#17 — The Last Detail (Hal Ashby, 1973)
When I first watched The Last Detail, some fifteen years ago, it was the first time that the reverential opinion usually afforded nineteen-seventies American cinema really began to fully make sense to me. It’s not like I hadn’t already seen great films from the decade. In fact, most of the titles that reside further into the upper reaches of this list were already under my movie-watching belt, and were routinely cited by me as evidence of the superiority of seventies cinema when I was doing my duty and lending my chirping voice to the well-established conventional wisdom. The Last Detail was different, though, at least in the way it impacted me. It existed just outside of the cluster of unassailable modern classics, right on the edge of the canon. It may have has the American actor of the decade and been directed by a man who stealthily presided over the finest, most daring works of those years, but it was often an afterthought when the most startling achievements were duly noted. What I was struck by, then, was just how good it is, indeed, how great it is. I’d done my due diligence with the major efforts of the most significant auteurs, but here was a film that I felt I could get to casually, in my own good time, and it was on the artistic level of the very best efforts I was watching at that time, over twenty years later. The seventies weren’t necessarily exceptional because the peaks were higher, but because the sheer number of excellent films was staggering.

The Last Detail features Jack Nicholson as U.S. Navy sailor Billy “Badass” Buddusky, who, with his partner “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young), is ordered to to bring a convicted fellow seaman across several states to Portsmouth Naval Prison in New Hampshire. That young fellow, whose crime amounted to little more than petty theft, is played by Randy Quaid in his first major role. Quaid plays the character with a wounded naivete, a childlike compulsion to understand what’s gone wrong in his life, while holding onto whatever vestiges of his eroding freedom he still can. To that end, Buddusky and Mulhall try to help, often acting more like drinking buddies than guards, giving the pending inmate a chance to swill some beers, shed his virginity and even enjoy one last picnic in a frigid park. The story is simple, but the execution is sublime.

The film is directed by Hal Ashby, operating with a markedly different style than in his previous film, Harold and Maude. Where the earlier effort was ravishingly evocative in its precise, dreamlike imagery, infusing poetry into the narrative through the sheer beauty of the visuals, The Last Detail is mostly direct and unfussy. Ashby positions his camera almost as a passive, fascinated observer, keenly attuned to the stop-start progress of the characters, but bypassing any attempt to impose elegance on the story. This is about inarticulate, almost brutish men engaged in a plain, tedious task. Even their attempts at revelry are bogged down in the mundanely disappointing, hotel roll-out beds that don’t unfold properly or grill fires that barely give off enough heat to cook food.

At the center of it all in Nicholson, the actor who arguably defined the decade. Beginning with his star-making (or maybe star-cementing, depending on how Easy Rider is factored in) turn in Five Easy Pieces, Nicholson was the raging anti-establishment voice, sometimes raging in futility, but raging nonetheless. In The Last Detail, he is another variation of that character, but one who’s been charged with actual authority, and the existential confusion the paradox stirs up in him defines the performance. He’s impatient, combative and often weary, entirely at odds with a society that’s make the mistake, albeit briefly, of putting him in charge. Watching him come to terms with his conflicted place, and the disappointment that is the hidden prize inside it, is endlessly fascinating and rewarding. Like a lot of films in the seventies, it invites fevered interpretations of the breadth of the message, the overarching social and cinematic trends it represents. In the end, I think it may be simpler than that. I think the film is great entirely on its own terms, not as part of a movement or as a chunk in a larger career story. That was part of my revelation too. For all the efforts to impose deeper meaning, sometimes excellence is its own reward.