"The Last Detail" is one superbly funny, uproariously intelligent performance, plus two others that are very, very good, which are so effectively surrounded by profound bleakness that it seems to be a new kind of anti-comedy. It's a good movie but an unhomogenized one.
"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.
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, remarkably played by Jack Nicholson, is Signalman First Class Buddusky, a 20-year Navy man of hilarious and often unwarranted self-assurance. Buddusky and Gunner's Mate First Class Mulhall (Otis Young) are assigned to escort from Norfolk, Va., to the naval prison in Portsmouth, N. H., an 18-year-old sailor sentenced to eight years in the brig for trying to steal $40 in polio contributions.
"The Last Detail" is the chronicle of this journey, which takes the better part of a week and dramatizes the increasing desperation of Buddusky as he tries to show the young prisoner his (Buddusky's) idea of a good time. There's a desolate beer party in a Washington hotel room, where Buddusky gets the kid drunk for the first time and tries to cheer him up. "Think of it this way," he says in effect, "you'll get two years off for good behavior."
In New York they crash a Nichiren Shoshu prayer meeting and wind up at a Village party where Buddusky tries to make out with a pretty, intensely serious young woman by talking about the romance of the sea, while she would prefer to talk about President Nixon or race relations.
In Boston, on their last day, Buddusky and Mulhall escort the young prisoner to a sleazy whorehouse where they introduce him to the wonderful world of sex by paying his tab. This experience, with a girl who manages simultaneously to be dimly sweet and a no-nonsense professional, is what finally unhinges the prisoner who, until then, has more or less accepted his fate.
Mr. Nicholson dominates the film with what amounts to an anthology of swaggers optimistic, knowing, angry, foolish and forlorn. It's by far the best thing he's ever done. If anything it's almost too good in that it disguises with charm the empty landscape of the life it represents.
Mr. Mulhall, by being black and playing a man who is as reflective and steadfast as Mr. Nicholson is errant, is the one person who gives the movie a contemporary look. 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 marvelous foil for Nicholson as the ever-polite prisoner who, for a long while, refuses to share Buddusky's rage at the injustice of his sentence. Early on, he has admitted to Buddusky that he had had a scrape with the police before entering the Navy. Asks Buddusky professionally: "Was it in the nature of a felony or a misdemeanor?" Says the kid: "It was in the nature of shoplifting."
Mr. Ashby persists in making comedies ("The Landlord," "Harold and Maude") that are never as funny as the treatments he gives them would have you believe. "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.
THE LAST DETAIL, directed by Hal Ashby; screenplay by Robert Towne, based on the novel by Darryl Ponicsan; produced by Gerald Ayres; director of Photography, Michael Chapman; editor, Robert C. Jones; music, Johnny Mandel. An Acrobat film, distributed by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 105 minutes. At the National Theater, Broadway near 43d Street, and the Coronet Theater, Third Avenue at 59th Street. This film has been rated R. Buddusky . . . . . Jack Nicholson Mulhall . . . . . Otis Young Meadows . . . . . Randy Quaid M.A.A . . . . . Clifton James Young whore . . . . . Carol Kane Marine O.D. . . . . . Michael Moriarty Donna . . . . . Luana Anders Kathleen . . . . . Kathleen Miller
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