THE LAST DETAIL (1973, Hal Ashby)

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A couple of sailors make sure that a youthful recruit has a good time on his way to prison.

Starring  Jack Nicholson, Otis Young, Randy Quaid, Clifton James, Carol Kane

Written by  Robert Towne

Produced by  Gerald Ayres

Duration  104 minutes

You will read within the pages of this blog its author banging on about how much he loves the 1980s. But even someone blinkered with nostalgia for the era in which they grew up must accept that the best decade for film was probably the ’70s. (There are counter arguments, of course, but bear in mind that this opinion comes from a place of hating musicals and having a limited tolerance for westerns.)

I mean, let's take a look at the Oscar Best Picture nominees from the year THE LAST DETAIL came out, as well as some from those either side, 1972 and 1974. They include THE GODFATHER, DELIVERANCE, THE STING, AMERICAN GRAFFITI, THE EXORCIST, THE GODFATHER PART II, CHINATOWN, and THE CONVERSATION.

You can’t tell me the motion pictures of today match that lot, both in quality and the sheer consistency of that quality. THE LAST DETAIL didn't even get nominated for Best Picture, and it’s a Goddamn masterpiece!

There are many elements that make LAST DETAIL great. Lead star Jack Nicholson comes as no surprise. Writer Robert Towne (CHINATOWN, sadly no longer with us as of this week) also isn't a shock. Director Hal Ashby (HAROLD AND MAUDE) is a given. But to me, the revelation in films like this and THE LAST PICTURE SHOW is Randy Randall Rudy Quaid. (Yes, that's his full given name.)

I was first introduced to Quaid as boorish Cousin Eddie in the NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VACATION series, especially the annually televised Christmas instalment. Then later in the cinema, as INDEPENDENCE DAY's crazed alien abductee pilot, who gets his revenge on his former captors by going kamikaze ("Hello, boys! I'm baaaaaack!"), or as a goofy Amish bowler in the underrated comedy KINGPIN. And while younger brother Dennis became a conventionally handsome B-list leading man who married Meg Ryan, Randy squandered his talent and slid toward TV movies, eventually becoming more notorious for personal scandals than anything he did on screen.

But in THE LAST DETAIL, a fresh-faced and slim 22-year-old Quaid delivers an Oscar-nominated supporting performance (he lost the statue to John Houseman for something called THE PAPER CHASE). 

Sailors Nicholson and Otis Young are the leads: hard-drinking, self-serving veterans, wary of being given a "shit detail" and adamant that any authority figure should "go fuck themselves". Such a detail does indeed come their way in the shape of escorting Quaid from their Virginia base to Portsmouth Naval Prison for attempting to steal 40 dollars from a superior officer (and not even succeeding), which because of political bullshit is enough to earn him an inflated eight-year sentence. 

The injustice of it all bothers even these most cynical of career sailors, and their brothers-in-arms compulsion to "do right by" the hapless and helpless greenhorn is comedic, full of righteous indignation and finally downright heart-warming.

The trio don't follow a straight line to the Naval prison, instead taking detours to the cities of Washington and Boston. They visit bars; seedy hotels; diners where they'll melt the cheese on your burger if you ask them to; parks for some al fresco-roasted hotdogs; meetings of chanting Nichiren Shoshu Buddhists; pornographic bookstores; pawnshops; ice rinks; groovy after-hours coffee joints; Nixon-bashing, joint-passing house parties (featuring a debuting Nancy Allen, looking even younger than Quaid); and brothels (where the girls look younger still than Allen).

Across these evenings of misadventure, the loose, easy-going naturalistic vibe that typified Ashby’s best work (BEING THERE, the abovementioned HAROLD AND MAUD) sucks you in and never lets go. These are real people, authentic, simply men being men together – with all that entails, for good and for ill.

Cousin Eddie would be proud.

And I’ll resist the urge to close with some snarky speculation about what such a product of the ’70s would look like if done today –  because director Richard Linklater (BEFORE SUNRISE, DAZED AND CONFUSED) actually tried such a thing in 2017. Helpfully for this blog, he even kept a ‘last’ in the title – so watch this space for a review of LAST FLAG FLYING, coming your way real soon, sailor …

Five stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  With regards to their Naval careers, Nicholson and Young describe themselves as "a couple of lifers", so further details are definitely on their horizon.

What would a movie called THE FIRST DETAIL be about?  The one I usually notice is the eyes, although of course I can’t speak for everyone.

Previously:  THE LAST HARD MEN

Next time:  THE LAST SEDUCTION

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988, Martin Scorsese)

 

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Jesus of Nazareth faces the ultimate existential crisis: being the son of God (and knowing His plans) while having human desires.

