| Ryan Sanderson |
The Last Detail plays on glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, September 12th, through Sunday, September 14th, as a collaboration with the Cult Film Collective. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
The Last Detail is a film of contrasts. It’s a film about everything, in which almost nothing happens—a beautiful, very funny work of art composed of some of the ugliest, most depressing imagery you’ll ever see in a major studio film. It’s an improvisational-feeling actor’s showcase structured around the vision of a legendary screenwriter, a film whose dreary realism is transformed by sharp editing and an oppressively upbeat score into a kind of live-action cartoon. In the sense that it’s a raunchy, profanity-laden comedy (the most f-bombs in a movie at the time) about badly behaved military men, it feels like part of the same genre as M*A*S*H or Meatballs. In the sense that it’s an epic journey where a party of soldiers encounter various adventures escorting a naive manboy to a dark fortress on the other side of the world, it feels a little like The Lord of the Rings.
And it’s my personal favorite film of the New Hollywood era (1967-1979, more or less). Yes, including that one you’re thinking of right now. That other one, too. I mention New Hollywood not just because I’m a film nerd and therefore think about New Hollywood more than I probably should, but because The Last Detail feels like it belongs to that era generally more than it belongs to any one of its legendary creators, individually. Darryl Ponicsan got the idea for The Last Detail from the Career Guidance Counselor he assisted on board the U.S.S. Intrepid. Per Ponicsan, the Career Guidance Counselor did not need an assistant, so the two played chess and told old war stories while killing time. Apparently, this unnamed guidance counselor was, like Billy “Badass” Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and Richard “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young), assigned the unpleasant task of escorting a young man, like Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid, nominated for and deserving of an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor), across the country to serve out a draconian sentence for a minor offense. Ponicsan adapted this story into his first novel, The Last Detail.1
That unpublished novel eventually found its way to the desk of producer Gerry Ayres in 1969. Ayres hired Bonnie and Clyde script doctor Robert Towne to write an adaptation. Towne wrote the Billy “Badass” Buddusky role for his friend, emerging superstar Jack Nicholson. Nicholson brought in director Hal Ashby. A great many of the best and most influential films of the era were passed this way around at the perpetual meetups and lunches and nights of debauchery shared by the stars and auteurs of New Hollywood. That era was never not precarious, not self-destructive, not stumbling toward its own demise, but if it ever seemed to be functioning perfectly as intended, it was in 1972: the year The Godfather sold more tickets domestically than every Avengers film except Endgame, the year an unpublished novel could be filtered through the studio system and somehow emerge a very different kind of masterpiece, one where the producers avoided the easy money at every step and backed the vision of the artists to transcendent results.
In preparation for writing this piece, I read Ponicsan’s original novel. I found it impossible to sift the truly bad choices from those that only fell short of my expectations after years loving the film. I only know that reading it I could not help but compare every one of its choices to its film adaptation, which is sort of like comparing my workout routine to Chris Hemsworth’s. With each new page, the brilliance of Robert Towne as an adapter becomes clearer. You understand there’s a weight to all the characters’ actions, and that weight is exactly what gives the movie so much power. It’s all the ways these characters measure the value of their time on this earth. It’s Mule’s hesitation to get involved with this mentally ill teenager’s life, Badass’s clownlike demeanor, half act, pure ego; Meadow’s vitriol at his former jailer’s blasphemy, far greater than any justified fury on his own behalf. It’s the way these characters spend a whole movie doing precisely one thing, as slowly and hesitantly and inconsistently as possible, despite there being no doubt whatsoever that thing will ultimately happen. It’s the most human imaginable thing. It’s a slow, simmering dig at the way authoritarianism erodes the will and therefore erodes the value of time, and also a love letter to the ancient lower-class art of fucking around on the job.
There’s a line in Towne’s screenplay, after Mule and Badass have just been told Meadows’s sentence for the first time. “Eight years and a dishonorable discharge.” Towne inserts: “It’s a heavy sentence.”2 Literally, Towne’s descriptive note in this moment is about the weight of the passage of time. In my opinion, that weight is clearly missing from the book, and it’s the most important Detail in the film. Many characters in the film are asked to react to the concept of losing eight years for no good reason. Eight years means something different to all of them, for different reasons. These reasons tell you something about their lives, their attitudes, their social statuses, their beliefs, their identities, the quality of their lives. Note how eight years is least valuable to the men in charge, at least regarding the men they’re in charge of. To the Master at Arms (Clifton James), regarding Meadows, that time is nothing. He laments that he can’t take the Detail himself as a kind of vacation.
