After its 1971 screening at the Cannes Film Festival, Drive, He Said became one of the festival’s most aggressively rejected films. The New York Times reported that the audience response was the most violently negative of the year: when the lights came up, spectators hooted, screamed, whistled, and rose from their seats to wave indignant fists toward Nicholson and actors William Tepper and Michael Margotta. The reaction was especially striking because Nicholson was already a major New Hollywood performer, and the film represented his first attempt to direct. Rather than receiving indulgence as an actor’s ambitious debut, the picture was treated by many festivalgoers as an incoherent and offensive eruption of American campus radicalism, sexual explicitness, and countercultural nihilism. The backlash became part of the film’s reputation: critics such as Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael later recognized its volatile energy and strong performances, but even favorable assessments generally conceded that Nicholson’s direction struggled to impose structure on its competing stories of basketball, sex, draft resistance, drugs, and political unrest.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1970s
Drive, He Said Provokes a Hostile Riot-Like Reception at Cannes
Drive, He Said / Jack Nicholson / 1970s
After its 1971 screening at the Cannes Film Festival, Drive, He Said became one of the festival’s most aggressively rejected films. The New York Times reported that the audience response was the most violently negative of the year: when the lights came up, spectators hooted, screamed, whistled, and rose from their seats to wave indignant fists toward Nicholson and actors William Tepper and Michael Margotta. The reaction was especially striking because Nicholson was already a major New Hollywood performer, and the film represented his first attempt to direct. Rather than receiving indulgence as an actor’s ambitious debut, the picture was treated by many festivalgoers as an incoherent and offensive eruption of American campus radicalism, sexual explicitness, and countercultural nihilism. The backlash became part of the film’s reputation: critics such as Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael later recognized its volatile energy and strong performances, but even favorable assessments generally conceded that Nicholson’s direction struggled to impose structure on its competing stories of basketball, sex, draft resistance, drugs, and political unrest.
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