The Last Detail (1973)

[This review excerpted from my other film blog, The Summer Film Queue]

*****

"This kid ain't goin' anywhere. On the outside too many bad things can happen to him. This way the worst part's already behind him."

"I am the motherfucking shore patrol!"

– 'Bad Ass' Buddusky

In 1975 my journey began in Norfolk, VA, and only two years earlier The Last Detail chronicled a journey that also began there. You might think from the film's poster image that this is a homoerotic Naval adventure shot in Nicholson's off years, but it's actually about a few guys on a pretty sad (and often hilarious) journey, with no gay love scenes whatsoever. Two sailors, Billy "Bad Ass" Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and "Mule" Mulhall (Otis Young) are ordered to escort a third, Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) to prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he is to serve eight years for stealing $40 from an officer's favorite charity. Meadows isn't the brightest bulb, and he's a bit shy and afraid of life; a foil for Buddusky, who likes to get shit riled up. Along the way the escorts feel bad for Meadows and set about showing him a good time by trying to get him drunk and laid and into fights (you get the idea he's never done any of the above). It's as fun as it sounds, probably more.

The film is directed by Hal Ashby, who also directed such greats as Harold and Maude (1971), Being There (1979), Shampoo (1975), and Coming Home (1978).

According to a quick scan of Wikipedia (hey, come on, I saved you the trouble), Ashby was a long-haired vegetarian hippie type, and his career was often noted as much for great film making as for sporadic declines into drugs and bizarre behavior like hiring his ex-girlfriends, who had no editing experience, to edit his films. His wife was pissed at him until her death for his portrayal of her in Shampoo, but not, apparently, pissed enough to divorce him. At one point, to prove he was respectable again, he began showing up to Hollywood parties donning an unremarkable blue blazer. None of this seems all that weird to me, actually.

The making of The Last Detail pissed off Columbia, who was financing it, in all sorts of ways. They hated the jumpy cuts, the constant swearing of the sailors in the script, the time it was taking to edit the thing, and Ashby's disappearing act near the end of editing. According to David Gilmour, it was Nicholson who finally convinced them to lay off Ashby about the expletives.

But look, this is all what the movement known as "New Hollywood" was about--taking the reigns from the producers and giving it to directors and actors, people who had a stake in things artistically. For those of you who don't know what this movement was all about, I won't get too into it in-depth here (has nothing to do with being unable to, of course), but a quick Internet search is probably sufficient to give you the big ideas behind it--that it is generally seen to stretch from the mid-60s to the early 80s. That it worked because studios had been losing money on musicals and historical epics. That their audience was growing more educated and intellectually demanding, so they had to deal with long-haired hippie types like Ashby and Nicholson, people who didn't return their calls and wore unimpressive blue blazers to highfalutin movie star parties, but who could tell a story in a new and interesting way.

A lot of smart people (including JN himself) call this one Nicholson's finest performance, and it takes about ten minutes into the movie to know that they are probably right about that. First, I've never seen such great portrayals of drunk guys in a hotel room by any actor, ever, so much so that I'm not entirely convinced they weren't actually shitfaced during filming. And truthfully, all three actors do a hell of a job with that. I've never seen Nicholson in particular so natural, and I'm talking about a master here, about Jack Fucking Nicholson. But I have to agree, this is probably his best role. He nails it.

What I really liked about this movie was its building suspense, created by both the plot (the journey to prison, or escape, or death--who knows?) and the characters' combustible combination (particularly Buddusky with Meadows). Buddusky, for reasons that feel somehow both completely mysterious an entirely plausible, seems to be coming unhinged from early in the movie, a coming apart that is somehow triggered by escorting this innocent-faced young man to spend a good portion of his good years behind bars (while maintaining that this is exactly what Meadows wants). Where is all this pent up rage and nuttiness coming from? We sense that it's about bigger things in Buddusky's life, things that even he doesn't know about, perhaps.

There's one scene, which I won't give away, when you would not be surprised no matter what the outcome is. And to achieve that in any narrative is absolute success. To achieve it in a movie is not only success of writing and directing, but of performance. You believe that the person in whose hands the outcome of the scene rests could do any number of things, and you wouldn't be all that surprised. That's great acting, directing, and writing.

And of course there are great moments of drunken stupidity, an awkward bathroom fight scene, and lots of great lines.

I'll leave you with this classic scene: