Yodeling in the Canyon: The Last Detail (1973)

 

As Red Letter Media once said – Fuck you, it’s January.

Just like the light of the sun, the warmth and excitement of the holidays have faded from our lives. Everyone is tired. Everyone is pissed. But hey, there’s comradery in that prissiness – and no movie articulates that early-year bitterness like Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail.

Based on the 1970 novel by Darryl Ponicsan, The Last Detail follows two Navy lifers Billy “Badass” Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and Richard “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young) as they escort 18-year-old sailor Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) to an eight-year stint at a brutal Naval prison. It’s a road trip with a doomed destination. A gangly, pathetic giant, Meadows won’t survive a week in the frigid Portsmouth Naval Prison – a fact that both Badass and Mule must reckon with as they bond with the poor kid in trains, buses, and cheap motels along the Atlantic seaboard.

Badass and Mule are self-described “lifers,” sailors with nothing to their name beyond their Navy roles. Badass is a typical loser with delusions of importance. To him, the Navy is a place where he can get a paycheck, be at sea, and live outside what he perceives as the confines of civilized society. Yet, like all three of these poor saps, he’s just confined differently. Nicholson has always thrived at the art of the caged dog, but his unreal 1973 run is worth noting: Between 1970 and 1975, he starred in films like my beloved Five Easy Pieces, and Oscar winners like Chinatown and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Nicholson received another Oscar nomination for the role of Badass – a sealion of a man who fights with waitstaff and army grunts alike, and who cannot imagine life on the outside. Mule is just as angry, but knows how to keep it cool. Collected and eternally put-upon, Otis Young’s performance is greatly underrated, as most comedic straight men are. Unlike Badass, who’s introduced asleep on base with a lit cigar still between his fingers, Mule is introduced dutifully ironing his uniform. Mule often repeats that the Navy saved his life – a point of pride that mostly feels like self-assurance when being chewed out by upper brass or disrespected due to his race. It’d be easy for a script to paint Mule as the stick-in-the-mud, but Young plays the character with the same “I’m not even supposed to be here” hilarity of Dante from Clerks. Lastly, Randy Quaid of all people gives one of the most heartbreaking performances of the 70s as poor Larry Meadows. A shy beanpole with sticky fingers, Quaid’s Oscar-nominated performance communicates a squall of emotion with just a small smile or a glassy-eyed stare.

Like any good road trip movie, the meat of the story comes from these characters bouncing off one another and the various dive bar creatures, sex workers, and “Marine assholes” they bump into along the way. Badass, pitying Meadow’s unfair punishment, side-tracks the mission to give Meadows a raunchy goodbye. A road trip movie might seem like easy work, but the balancing acts between downtime, travel, and character moments are unbelievably hard to pull off. The now legendary script by Chinatown scribe Robert Towne somehow manages to be breezy without ever being boring. It moves when it wants to, shuttling our characters along steel Amtraks and across barren fields, and knows when to take its breath. Early in the film, after a fight with a racist bartender, the trio buys Meadows his first drink: a case of Schlitz in some Washington, DC parking garage. Naturally, they get drunk as shit and miss their train, so they post up for the night at a motel…only to drink a few more cases. What follows is a ten-minute scene of three men just drinking. Ten minutes may not seem long on the page, but it’s a staggering flag to plant so early in a movie. Director Hal Ashby depicts what it’s like to get drunk with three guys in a hotel room with pinpoint accuracy: loud rambling, pauses to watch TV, pissing with the door open, louder rambling, beer runs, and figuring out sleeping arrangements way too late in the night. Scenes like these cement a genuine connection between the men, even when darkness lingers on the peripheries. Before bed, Badass tries to teach Meadows how to fight, but Meadows refuses to punch him. Finally, Badass gets in the gentle giant’s face, “I’m taking you to jail, mother fucker!” he says.

“That ain't your fault.”

Badass screams and tears the room apart.

Famously unfilmable in 1970 due to the amount of profanity, Towne’s script isn’t bawdy just for the sake of it. There’s profound hilarity and heartbreak behind every expletive. As he explained, “This is how people talk when they're powerless, they bitch.” It’s easy to bitch when you don’t have shit going for you – and the drab east coast setting matches that tone perfectly. This is a starkly colored movie, with beige, blue, and grey being the primary tones. Often relying on natural light, Ashby and cinematographer Michael Chapman capture everyday locations like public parks and train depots with a hungover brightness and the lush interiors of midnight cafes and cathouses with a poorly-lit ambiance that renews the promise of a good time. The dull tones of steel and beige remind a contemporary audience that while the 70s were certainly a kinetic time for the United States, it wasn’t necessarily a colorful one.

Since 2023, The Last Detail has returned to the cultural conversation due to the popularity of The Holdovers. The two movies share more than their fair share of similarities – in tone, structure, and ice skating scenes – but the real comparison that struck me this rewatch was with a television series instead: Mad Men. Mad Men is an extended look into the cultural and generational clashes at the heart of America during the “New Hollywood” era of filmmaking. Badass and Mule aren’t nearly as upper crust or Waspy as Don Draper, but they still represent “the man” as Naval sailors. This slight elevation of status makes their middle journey through NYC so interesting. After wolfing down some Italian sausages, the trio are drawn into a basement apartment-turned-temple by the sound of chanting Buddhists. Badass is quick to call them “homos” until one worshipper invites the more spiritually open Meadows to a party. That party is more of an intellectual discussion in a living room, which Mule perfectly sums up by complaining, “We might as well be at a fucking bus stop.” It brings to mind some of Don Draper's best run-ins with beatniks and counterculture groups throughout Mad Men – generational conflicts explored through failed flirtations. Badass is least at home, loudly plotting on which girl he’ll score with, just to strike out with jingoistic Navy talk to a room of anti-war hippies. Mule hilariously has a genuine connection when a girl asks him about being a Black man in the Vietnam War until a Frank Zappa-looking motherfucker grills him on the morals of serving under Nixon. Only Meadows, the youngest and most open to the possibilities offered in that room, finds affection. An older woman, caressing Meadows' hands, offers to help him escape to Canada. Meadows refuses. He can’t get his captors in trouble.

“They’re my best friends,” he says.

The Last Detail is available to rent on Amazon Prime or Apple TV.

Special thanks to Austin Smoldt-Sáenz, Elena Bruess, Joshua De Lanoit, and Max Seifert.