Customer Reviews

The Last Detail

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is one of my favorites, but it's also one of the most difficult movies to describe to people. Yes, it's about two experienced guys in the Navy who are assigned to escort a young charge (whom they don't know) to Naval prison. And yes, they have some fun along the way, knowing how sad the situation really is. But there's an indescribable something about "The Last Detail" that just gets to me on a pretty deep level. First of all, it's the acting. I mean if you ever question Jack Nicholson's talent and depth as an actor, then watch this movie. I beg to argue about who on earth could have ever embodied this role this deeply. I don't think any of the other big and great actors of his time could have pulled it off this perfectly (Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, George C. Scott, Robert DeNiro). Also, Otis Young and Randy Quaid are pitch-perfect in their roles as well, though the movie clearly belongs to Nicholson. This is a GREAT PERFORMANCE!! It's the definition of one!

But in addition to the acting, the photography of the film is brilliant. It captures the times and places in a rather bleak yet very haunting way. The guys drinking beer in the parking garage in D.C. The three of them pressed into the small hotel room in D.C., along with all those empty beer bottles. Walking a quiet and snowy residential block in Camden, NJ. Walking the streets of nighttime NYC. Playing darts in a bar in NYC. Going to a late night party in an NYC apartment. Going to a Boston brothel. Trying to grill and have a picnic in the middle of a snowy park in Boston! I don't know if it's just my fascination with the time that causes me to find it so darn striking, but it just is. I find these scenes so haunting, and so REAL.

To me, those two things are what make this film so exceptional. The dialogue is also brilliant, as is the complexity of the emotions that are raised by the story. I guess it works on a lot of levels. Just don't miss it, whether you're a Nicholson fan or not. But if you are a Nicholson fan, don't miss out on what is probably his greatest performance!!

Directed by Hal Ashby, who made such powerful commentaries on life in America as SHAMPOO, COMING HOME, BEING THERE and the cult-favorite HAROLD AND MAUDE, THE LAST DETAIL offers the story of three U.S. Navy sailors on a toot--and at the time of its 1973 release it was chiefly noted as the most profane film to achieve a mainstream release. The passage of time has dimmed that profanity's bite, but nothing can dim the power of its performances, it's darkly funny story, or the director's bitter vision of both life in the Navy and the urban decay of 1970s America.

Two Navy-lifers (Jack Nicholson and Otis Young) are ordered to escort a young sailor (Randy Quaid) to a military prison, where he will do eight years followed by dishonorable discharge for attempting to steal a charity jar containing forty dollars. Once the trip gets underway, they realize the young sailor is essentially an innocent--and they set out to show him a good time before he is locked away. And their idea of a good time ranges from a bout of hard drinking in a hotel room to a brawl in a men's restroom to an evening with New York hookers. Along the way, Nicholson and Young gradually realize that they are just as much in prison as Quaid will soon be--victims of their own ennui, serving out their sentences in a military that fosts coarseness, frustration, and mindless machisimo as a matter of course.

The performances are excellent throughout. This was the film that launched Nicholson to stardom--but it is also a film that allows us to see what Nicholson could do before he became immured in the trappings of his own fame and collapsed into self-characture: he is every bit as good here as he would be in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST and CHINATOWN. Otis Young, an actor whose career never quite took off, is Nicholson's equal here, balancing Nicholson's excesses with his no less firey but considerably more commonsense role. And Randy Quaid scores an equally memorable performance as the young sailor, while Carol Kane gives a memorable turn as one of the hookers they encounter in their travels. Watch closely and you'll also discover a very young Gilda Radner as a member of a religious cult.

In spite of the noteriety it received upon release, like many of the best films of the 1970s THE LAST DETAIL has fallen through the cracks to become a largely unsung classic. Fashion changed, and with the advent of Ronald Regan, the stock market boom, and two decades of heavy-handed materialism Americans abandoned their cinematic realism and social statement in favor of big budget, special effects heavy, and largely escapist film. But the pendulum inevitably swings back, and now that we face serious issues both at home and abroad such films as THE LAST DETAIL are at last, perhaps, beginning to come into their own. Strongly recommended.

I spent four long years in the navy depicted in this movie. The bleakness, tawdriness, and general sense of third-rate emptiness capture perfectly the true experience of enlisted navy life as I knew it in the late sixties and early seventies. Nicholson plays the quintessential lifer: angry,ignorant, arrogant,full of himself and yet empty at the same time. He prides himself on his hostility and knows no real friends. This movie should be required watching for potential recruits.Forget the slogans and the posters; forget the action, romance, and comedy movies about navy life: this is the real thing! There's another side to the real experience that is captured with wry accuracy in this picture. A literature of profanity, with its unique vocabulary and syntax permeates and finally makes bearable life in uniform. The Last Detail is rich with this twisted art form based on the F-word. Watch the interaction early on between Nicholson and the chief master-at-arms in the transit barracks. They got it just right.

Two naval officers are escorting a kid to military prison - they've got a week to do what should only take them two days - they get into all kind of adventures, and stick it to the man every step of the way.

Its not narrative-driven cinema, but it has something I really like in my movies - it establishes a little world where you feel like spending time. Its precisely because the character just cut loose across the country, instead of having these major structural changes along the way.

This is not a must-see film, but if you've already seen some of the must-see Nicholson 70's classics like Chinatown and Cuckoo's Nest, this one is just as interesting. Great characters, involving little story and well performed by Nicholson (Vacation's Randy Quaid is not so good), and neither is the third guy.

Really grainy, dirty transfer - looks terrible - but at least its a nice fat widescreen image. Hardly any special features, too. For those reasons i recommend you save this one for rental.

