ATLANTIC CITY IN THE FALL is like a whore house on Sunday morning, the denuded neon playgrounds of merchandising America. It is the ghost town of the Penthouse pleasure seekers stinking with the excrements of honky-tonk commercialism. The King of Marvin Gardens, written by Jacob Brackman and directed by Bob Rafelson, tortures Atlantic City's dying glory into a monopoly game of cultural dimensions, the bankrupt dead-end of the American dream.

Rafelson peoples his landscape with the misfit fringes of go-ahead America: wheeler-dealers and sham artists, gamblers, petty crooks and rootless wanderers. Though outsiders, they still cherish a belief in Monopoly's promise, winner takes the jackpot. So they circle the board in a frivolous game of one-upmanship, until life sputters out in disillusionment or disaster.

Rafelson's hero is David Staebler (Jack Nicholson), a late night radio monologuist who broadcasts private traumas packaged for cultural consumption. He leaves the sordid bachelor digs he shares with his grandfather in Philadelphia when summoned to Atlantic City by his brother Jason's telegram, "Get your ass down here. The Kingdom is come." The "Kingdom" turns out to be but a revived version of a boyhood fantasy: to take over Tiki island, one of the Hawaiian archipelago, build a casino and amass a fast fortune. The Staebler brothers spend the rest of the film trying to subsidize the dream. Meanwhile they live precariously, like Vegas princes in seamy unpaid-for hotel rooms. Jason (Bruce Dera), keeps a harem of two, Sally (Ellen Burstyn), a juicy tart past her prime, and Jessica (Julie Anne Robinson), her puppet-like "stepdaughter." The four cavort from bisexual bedside to desolate beach and boardwalk. But their joyride is scarred by an undertone of tension as they blind themselves to the steady disintegration of their dream.

RAFELSON'S MONOPOLY METAPHOR is too slick a formula. He has poached inconsistently on the terrain Arthur Miller familiarized: Shopworn sales talk has become the idiom of a society based on manipulation, commercial go-getting has been universalized as a private ethic, preservation of personal integrity means self-destruction. These are his cool assumption, the truisms of one who has seen-it-all. Sentimentially is a demon to him, so he lavishes heavy filmic methods in an effort to play it tough, and it is wholly at the expense of his material. He has twisted the form of his film into the shape of his gnomic self-consciousness.

The result is a film going in too many directions, none of them resolved. For Jeson's sake, David has tagged along skeptically, ever bashfully peering through smudged glasses and trailing a dowdy muffer, But jason turns out to be a second rate front men for a black mobster and is out. Smarted in a shady real estate deal. Sally realizes that her conquette heyday has long since passed and panic brings her to borderline insanity. The sexually insecure David wallows in nervous in-irosprection, and lets the dream linger too long. For Sally hysterically plows four bullets into jason, and David returns to his radio.

Refeison builds this complicated potpourri on bogus techniques. Again and again he cuts into the middle of a scene, in an overcalculated bid for involvement. Or he mystifies with new angles until perspective exposes the banality of his subject. This is tinplate Godard, confusing instead of intellectually surprising. Take for instance, the scene of David's train arrival. He steps onto a deserted platform and confronts a raucously singing spike-heeled floozy who throws open her fur coat to reveal a chintzy Miss America costume. Then four creatures who look like skid row relics show up with battered horns and even more battered music. Not only is it imitative of Fellini, but it is totally irrelevant.

WHAT IS CRIMINAL about this sort of self-centered expertise is that it usurps the film's only potential interest, its triangular network of human relationships. Rafelson splurges on suggestiveness and bankrupts the meaning of his suggestion. Sally's menopausal trauma is supposed to be a simmer that slowly comes to boil in manic proportions. But Rafelson dissects it into a series of chic vignettes; she throws a tantrum over rusty bathwater, is glimpsed through a bedroom door, naked, giddily squirting a watergun at a cowboy costumed Jessica. Tear-streaked, she burns her beauty aids with funereal ceremony, mourns her Maybelline in the sand, and ends by chopping her hair off with distraught, mechanical motions. Why is unexplained, lost somewhere in between Lazlo Kovac's dazzling photography and Rafelson's shortcutting. Understatement has degenerated into amorphousness. And Sally's final hysteria is just a sheen of sensationalism polishing off Rafelson's neat surface.

Rafelson's raw materials are first rate: sensitive acing (except for Julie Anne Robinson). Lazlo Kovacs's cinematography, a glib sharp-tongued script. But he Jumps them together without logic or order. The "no exit" situation would seem well suited to psychic drama. But Rafelson leaves unexplored Nicholson's talent for tempestuousness and dwells in a tone of wistful resignation. The problem again is Rafelson's self-conscious world-weariness. He shows Nicholson improvising in the bathroom. "The form of the tragic autobiography is dead. I have chosen radio...because my life is hopefully, comically unworthy." If this is a snub at melodrama, it is hardly less sentimental. Rafelson has merely traded in emotional pathos for grotesque wihimsy David's jadedness is supposed to be glamorous, but David is drugged by his own disillusion; and this is irresponsible escapism.

UNFORTUNATELY, NICHOLSON is threatening to become America's newest anti-mainstream cult figure. He made his reputation in Easy Rider as a boozy small town lawyer hopping across the country in a search of an alternative to urban America. In Five Easy Pieces he played the misfit artist who made an ethic out of lonely and ignored self-destruction. He was an uncritical social dropout, however, suffering from a congenital incompatibility with what happened to be a sick scene. Like it or not, his road trip was still an endorsement of Playboy America. David Staebler lacks even this vivacity or independent moral sense. The bleakly comic face he turns toward emotional catastrophe is tantamount to moral treachery: yet we are asked to admire it as an ethic.

The King of Marvin Gardens is a skeletal version of Five Easy Pieces robbed of its vital flesh and muscle fabric. It is a blood brother of the genre established with Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces. These films bore the double burden of avoiding Hollywood debris and finding a voice independent of more practiced European avant-gardism. And they emerged as wholly American. Now Rafelson feels it his aesthetic duty to be new again. The problem is that his basic landscape hasn't changed, and so as be remodels his methods he sacrifices sincerity. The onetime pace-setter is pacing anew having lost his bearing.