Classic 70s Movie: “The Last Detail”

An additional post in our Classic 70s Movie series from Jack McDonald.

Movie Title: The Last Detail

Year: 1973

Writer: Screenplay by Robert Towne, based on the novel by Darryl Ponicsan

Lead Actors: Jack Nicholson, Otis Young, Randy Quaid

Director: Hal Ashby

IMDb Summary: Two Navy men are ordered to bring a young offender to prison but decide to show him one last good time along the way.

Why I Think This Is A Classic 70s Movie: The Last Detail captures the mood of the 60’s hangover like few others. It embodies the frustrated, weary defiance of a generation that had seen firsthand the limitations of idealism and nonconformity in the violence and dissipation that had closed the previous decade. When the film was famously delayed by Columbia Pictures due to its thoroughly profane dialogue — 342 “fucks” in the first seven minutes according to then-production chief Peter Guber — Robert Towne tried to explain. “This is how people talk when they’re powerless to act,” he said. “They bitch.” (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind). One of the great marvels of the film is that Towne, who constructed such a sprawling, forbidding tangle of noir intrigue with Chinatown, was also capable of creating this narrowly focused, deeply humanistic story. Through the lens of macho Navy posturing, Towne was able explore just how broken-down and meaningless masculine conventions were (and still are) in an era where the promise of a better world had been briefly glimpsed, then lost.

Even apart from the still-timely themes, The Last Detail is simply a joy to watch, with Nicholson turning a remarkable performance that he himself considered his best (Inside Oscar, Mason Wiley and Damien Bona). Keith Uhlich of Time Out New York called his Buddusky “one of the greatest incarnations of stunted machismo onscreen.” In what was only his third film appearance, Quaid does brilliant, slowly-unfolding work as Meadows, a compulsive thief facing eight years in the brig for stealing pocket change. Otis Young’s bitter, cynical Mule, with his constant refrain of “I hate this chickenshit detail!” adds just the right notes of vinegar and perfectly balances the central trio. So much of the film’s heart is in these men’s loose, bawdy, occasionally tender interactions, a fact director Hal Ashby clearly recognized. Throughout, he keeps his directorial touch light and his presence subliminal, which makes moments like his jump cutting in the epic drinking scene that much more effective. Which brings us to…

My Favorite Moment in the Movie: Having decided to have a little fun on their way down to take Meadows to the brig, the men seek out a drink in Washington DC. An encounter with a bartender turns nasty quick when the man takes exception to Meadows’ age and Mule’s race, and Buddusky reveals his hair-trigger temper. Riled up, the men leave in search of fun, promising Meadows that he won’t leave DC without “a belly full of beer.” Cut to the trio working their way through a case in a parking garage, realizing they’ve missed their train, and resolving to get a hotel room and deal with it in the morning. Ashby’s editing keeps taking us ahead in the scene, the men progressively drunker and drunker, as they fight over sleeping arrangements and a soused Buddusky attempts to demonstrate signal corps sign language to Meadows. It’s one of the most effective sequences of characters simply hanging out and being themselves in any movie, and it’s far from pointless. So much character information is conveyed that will deepen and change the way we see the following events. As drinking scenes in movies go, you’d be hard pressed to find one more vital, in every sense of the word.

My Favorite Dialogue in the Movie: While the aforementioned drinking sequence contains many hysterical throwaways — “I’d like to make a toast to Batman…Superman…and the Human Torch!” — it also contains one of the most thematically important exchanges in the script:

Meadows: Hey, you guys mind if I say somethin’? That guy at the bar, why did you get so mad at him? I don’t blame him not givin’ me a beer.
Buddusky: Hey, don’t you never get mad at nobody?
Meadows: Well, sure I do, yeah.
Mulhall: Who do you get mad at?
Meadows: Not at somebody who’s doing their job.
Buddusky: Who, then?
Meadows: Injustice.
Buddusky: Bullshit! You never get mad at nobody. You’re just a pussy!
Meadows: I do, too, get mad.
Mulhall: Did you ever get mad at the old man for what he done to you?
Meadows: Well, he was just…
Buddusky: …doin’ his job. Hey, they’re gonna take eight years outta your life, man.
Meadows: Six years. You said six!
Buddusky: Hey, what the fuck difference does it make? You don’t even care about it.
Mulhall: Come on, Badass, that don’t help him.
Buddusky: Fuck help, fuck fair! Fuck injustice! Don’t you ever just wanna fuckin’ whomp and stomp on someone, bite off their ear, just to do it…? I mean just to do it, just to get it out of your system?

Buddusky can’t fathom Meadow’s impassiveness, but he can’t offer any sort of reasonable alternative apart from his own explosive rage. In the moments immediately following, he tries to get Meadows to take a swing at him. Failing, he lashes out on the room, punching the wall, destroying a lamp. A jump cut then takes us ahead, where a drunken, now-subdued Buddusky picks at his arm, his rage spent. In the end, both approaches have accomplished nothing. The world is screwing them over, and whether they take it or try to fight, the result is the same — the resulting resignation foreshadows the film’s quietly heartbreaking finale.

Key Things You Should Look For When Watching This Movie: Before becoming a director, Hal Ashby made his name in the film industry as a brilliant film editor, working repeatedly with director Norman Jewison, whose In the Heat of the Night won Ashby an Academy Award for Film Editing in 1968. Even once he had moved on to directing, Ashby had a reputation for being heavily (sometimes overly) involved in the editing process. On The Last Detail, he fired his initial editor after the completion of principal photography, eventually working closely with editor Robert C. Jones to cut the film at his home. The process took so long that Columbia very nearly took the film away from Ashby and Jones by force (Biskind).

With such a perfectionist sensibility behind the editing, one might expect that aspect to define the film to some degree, but apart from the aforementioned jump cuts, the editing in The Last Detail is characterized by its unobtrusiveness. Many scenes contain long takes in which the actors’ movements and behaviors are allowed to direct the course of the eye. In the book Being Hal Ashby, Nick Dawson relates stories from set about how Ashby would allow Nicholson to see the shot setups through the viewfinder so that the actor knew exactly what he was working with in terms of distance and space within the frame. Ashby largely downplays the role of the editing in the interest of letting the performances drive the story.

Lastly, for a film so devoted to pungent, upfront masculinity, The Last Detail has a lot of warmth and respect for its few female characters. Witness the underestimated and thoroughly unimpressed Nancy Allen rolling her eyes as Buddusky waxes romantic about the sea, or the always-reserved but totally in-control Carol Kane as a prostitute reassuring Meadows that after a false start, he “took to it like a duck to water.”

The Last Detail is the kind of movie that gives and gives, pulling belly laughs out of you during your viewing, providing food for thought days after it concludes. That, and the next time you’re performing some unpleasant task, you just might find yourself muttering: “I hate this chickenshit detail!”

Thanks, Jack! To show our gratitude for your guest post, here’s a dash of creative juju for you. Whoosh!

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We already have a set of 80s Movies and 90s Movies. This month, we’re working on 70s Movies.

Thanks to all of you for your participation in this project, creating a resource for writers, movies we should all watch to help learn the craft of screenwriting!