Hal Ashby's "The Last Detail" is the sort of film one hears about via one's more cultured relatives. However, unlike the numerous films that seem to have unjustifiably occupied a significant portion of one's siblings'(and one's uncle's and aunt's etc.) cinematic canon, "The Last Detail" is a masterpiece. Jack Nicholson gives what may be his finest performamnce as Signalman First Class Buddusky.

Don't miss this one.

If you're even a casual Jack Nicholson fan and haven't seen the uncut version of this less-than-famous, boringly-named road movie, you haven't lived. To me, this is the ultimate Nicholson role--cynical Navy petty officer Billy 'Badass' Buddusky, who's assigned with a quiet shipmate (Otis Young) to escort a hapless young swabbie (skinny Randy Quaid) by train and bus from Norfolk, Va., to the Portsmouth, N.H., naval prison. You can imagine the adventures along the way. Raw, wild, comedic and poignant, 'The Last Detail' is an ultimate slice-of-life romp that's more fun to watch than its fellow contemporary classic, 'Five Easy Pieces.' To me, it's also far more substantive than the next Nicholson vehicle written by Robert Towne in the same period, 'Chinatown.' You may remember the 1960s marketing slogan 'Sean Connery IS James Bond. Well, Jack Nicholson IS Billy Baddusky!

'The Last Detail' is a downbeat, very 70s 'On The Town'. The stark simplicity of its story - two Shore Police escort a teenage sailor from Norfolk naval base to prison in Boston - is its stroke of genius. Uncluttered by the need to drive the plot forward, undiverted by external conflict, the film can concentrate on the interplay of three very different, very brilliant actors, and the internal struggles of their characters. The two policemen in particular find themselves torn between their professional duty, and their friendly empathy with a gangling youth who, to their disbelief, is being sentenced to eight years imprisonment for being caught stealing money from the polio kitty. It is a film full of unobtrusive ironies - these are three sailors who spend the movie crossing the continent on land; the two policemen, who foul-mouthedly shout their rebelliousness against authority, are intensely conservative, while the god-fearing mamma's boy is the one who eventually tries to break the status quo. He's going to jail, but the other pair will rot in the navy as 'lifers'.

The plot simplcity lends the film the impetus of an Allegory, which, thankfully, is lightly done. 'Detail' reverses the movement of the traditional Western with its promise of freedom from civilisation, by heading West-to-East towards jail (and Portsmouth, Boston, the very source of modern America itself). The visuals and locations are flat and largely anonymous, increasing the sense of a Symbolic Arena, but also evoking a mid-70s disenchantment and diminishment. As the policemen try to give the virginal prisoner one last good time before jail, we find the sour remains of the failed 60s counterculture, the debasement of Eastern mysticism into selfish babble; the impotence of drugs; the despair behind 'free love'. In fact, the whole thing would be far too depressing if it wasn't for these performers, whose characters don't have anything particularly witty or insightful to say, but talk and joke and waffle and improvise and laugh and fight and lose control and trash hotels and cry like real, very flawed people in an even more monstrously flawed America.

I can't really say how much I love this movie. It's obvious strength is a powerful and moving performance by Jack Nicholson. Randy Quaid is also excellent. But the script - the lines reveal so much about the characters. The writing is strong enough to be a novel, the breadth is that expansive. I have a few favorite scenes, such as the bar scene and the restroom scene, but there is one that sticks in my throat every time I see this film. At various points in the picture, a cheery march is played on the soundtrack, obviously a sarcastic counterpoint to the inglorious life of an enlisted man stuck in a unforgiving system. Once the three main characters go through their "lost weekend" with the young prisoner, they are in snowy Portsmouth, with only a few precious hours before their charge must be turned over to the brig. By this time, Nicholson's character has developed such a fatherly attachment to the naive prisoner that he will grant him any last wish: even attempting to burn frozen wood on a campground so the three can have wieners. After they eat the hot dogs, there is a slow panning shot of a pristine snow covered park, not a soul in sight. A slow, mournful dirge plays on the soundtrack. It's the end of the line, fellas. The party's over and it's time to face harsh realities. Young charge is gonna be locked up for eight years and you two "mean [...]" are going right back into the love it or hate it lifestyle where your freedoms are few and far between. It's that slow pan, which ends on a shot of Jack Nicholson sniffling in the bitter cold and lamenting to his hard-nosed partner, that the young man whose spirits he tried to lift, will get pummeled and abused for a long chunk of time. It's the fear any parent has about their sensitive child entering the harshness of the world. If you have patience, if you can tell good acting from bad I recommend this film to you.

Even with a reusume that includes other great films like "One Flew Over The Cucukoos Nest" and "As Good As It Gets", for me "The Last Detail" still remains Jack's best. I first saw this film as a kid working as a usher in a movie theatre. I let my Dad, a former swabby, in and he ended up staying to watch it again at the next show. He told me "If you ever want an idea of what it's like in the Navy, this is it." I have no doubt he was right. I lost my Dad 18 months ago, but I couldn't help but think of him drinking 16 oz. Schlitz with these 3 characters and fitting right in. An excellent movie with a perfect cast, if you don't mind the salty language that matches the characters, watch this film and enjoy! One of my favorites since 1973!

I grew up hearing my grandfather's stories of life in the navy, & this classic is very realistic. Just as Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) & Mulhall (Otis Young) come to hate their shore patrol duty, my grandfather also hated it. After all, nobody likes to fight drunk people! The characters in this movie seem very real & they draw the viewer into their bleak world of "lifers" in the navy. The language is very bad but after all, who cusses like a sailor?!? While this great film ranks alongside "Chinatown" & "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" as one of Jack Nicholson's greatest performances, the dvd is a dissapointment. It looks like no effort was made to restore the picture quality & there are virtually no special features. My advice is to stick with the video until a special edition dvd is released.