Starring  Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, Barbara Hershey, Harry Dean Stanton, David Bowie

Written by  Paul Schrader

Produced by  Barbara De Fina  

Duration  163 minutes     

I’ve argued on this blog that Ridley Scott has never made a genuinely great film, despite the inexplicably elevated position he inhabits for some.

The question that occurs to me now is, has Martin Scorsese ever made a bad one?

Across 26 features, there are six that have most regularly come in for criticism, or are just simply not as well known. So are these 'lesser Marties' deserving of their status as outliers? Let’s see!

– WHO’S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR (1967):  The director's debut, an Italian-American New Yorkers' tale and precursor to MEAN STREETS, it's appropriately rough around the edges. But the talent is there up on the screen and as far as first features go, it certainly makes you intrigued for what this young man might do next.

– BOXCAR BERTHA (1972):  Scorsese was one of several fledgling directors to cut their teeth under producer Roger Corman, such as (deep breath) Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, John Sayles and James Cameron. He made BERTHA for Corman's American International Pictures, and the film is a trashy female gangster flick that’s a lot of sleazy low-brow fun.

– ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (1974):  Probably Marty’s most unfairly overlooked film. Central is a powerhouse performance by Ellen Barkin (who won an Oscar), and this affecting drama also has memorable turns from the pre-TAXI DRIVER pair of Jodie Foster and Harvey Keitel.

– NEW YORK, NEW YORK (1977):  I'm never going to be subjective about a musical; a jazz musical, no less. Moving on.

– KUNDUN (1997):  Um ... I’ve seen it. It exists. It's probably most remembered for that bit in The Sopranos where Christopher Moltisanti spots Scorsese-playing-himself and yells out "Marty, KUNDUN! I liked it!"

– GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002):  This one is a bit of a slog. Leo was still maturing from teen heartthrob into proper leading man. Diaz was miscast. Day-Lewis was enjoyably big, but also distractingly so. Ultimately, it was never able to recover from all its production troubles. I do like the U2 song that plays over the end credits, though.

(In addition, THE KING OF COMEDY and AFTER HOURS didn't do much business when they were released but have both since been reassessed; I like the former but have never really warmed to the latter.)

 

So yes, I would say Scorsese has a batting average superior to most big-time directors, even plenty of those names listed above. And LAST TEMPTATION is firmly in the ‘definitely great’ camp.

The film was controversial for its depiction of a flawed Jesus. But anyone who bothered to absorb the opening crawl should have known to proceed with leniency: "This film is not based upon the Gospels but is a fictional exploration of the eternal spiritual conflict."

(They should have put "based on a true story" – that would have really stirred the pot.)

Marty was using Jesus Christ the man as the starting point for an exploration of the struggles we all go through – heightened, of course, by JC's unique internal wrestling match between being both a deity and a flesh-and-blood human.

In short, he's a flawed hero who goes through a journey – an 'arc', to use a term that the KUNDUN-approving, wannabe-screenwriter cousin of Tony Soprano would appreciate. Which should tell you everything: this is a movie, where Jesus Christ is the protagonist. It’s not a sermon; it’s not a fly-on-the-wall documentary. It has thematic depth and spiritual resonance, but it also needs to move and entertain us. And it does.

JC is cut from the same cloth as other Scorsese leading men. He suffers the sexual distractions of RAGING BULL’s Jake LaMotta. He is miffed by a world full of sin, like Travis Bickle in TAXI DRIVER. He appears to die at the climax but then doesn’t really, like Ace Rothstein and his exploding car at the start/end of CASINO ( ... OK, that one might be a stretch).

Let’s talk about casting. First, the obvious question: why not de Niro as Jesus? Ironically, at the time of filming he may have been busy playing the devil for Alan Parker in his movie ANGEL HEART.

Or why the hell not Harvey Keitel? He was on set and everything, playing Judas Ascariot (dyed ginger, for some reason). Yes, he's still second-billed and yes, Judas is pretty much the antagonist and a meaty role in itself. But come on, Harvey would have been amazing! Just look at what he managed to do shortly after as a tormented soul, sometimes in a religious setting, in Abel Ferrara's BAD LIEUTENANT.

Anyway, the final casting choices do work well and are leftfield enough to fit in with the movie's slanted take on its subject matter, as is having many characters talk in anachronistic Noo Yoik accents. Willem Dafoe as the man (of God) Himself is as committed as you’d expect (and surely influenced Ewan McGregor); David Bowie is an icily callous Pontius Pilate; Barbara Hershey a suitably sexy Mary Magdalene. And putting Harry Dean Stanton in your movie (as Saul/Paul) never fails to elevate it.

So, another tick for Mr Reliable Marty. And SILENCE, his questioning-faith companion piece from 2016, is also excellent.

Five stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  On Earth, yes. Up in Heaven? Not sure it’s that kind of place.

What would a movie called THE FIRST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST be about?  Who can be sure that the temptations depicted here hadn't been part of Jesus's life for years already? The Bible is famously light on details about his teens and 20s, after all.

Previously:  THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Next time:  LAST PASSENGER

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (1971, Peter Bogdanovich)

 
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Teenagers in 1951 come of age in their dying Texas town.

Starring  Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn

Written by  Larry McMurtry, Peter Bogdanovich

Produced by  Stephen J Friedman

Duration  118 minutes

I can’t talk about THE LAST PICTURE SHOW without starting with Stephen King.

In his novel Lisey's Story, Lisey has recently lost her husband, Scott, and is going through his journals. She learns from them that when her hubby used to stay up late and drop off in front of the TV, he would fall into a catatonic state and be literally transported to a magical alternate universe, where he found peace and healing from his debilitating mental health issues.

But it wasn't any old programming that used to whisk him away. The Shopping Network or repeats of Magnum PI wouldn't cut it – in order to travel to that wonderful healing place, Scott had to be watching his favourite movie, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW.

(And if you think I’m going to now delay getting to the actual review by going off on a tangent about Stephen King books, constant reader, you’ve got another thing coming. So not my style.^☆)

Now, I can't be sure exactly why King gave this particular film the power to mentally teleport people to a far away land; he never makes that explicit. But since the reason Scott would embark on those journeys was to recuperate, 1950s-set coming of age classic THE LAST PICTURE SHOW is therefore portrayed as a vessel with which to break free from inner torment.

So, is this movie ‘escapism’? I've always found that a bit of a limiting term, usually eluding to fantastical, good-vs-evil battle stuff, or love-wins-in-the-end fairy tales. Forget your troubles and immerse yourself in something idealised and totally removed from reality for a couple of hours.

But there’s another kind of escapism: a wallowing kind, when you reach out for something that affirms the pain you’re going through. Diversions like the type in the previous paragraph can feel like they’re taking the piss by portraying something unobtainable; what you really want is a Radiohead album on repeat and MELANCHOLIA or REQUIEM FOR A DREAM playing with the sound off.

In the case of PICTURE SHOW, it doesn’t put the viewer in a world of orcs and elves or shiny romcom land. But it does take them somewhere: back to the ’50s, that lost time of Boomer nostalgia so frequently visited by the generation of King (most notably for IT), Robert Zemeckis (BACK TO THE FUTURE), Steven Spielberg (THE FABELMANS), and many other creatives born following WWII. But PICTURE SHOW's tone is far from carefree and enchanting; instead we get moribund, ennui-laced melancholy. The opening goddamn shot is a pan through a deserted town with dust blowing everywhere, a place that makes the shithole from LAST MAN STANDING look cheerful and prosperous. The very first words spoken are "You're never gonna amount to nothin’!"

The local kids we meet are thoroughly disillusioned. They have none of the collegiate spirit that their elders expect, shirking tackles on the football field and only singing the school anthem mockingly while driving away from the place. They pass the time making out in the back row of the town’s only cinema, being sure to remove their chewing gum first. They experience fleeting liberty by skinny dipping at unsupervised parties, in a famous scene with Cybil Shepherd that discloses to the viewer the exact moment when director Peter Bogdanovich decided to ditch his wife (who was working on the crew!) and run off with her.

It’s a not a film heavy on plot. It’s more of an atmosphere piece punctuated by minor incidents, a few shattering events and a whole bunch of loaded exchanges heavy with unspoken emotion, moving forward like the unhurried flow of water, lapping over you and soaking into your bones.

That Ben Johnson and Clois Leachman bagged acting Oscars for so little screen time (10 and 16 minutes respectively) tells you all you need to know: as we all learned in Physics class, pressure equals force over area. Their strong performances delivered within such brief pockets of time create a huge impact, and I'd say the effect has only ever been bettered by Judi ‘eight minutes’ Dench in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE.

What I’m getting at is that the movie is dreamlike – at once intense and casual, amorphous yet precise, and, ultimately, transporting.

I think I see now what King was going for.

Five stars out of five.

^☆ … What? OK fine, since you won’t stop going on about it. The masterpieces are IT, The Stand and the Dark Tower series; other personal favourites are 'Salem's Lot, The Dead Zone, Firestarter, Roadwork, Pet Sematary, Misery, The Dark Half, Duma Key, and pretty much all of the short story collections.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  That’s how the movie finishes: the town cinema that was one of its few features is forced to close down due to lack of business. Final screening: RED RIVER, starring John Wayne and Montgomery Clift.

What would a movie called THE FIRST PICTURE SHOW be about?  Same thing as Scorsese’s HUGO? Something about Georges Méliès, certainly.

Previously:  FERNGULLY: THE LAST RAINFOREST 

Next time:  THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972, Wes Craven)

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When a middle-class couple realise that the drifters they have let into their home are responsible for the rape and murder of their daughter, cheerful hospitality curdles into bloody revenge.

Starring  Sandra Peabody, Lucy Grantham, David Hess, Martin Kove

Written by  Wes Craven

Produced by  Sean S Cunningham

Duration  84 minutes

Imagine for a moment that your name is Bonnie Broecker. It’s the mid ’60s and you’re married to Wesley Earl Craven, a respected humanities professor at Clarkson College of Technology, New York.

Life is ticking along nicely; your husband has begun messing around making short films with a 16mm camera, but it’s just a hobby – he had a strict Catholic upbringing where movies were forbidden, so it’s probably just something he needs to get out of his system.

Then the man you call Wes starts to get more serious about this filmmaking business. He suddenly jacks in the academia and starts editing and writing X-rated flicks – under a pseudonym, mercifully.

Things don’t quite work out between the two of you and sadly you’re divorced by the decade’s end. Then, one night in 1972, you’re walking past a movie theatre showing something called THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, directed by one Wes Craven. Curious to see what your ex’s cinematic ambitions have led to, you purchase a ticket.

Eighty-four minutes later the credits are rolling up and the rest of the audience has shuffled away, but you're still rooted to your seat with your mouth agape.

"Oh, Wes," you whisper. "What the fuck was that?"

There must also have been several of Craven’s ex-students who went to see LAST HOUSE, not to mention his sophomore effort, THE HILLS HAVE EYES, and all the other horror hits and less-than-hits that followed. Did any of these youngsters equate these intense films with the bland teacher who used to hold court in the lecture hall droning on about philosophy and art history? Did any of them – let alone his ex-missus – think, "Oh yeah, this doesn’t surprise me, I always knew he had it in him"?

Just like David Lynch being a gawky former Eagle Scout and John Woo being a softly spoken pacifist, egghead Craven creating the kind of films he did is pretty baffling. But even if his move into exploitation is as unfathomable as the evil that lurks in society's underbelly, he certainly made an impact on horror cinema.

Craven actually changed the genre three times in three separate decades. The raw and uncompromising LAST HOUSE raised the bar for what true terror could be on screen; ten years later he breathed new life into tired slasher flicks by unleashing Freddy Kruger in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET; and then in the ’90s he delivered the meta mega-hit SCREAM.

Viewed today, LAST HOUSE remains a truly gut-wrenching ordeal. The abuse meted out by the odious Krug and his gleeful band on the poor girls, whose only crime was venturing from their leafy suburb into the big city, is difficult to watch, with the "piss your pants" humiliation being especially not for the faint-hearted.

Yes, the film is inarguably amateurish and occasionally cheesy, with its bumbling cops (including a pre-KARATE KID Martin Kove), prolonged cake-decorating sequence and cheerful music. But the lurching tonal shifts make the scenes of stark violence and torture even more shocking, coming so abruptly and so relentlessly as to make the viewer feel that they themselves have been physically assaulted.

It's an important horror picture, of that there can be no doubt, but even if we had never ended up hearing of Professor Craven or Sean S Cunningham (producer here, later director of FRIDAY THE 13TH) again, LAST HOUSE would still stand on its own as a work of genuine power.

Five stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  You don’t actually see the street clearly, so it's impossible to verify whether there were in fact no more houses on that side. But why would such a trusted educator lie to us?

What would a movie called THE FIRST HOUSE ON THE LEFT be about?  You could say it had already been done by way of Craven’s inspiration for LAST HOUSE, Ingmar Bergman’s THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960). Although since that film is set in 14th Century Sweden it was probably more of a wooden hut on the left. Otherwise … well, maybe the couple who live in the first house turn out to be more of the forgive-and-forget type, resulting in a somewhat anticlimactic finale. 

Previously:  THE LAST LULLABY

Next time:  THE LAST MERCENARY

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989, Steven Spielberg)

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Whip-cracking, daredevil archaeologist Indiana Jones teams up with his father (also an archaeologist, but a stuffy old-fashioned one) to track down the actual holy grail.

Starring  Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Denholm Elliott, Alison Doody, John Rhys-Davies, Julian Glover

Written by  Jeffrey Boam

Produced by  Robert Watts

Duration  128 minutes

Despite the five stars, I am going to come down on LAST CRUSADE, just a tiny bit.

The film plays it a little too safe. Spielberg reproduces all the beats from RAIDERS, but this time with the comedy cranked all the way up. He wants to exorcise our memories of TEMPLE OF DOOM, copying best pal and Indy collaborator George Lucas’s tactic with STAR WARS: deliver popular first instalment, go dark for the sequel, reign it in and return to the tried and tested for part three. 

(See also Robert Zemeckis’s Spielberg-produced BACK TO THE FUTURE saga, although Zemeckis did at least introduce a Western setting to freshen up his trilogy-capper).

Now, OK, I get it. TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE fucked everybody up; John Landis the most, of course, but the other directors involved in that ill-fated project were not in the mood for any more darkness after such a shocking onset tragedy, the fallout from which was still rumbling through the courts. Steve got all his angst out of his system with TEMPLE and then insisted on nothing but lightness in his next franchise picture. 

Added to this, by the late ’80s his marriage to Amy Irving was on the rocks, so the biggest director in the world just wanted to have some fun and forget about troublesome things. Hence finally doing his Bond film with the main man himself, and making the endeavour much more of a comedy with some adventuring than an adventure sprinkled with jokes.

But TEMPLE is still my personal favourite – yeah yeah, it’s not ‘better’ than RAIDERS, but it's the one I come back to the most. What if Steve (and George, can’t forget him) had decided to travel further down this challenging path for Indy? I'm not sure how much darker they could have gone than kidnapped children working as slave miners, hearts getting ripped out and a possessed Indy intimidating his pre-teen sidekick, but it’s just a shame that we got RAIDERS: HERE WE GO AGAIN instead of another stab at something more daring.

I can't find it anymore, but I once watched a YouTube video where someone played TERMINATOR 2 and TERMINATOR 3 side by side to demonstrate how the later film completely replicates the structure of its predecessor. I’ve never seen this done with RAIDERS and CRUSADE, but I’m betting that it would work. If you’re flicking through the channels and come in during the truck chase towards the end of CRUSADE’s second act, then it might take you a few minutes to realise that you’re not watching the truck chase towards the end of RAIDERS’ second act.

And then there’s that overabundance of humour. Take how the film treats the character of Marcus Brody. In RAIDERS, he’s Indy’s friend and colleague at the university, a sturdy influence who provides our hero with the knowledge and confidence he needs to embark on his quest. In CRUSADE, he’s reimagined as a goofy counterpoint to Henry Sr, someone notorious for getting lost in his own museum and who stumbles around foreign countries mumbling, "Uhhh ... excuse me ... does anyone here speak English?"

But come on, before this becomes the most negative five-star review of all time – of course CRUSADE is a brilliant film. 

One thing I especially appreciate is that the obligatory relationship subplot is actually between Indy and his Dad, rather than a forced love-interest. Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam (THE DEAD ZONE, THE LOST BOYS, LETHAL WEAPON 2) has the good sense to realise that no one gives a shit about Alison Doody’s Dr Elsa Schneider, and so rather than dragging her tryst with Indy out all through the movie before having her betray the Joneses towards the end in a stunning 'twist', Boam tosses the reversal in as soon as possible so we can get her out the way and spend more time with the father/son dynamic.

This decision to sideline her character does make one feel pretty sorry for the soon-to-be-forgotten Doody. When she signed up to be the top-billed woman in the latest Steven Spielberg blockbuster co-starring Harrison Ford and Sean Connery, I doubt she considered the possibility that it wouldn't boost her career.

Which leads me to mention in closing that although CRUSADE was clearly made as a family-friendly tonic to the nastiness of TEMPLE, which Spielberg had already disowned, one nicely adult touch still crept in: the revelation that both generations of Jones men have slept with the same double-crossing villainous woman. Good on ya, Sean!

Five stars out of five.

Valid use of the word ‘last’?  Well, that cave place they were all fleeing at the end was pretty much collapsing all around the old knight dude, so no one's getting back in there again.

What would a movie called INDIANA JONES AND THE FIRST CRUSADE be about?  Either some kind of prequel with a Jones ancestor set in the 11th Century, or flashing back to an even-younger-than-River Indy, when he's a four-year-old on a quest to exert his authority over Henry Sr and his hitherto unseen mother – possibly by refusing to eat his broccoli. 

Previously:  THE LAST EMPEROR

Next time:  THE LAST SUMMER

Check out my books:  Jonathanlastauthor.com