The Last Detail (Bright-Persky Associates, Acrobat Productions, Columbia, 1973)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, December 28) I turned on Turner Classic Movies for a pair of films that in their own ways were about low-life people. One was Hal Ashby’s 1973 quirky drama, The Last Detail, about two sailors in the U.S. Navy’s Shore Patrol, Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and Mulhall (Black actor Otis Young), who are assigned to take an 18-year-old sailor named Meadows (Randy Quaid) from Norfolk, Virginia to Portsmouth, Maine. Meadows is an accomplished thief who stole a box of collections intended for a fund to fight polio. Since polio was a pet cause of the wife of the base commander, Meadows drew an eight-year sentence, unusually stiff for the crime and the limited amount of money involved. Buddusky and Mulhall determine to show Meadows a good time along the way, a premise which had led me to expect another On the Town. Instead, the trio of sailors have a rather mopey time as Buddusky unlocks Meadows’s handcuffs and they take him to Washington, D.C. and then New York City on their way. They end up with a group of Buddhist hippies, including a young woman who teaches him the “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo” chant” (which a good Buddhist friend of mine has told me has nothing to do with real Buddhism) and takes Meadows up a long flight of stairs to her loft. At first we think she’s going to seduce him – the film’s script by Robert Towne, based on a novel of the same title by Darryl Ponicsan, strongly hints that Meadows is still a virgin – but she only wants him to do some chanting with her. (The young Gilda Radner appears in this scene as one of the hippie chicks, and given how sexist this film is “chicks” is an appropriate term.) Later, in another city (Boston, ironically), the trio run into a taxi driver who’s an ex-Navy man himself. They ask him to take them to a whorehouse, where Meadows finally loses his cherry to a character listed only as “Young Whore” (Carol Kane). Meadows climaxes almost immediately but Buddusky and Mulhall offer to pay the madam (Patricia Hamilton) more money to give Meadows another chance, and later the young whore announces that he’s taken to sex “like a duck to water.”

The Last Detail is a mediocre movie – a disappointment from its usually interesting director, Hal Ashby – though it has some good scenes. Buddusky’s confrontation with a redneck bartender who refuses to serve Meadows a beer because he’s under age (we’re told he’s 18, though when he made this movie Randy Quaid was 22, and looked it) is fun even though it has echoes of the chicken-salad sandwich scene in Five Easy Pieces (the one great scene in an otherwise monumentally overrated movie). There’s also a scene in which they try to picnic in a park and grill hot dogs, only they don’t have any buns and both Buddusky and Mulhall don’t want to eat hot dogs without buns. Meadows solves the problem by spearing his hot dog with a twig and dipping it straight into a jar of mustard. While the picnic is going on, Meadows rather innocently walks off in the direction of the Canadian border – though it doesn’t look like he has an actual plan to escape – and Buddusky chases him down and beats the shit out of him, apparently because he trusted Meadows enough to have unlocked his handcuffs and Meadows repays him by trying to desert. And the final scene is quite good, starting with an establishing shot of the Portsmouth prison that looms over the action and featuring the young Michael Moriarty as a prison official who gives Buddusky and Mulhall a hard time over several issues, including the condition of Meadows’s face when he shows up (he asks Buddusky if Meadows was trying to escape, and Buddusky says no) and the lack of a counter-signature on the written orders Buddusky presents. “You were never here,” the official (who’s identified only as “Marine O.D.” in the cast list) tells Buddusky and Mulhall, setting up a brief Kafka-esque argument between them. It’s also nice to see Jack Nicholson topless and wearing only military underwear in a few scenes, though he’s not all that good-looking and, whatever Nicholson’s talents as an actor, sexiness was not one of them.

The Last Detail is ironic because Nicholson played an anarchic sailor who yearns to break free of the Navy and its discipline (though at the end he and Mulhall regretfully acknowledge that the Navy is their career and they’re “lifers”) almost two decades before his marvelous appearance in the film A Few Good Men (a much better movie than this one, despite the normally disqualifying fact that Tom Cruise is its star) as the personification of spit-and-polish military discipline. But The Last Detail, which I don’t think I’d ever seen before, is largely disappointing, an O.K. film which could have been great if it had some of the insouciance of On the Town before it or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off afterwards – despite the modish filling of the soundtrack with swear words seven years after the breakdown of the Production Code. TCM host Ben Mankiewicz co-introduced the film with a woman director, Nicole Holofcener, who had nice things to say about Hal Ashby and his films (TCM double-billed it with another Ashby-directed movie, Coming Home from 1975, which I remember as worlds better than this one) even though, not surprisingly, she described Ashby’s movies as coming-of-age stories about men and her own as coming-of-age stories about women. One anecdote the two hosts told before the film started was that Hal Ashby and Robert Towne had an argument over the casting of Meadows: Towne wanted John Travolta for the role (at the time he’d just started his star-making role as Vinnie Barbarino on the TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter and hadn’t made a name for himself in films) but Ashby insisted on casting Quaid. As things turned out, Ashby was right: Quaid totally out-acts the two other leads and gives an indelible portrayal of innocence betrayed. Even Quaid’s ungainly body works to his advantage; at times he reminded me of Boris Karloff in Frankenstein just after his creation when he’s still trying to get an understanding of how this body of his is supposed to work.