The Last Detail

I really want to apologize to everyone. I was really occupied yesterday that it completely slipped to post my weekly Friday movie reviews. Don’t get me wrong, I was thinking it, but then I completely forgot. So today, I will post my review. I want to apologize for posting this late, and hopefully I don’t forget again.

For April, I’m thinking of doing another “Jack Nicholson Month” where I review other famous movies that he starred in. Let’s get it started again with the 1974 classic, “The Last Detail.”

This is one amazingly funny, hysterically smart performance, plus two others that are excellently good, which work very well given the reflective harshness that it looks like a new definition for anti-comedy. Vincent Canby said it best when he said, “It's a good movie but an unhomogenized one.”

Canby went on to say, “"New" is perhaps a poor word to use in connection with the film. Like the recent "Cinderella Liberty," which was also based on a novel by Darryl Ponicsan, "The Last Detail" considers the lives of career United States Navy sailors with a gravity that recalls the atmosphere of the late nineteen-forties and fifties, when World War II was still freshly won, Korea was being brought to a close, and Ike was going to throw the rascals out of Washington. In the years that preceded the political and social upheavals of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, ignorance still possessed some innocent charm.”

Canby continued, “It doesn't any more. It seems frivolous and a bit scary. So much so that I suspect that Hal Ashby who directed "The Last Detail," and Robert Towne, who wrote the screenplay, may have thought of their leading character, who is 20 years behind the times and only vaguely aware of the fact, as a lot more representative of many American lives today than the rest of us would care to think.”

This character, greatly played by Jack Nicholson, is Signalman First Class Buddusky, a 20-year Navy man of funny and frequent unnecessary confidence. Buddusky and Gunner’s Mate First Class Mulhall, played by Otis Young, are tasked to take from Norfolk, Virginia to the naval prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, an 18-year-old sailor sentenced to eight years in jail for trying to steal $40 donations for polio.

“The Last Detail” is the story of this travel, which takes up a good amount of a week and performs the growing anxiety of Buddusky as he tries to show the prisoner what he thinks is a good time. The three have a beer party in their Washington hotel room, where Buddusky gets the kid inebriated for the first time and tries to make him happy. “Think of it this way,” he says in result, “you’ll get two years off for good behavior.”

In New York, they go into a Nichiren Shoshu prayer meeting and en up at a Village Party where Buddusky tries to sleep with a pretty, completely serious young woman, played by Luana Andres, by talking about the romance of the sea, while she would rather talk about President Nixon or race relations.

On their last day in Boston, Buddusky and Mulhall take the prisoner to a corrupt prostitute club where they show him their introduction to intercourse by paying his tab. This experience, with a girl, played by Simka Dahblitz-Gravas from “Taxi,” comedian Carol Kane, who is softly sweet and a down-to-earth professional at the same time, is what finally disturbs the prisoner who, up to that point, has more or less accepted what’s going to happen.

Jack Nicholson controls the film with looks like a collection of boastings optimistic, knowing, angry, foolish and lonely. It might be the best performance he ever did. Canby said, “If anything it's almost too good in that it disguises with charm the empty landscape of the life it represents.”

Otis Mulhall, by being African-American and playing a man who is as thoughtful and persistent as Nicholson is naughty, is the one person who gives the movie an up-to-date look. Canby noted, “In World War II, black sailors seldom got out of the galley.”

Randy Quaid, who had a small role in “The Last Picture Show,” is a genius stop for Nicholson as the always polite prisoner who, for a good majority, refuses to share Buddusky’s anger at the injustice of his sentence. Early on, he has admitted to Buddusky that he had trouble with the police before enlisting in the Navy. Buddusky professionally asks, “Was it in the nature of a felony or a misdemeanor?” The prisoner responds, “It was in the nature of shoplifting.”

Hal Ashby continues in making comedies that are never as funny as the behaviors he gives them would have you believe. Canby credited, “"The Last Detail" is his most interesting and contradictory so far. You'll laugh at it, not through your tears but with a sense of creeping misery.”

As I have stated, this movie has to be seen to be believed. It’s actually a good movie to watch and you’ll love it, especially if you’re a Jack Nicholson fan. This even has the line where Nicholson yells, “I am the mother****ing shore patrol mother****er, I AM THE MOTHER****ING SHORE PATORL!” Yes, I did censor that, and you know why.

Check in next Friday when I review a masterpiece in “Jack Nicholson Month Part 2.”