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The Criterion Channel Presents: The Last Detail (1973)

One of the most underrated movies by Richard Linklater is his 2017 veterans comedy-drama Last Flag Flying, about three former marine friends reuniting for a road trip to collect the body of one of their sons recently killed in Iraq. It’s a good movie, and I was aware at the time that it was a loose sequel to a movie from the 1970s; or rather it was based on a book that happened to be a sequel to the book that that 70s film was based on. So the two films are perhaps more like second cousins than siblings. It took me a while though to get around to watching The Last Detail, a far more successful and significant movie for its era, written by Robert Towne (based on the book by Darryl Ponicsan), directed by Hal Ashby, and featuring Jack Nicholson in that Goldilocks zone of his career preceding Chinatown and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Criterion’s New Hollywood collection this month however, gave me the opportunity to see it.
It’s about the relationship that forms between three U.S. Navy sailors when two of them are tasked with escorting a third from Virginia to a prison up in Maine after he’s been court martialled and dishonourably discharged. The ill-fated young man is eighteen year-old Larry Meadows, played by Randy Quaid, whose crime was simply an attempt to steal forty dollars from a charity box. Figuring the punishment is way too severe, “Badass” Buddusky (Nicholson) and “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young) arrange to give Meadows a few last tastes of freedom at the various places they stop at along the road.
The movie has a similar anti-military brass attitude to an earlier hit of the decade, M*A*S*H, and once again Nicholson is used as an avatar for the free-spirited everyman in the face of it. This was a post-Pentagon Papers production, so anti-institutional sentiment was pretty high, and the movie represents it well, even as it portrays both Badass and Mule as military lifers. It takes shots at the other side, Mule at one point is beset at a party by hippies provoking him into denouncing the government. But the film's prevailing attitude does seem to be: respect the servicemen but not their bosses.
Most would agree the punishment for Meadows is grossly overblown, especially paired with his vacant and naive, possibly neurodivergent personality. And it's easy to get behind the notion he should have the chance to live it up. This was Quaid's breakthrough role and it's easy to see why -there are moments where he really conveys the numbing yet sinking reality of his situation better than I've seen in most movies. But it is of course Nicholson's vehicle, and while he does play to his usual manic energy, he's also more grounded than expected. Sure, he curses out and threatens a bartender for refusing to serve Meadows in one of the movie's best scenes, but he's also genuinely introspective and plays a lot of quiet conflict over this detail. You don't believe at all that he cares about Meadows when he first poses this escapade, but you definitely believe it once he and Mule have to hand him over in Portsmouth.
The Last Detail is a very old school male bonding movie, in that it involves things like Badass and Mule trying to toughen Meadows up by goading him into a fight, encouraging him to go out drinking, and arranging his first night of sex with a prostitute (played by a wonderfully apathetic Carol Kane). But it almost feels like Ashby and Towne are poking fun at these tropes through the unconventional ways that Meadows goes along with them -forcing Badass and Mule to be less cartoonish in their own actions even as they act the part of wild guys on the town. And on some level the actors and Ashby must be aware that those naval hats and uniforms don't look cool in spite of the image the guys try to project.
There's a mellow tenderness underlining Ashby's direction, as can be found in his other movies about social castaways navigating their worlds -Harold and Maude and Being There most notably. All three of his sailors are drawn as anomalies through their adventure, marked out by their uniforms and with these their histories. Ashby and Towne are genuinely compelled by them. There's a great scene while Meadows is losing his virginity where Badass and Mule just converse frankly and we learn that Badass had a previous marriage that ended with his enlistment and Mule has been tirelessly supporting his mother. And some of Meadows' dim malaise appears to rub off on them. We see it again when they part ways at the end. Ashby is very sparing, letting the characters drive the mood; it's why the ending is curiously solemn. After the adventure, it's still a shitty thing they have to do, and there's not really any catharsis to it. But that doesn't mean this last detail was for nothing.

Criterion Recommendation: A New Leaf (1971)
Talking about New Hollywood, here's a film not included in the Criterion Channel's collection -a great, subtly deranged little movie called A New Leaf, the directorial debut of Elaine May. May herself stars as an unlikely heiress -shy and kind of dweeby- who Walter Matthau's financially ruined opportunist sets his sights on marrying for her fortune and then killing her off, only for his every attempt to go awry. A very twisted spin on a romantic-comedy, A New Leaf not only introduced May as a director in a time when there were virtually no women directors allowed the opportunity to succeed in Hollywood, but also introduced her as a particularly sharp director, who could hold her own in the transgressive era of the 70s in both her films' subjects and aesthetics. There is some remarkable technical ingenuity on display here -one of the best split dioptre shots of any Hollywood film; and she commits as much as an actress as she does a director. The movie is quite funny, often in perverse ways, and its gleeful abrasiveness hints at the style that would evolve in films like The Heartbreak Kid and Mikey and Nicky. An important movie in an important era that doesn't get its due.

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