinson).
The movie is a flawed masterpiece full of menace, surreal moments and obscure dialogues, with the city photographed in all its desolate, decaying beauty by László Kovácscorrect, who also shot Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. Probably the greatest sequence has the four main characters recreating the Miss America pageant in the desolate, deserted Convention Hall. Marvin Gardens (a misspelling by the game's creator of Marven Gardens, a township south of Atlantic City) is a yellow property on the Monopoly board. The movie is best viewed alongside Louis Malle's masterly Atlantic City, shot a decade later while the town was in the process of getting a multimillion-dollar facelift.