Mule and Badass see that side of things as well, at least when they’re not looking at Meadows’s innocent, naive, tortured face. Their curse is a smidge of empathy. They know, a little, the violence of what they’re being asked to do—obviously, nothing compared to what was happening in Vietnam at the time, but still, a measurable cruelty. And yet they also know the consequences of not doing it. Rather than check out and desensitize themselves, Mule and Badass resign themselves to living awkwardly in the middle of these two opposing awarenesses. They take Meadows on a curated vacation of everything these two Navy lifers consider good about life. Under their tutelage, Meadows gets drunk, gets laid, gets in a fight, trashes a hotel, gets a burger with melted cheese on top—a two-day sample platter of everything life has to offer, at least for guys like Mule and Badass.
In his intro to the published collection of the Chinatown and The Last Detail screenplays, titled “On Moving Pictures,” screenwriter Robert Towne writes, “What was once said of the British aristocracy, that they did nothing and did it very well, is a definition that could be applied to movie actors. For gifted movie actors affect us most, I believe, not by talking, fighting, fucking, killing, cursing, or cross-dressing. They do it by being photographed.
Towne goes on to say that part of his job as screenwriter is, “not to get in an actor’s way.” 2 Yes, The Last Detail is an actor’s showcase. All three leads are asked to chew some scenery, literally in a couple moments, and they do so beautifully. All three leads and the hapless citizens they encounter (including Carol Kane and Gilda Radner in her first onscreen role) exude energy and backstory and little quirks of behavior that tell you their life story in a handful of moments. These moments feel improvised, in part because of Robert C. Jones’s editing, which cuts around big, exuberant moments of human behavior, and partly just because the actors have the space to inhabit their roles so beautifully. Almost all of them work exactly as written in Towne’s screenplay.
Meanwhile Ashby backs that action up with a rolling festival of bored, miserablist grey backdrops, drab cityscapes, dingy barracks, cloudy skies, trashed hotel rooms, the ugliness of the organized world captured with a fascination only amplified by the truly “fuck you” pep band score which insists itself even over some of the film’s biggest bummers. And part of what makes the film so brilliant is that it kind of works. The score does give the film a brisk, quirky air, even when the imagery is dull or downright oppressive. That pairs, I think, really brilliantly with Meadows’s own experience with the kindness of his jailers, the genuine, life-affirming rush he gets from this deeply compromised journey. He meets parts of himself for the first time, and becomes someone capable of running toward a better life, just a week too late. Hence the film operates at all times on two parallel and largely contradictory levels—as an affirmation of the stories we tell and efforts we make to add a little sunshine to a bleak and disorderly world, and a document of some unpleasant truths that a peppy, single-minded score can’t blot out.
Towne wrote about this disparity between the world the movies sell us and reality as we encounter it: “… its validity didn’t lie in the likelihood that it was or would come true. Like most dreams, its greatest significance was our belief in it.”
think that’s pretty close to a thesis statement for The Last Detail, as much as a film that conflicted can have a single thesis statement. Belief fills life up, gives it shape and dimension, whether it’s Meadows’s chanting or Badass’s ego or a grudge with some rival Marines. The characters are filled with recriminations and self-doubt, and then they disappear into a story for a while and are cleansed by emotional release. Meanwhile, average citizens are often terrorized and horrified by these violent, raging maniacs acting out their herculean inner conflicts in their midst. And maybe that’s the second part of the thesis–it’s not enough. As much as they try to dress up a perp walk as a vacation, purge their uncomfortable feelings with rowdy misadventures, the true nature of their journey always makes itself known eventually.
I know I’ve done a bad job communicating this specific fact about the film so far, but it should be noted that it’s really funny. Nicholson rightly regarded this to be the best role of his career, and whether he’s grandstanding or grouching or yodeling, it’s some of the most watchable comedic acting I’ve seen. Somehow, Randy Quaid’s every bit his equal, all moonfaced, Pixar-eyed innocence, reacting with disbelief and confusion to every new detail of the world. Otis Young has the thankless task of playing straight man to these two howling maniacs, and he’s every bit as essential to the film’s success. There’s a genuine—if brief—conversation about the Vietnam war that works precisely because of the genuineness he brings to a character who is easily the worst part of the book.
During the film’s best scenes, like the hotel and the party, Ashby and Jones chop the action into staccato bursts of exciting, contradictory energy. While this action often has little onscreen setup or motivation, you can’t help but chart the internal motives as the characters work themselves up into broad, penduluming swings of laughter, anger, sadness, fear, or pointless silliness. Each shot conveys something sincere and beautiful and also limited and self-defeating in their attitudes and actions. It’s funny to the precise extent that it’s also a little sad. People have been laughing in the face of the scary and sad our whole recorded history. It’s a time-honored tool of our survival, and the film taps into that capacity to incredible effect. How well do five days of comedy take the edge off eight years of tragedy? I guess that’s up to each individual viewer to decide.
Citations
1 Ponicsan, D., & Pinchot, B. (2017). The Last Detail. Author’s Republic.
2 Towne, R. (1997). Chinatown; The Last Detail: Screenplays. Grove Press.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon