The Last Detail (Hal Ashby, 1973):

Guest Columnist: Jordan Hoffman

Believe it or not, there are a few perfect guy movies out there without explosives, killing or car chases. Hal Ashby's The Last Detail may be the best of 'em. What makes this a true guy film is that one could imagine the characters of the film going to see any of our listed guy pictures. Would the Outlaw Josey Wales have time for something as time-wasting as cinema? The characters are like us: foul mouthed slobs who want to have fun and stick their pricks up the symbolic boss' wife called authority.

Jack Nicholson plays "Bad Ass" Budduskey. This role sealed his persona within the collective unconscious. While Detail isn't as well known as One Flew Over The Cukoo's Nest, Easy Rider or Five Easy Pieces, it is in fact the film where Jack plays the grinning devil character at his loudest, strongest, and, I feel, funniest. He and "Mule" (played by Otis Young) are low-rent Navy lifers who get handed all the, if I may paraphrase, chickenshit details. This time they have to escort a fresh-faced recruit (Randy Quaid) up the East coast to the military prison, where he will spend eight years behind bars. His crime? He stole forty dollars. Thing is, he stole it from the charity box of the commanding officer's wife's pet project ("every year the polio people give her a fucking plaque!") It sucks and it's unfair, but there's nothing they can do, unless they want their own asses behind bars, too.

But Bad Ass isn't about to let the kid go without a fight. He's a good kid, even if he won't stand up for himself and, let's face it, has a problem with kleptomania. They've got a week to get him up the coast, and while the original plan was to motor him up there without stopping so Mule and Bad Ass could spend the extra per diem on themselves, they realize that these few days will be the only chance the kid will have to be a young man. And not just any young man--a randy, dandy sailor man!

The first stop is to get him drunk. When the first bar won't serve him 'cause he's underage (and winces at serving Mule, who is black) Nicholson starts making a stink. "Get out of here, or else I'll call the shore patrol!" the barkeep warns. Nicholson whips out a pistol, "I am the motherfucking shore patrol, motherfucker! Give this man a beer!" It's a liberating scene. And the first of many just like it.

Robert Towne's no-nonsense script follows the three through bus stations, greasy coffee shops and hotel rooms. Hilarity comes when the three are discovered drinking great quantities of Schlitz in a public garage. Or when they happen upon some Marines in a locker room (you can rest assured these Navy men have many issues with the Marines.) Or at a hippie-dippy "chanting party" in the early 70's East Village. It's here where Mule and Bad Ass fight hard as they can to get the kid a little poontang before they lock him up. Indeed, the whole second half of the film is, at least on the surface, a quest for some easy and merciful tail for the virginal Quaid. When they finally come to prostitute Carol Kane, the encounter is so tender, yet so embarrassingly hilarious (and recognizable!) that I bet you'll have to hit rewind to make sure what you thought just happened really happened.

The Last Detail's aesthetic doesn't fuck around, either. Straight ahead shooting, simple coverage, minimal credit sequences, natural lighting, no tricks, no music (other than some military drumming when appropriate) and precise editing. That's because the guys in the film wouldn't stand for any fancy-ass shit. They're sailors. They run around Manhattan in sailor uniforms. They stand on a porch in Camden, New Jersey waiting for Quaid's mother to show up, freezing their nuts off, steam escaping from their mouths. They have tattoos of anchors. They order cheeseburgers, and if the cheese isn't melted the way Quaid wanted, then Nicholson will be sure to show him just how you make sure they know to how melt your cheese for next time. They don't bat an eye at sharing a room, all wearing nothing but their white caps and undies. They hoot and holler, and man do they curse. They have mouths . . . like sailors!

This also might be one of the first Hollywood movies to discuss oral sex. John Updike claimed that Shampoo was (at least it was the first that Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom saw) but that was released two years later. As luck would have it, Ashby directed that, too, so I think it's fair that this taboo subject was probably broken here. (Wow, Ashby's Coming Home is all about oral sex, too . . . could this have some deeper meaning?) Nicholson in Detail refers to cunnilingus as "yodeling in the gully." I don't really know what this means, but it sounds dirty and makes for a very pleasing running gag.

But there's something darker here, too. Like all good pictures from the early 70's there is a sincere distrust and dislike for authority. The shadow of The Man hangs over the entire adventure. Indeed, eventually the boys are going to have to decide whether they hand the young Quaid over or if they put up some kind of desperate fight. Here the anger and resentment that fueled so much of that era's fiction takes on a true poetry; we've watched Freedom been given to Quaid for the first time, and now it must be taken away. Mule and Bad Ass will be handing over part of their own manhoods, part of their own adolescent purity, when the week-long bender is over.

Hal Ashby's best known for his quirky, dark films like Being There and Harold and Maude. He also nearly invented the 1960's look of editing during his cutting tenure. Other than the Stones documentary Let's Spend The Night Together, this is the only "guy picture" on his résumé. The Last Detail just beats out John Cassavettes' as the best raging binge picture ever made, but it is also a great document of a particular time in American subculture. It also captures one of our most powerful leading actors at the absolute top of his game. And it'll also settle any dumb argument you have with a feminist that all guy movies have to have killing in them. I'm proud to make this my introductory entry to the GMOTW canon.