The Last Detail (1973)

This is the only movie I've ever seen that shows Navy enlisted men as other than Laurel and Hardy type buffoons, or singers and dancers with their hats on the back of their heads like Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly. This movie shows that enlisted men are real, human, and have feelings just like everybody else. Anyone who has ever been in the Navy has known and been stationed with men like the three characters in this movie. I can't speak for the current Navy, I left in 1964, but it's refreshing to see a movie about Navy enlisted men.

Fmovies: Nicholson's "Bad Ass" is a beautifully crafted piece of character. He cusses. He fights. He drinks. He's loud. No one else speaks Robert Towne's words better than Nicholson. In this film he overwhelms at every turn. In the bar scene, he shows brute anger and a desire for dominance. The scenes with a young Nancy Allen are delightfully witty because of Nicholson's schoolboy antics of getting a woman into bed.

It is the scenes with Randy Quaid (also wonderful) where Nicholson shines brightest. "Bad Ass" represents a paternal figure lacking in Meadows' life. He makes him a man by demanding he send back a hamburger if it's not cooked the way he likes it. He demands Meadows to stop crying and be a man. He demands Meadows to stand up for himself and fight when someone pushes his buttons. He demands Meadows to want to have sex, like other men his age. Nicholson's father figure image here is played off perfectly as Meadows sort of imitates things "Bad Ass" does. If Bad Ass has a beer, Meadows has a beer. If Bad Ass wants a woman, Meadows wants a woman. There's a secret trust between the two. It's unspoken, but it's there. That trust is broken in the end when Meadows tries to escape. It wasn't all a lie, Meadows just felt that it was time to stop learning and start moving.

I would like everyone to know that my Dad played the Bartender in this movie and has quite a story to tell. Before he became a classically trained actor on Broadway and a member of the Group Theatre, he actually was in the Navy when he was 18. He did time in the "Brig" (he can explain that one, the story is too good for me to tell) and was also friends with Jack Nicholson. He was also in "Easy Rider" and many other great films. Their scene in this movie together was also included in Maxim magazine's "Top 100 Movie Scenes". My dad is a bad ass and I think everyone should see this movie. ~This was posted by his loving daughter, Morgain (Who is finally a member of the Screen Actors Guild)

The Last Detail fmovies. The Last Detail by Hal Ashby is much like John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy in that they are both road trip movies as well as buddy movies. They are about friendships that forged in extreme circumstances and the effect that these experiences have on each character's lives.

In the last detail, an unfortunate seaman by the name of Meadows (Randy Quaid) is condemned to jail for eight years for a misdemeanor crime he was unable to even complete. Being caught with his hand in the cookie jar after a mere forty dollars, he is consequently transported from a naval base in the south to the naval prison in Portsmouth, Maine. The last detail of a few veteran naval officers, namely Billy "Bad Ass" Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and "Mule" Mulhall (Otis Young) is to transport this eighteen year old, soon to be prisoner up the east coast.

The three gentlemen have never met before and all seem to have different interests. Billy and Mule are after some welcomed time off from the suffocating life on the naval base, while Meadows is drowning in his own depression. Billy is more of a lenient presence, while Mule seems to want to do his duty first and then relax. Soon the men form a bond. This bond and their relationship is what carry the movie. Meadows is an innocent and modest teenager who found his way into the navy because of a shop lifting problem. However, after hearing his story and spending time with the boy, the two officers realize the ludicrous charges that have been brought against such an undeserving soldier.

They take pity on him and decide to make his last days of freedom ones in which he will cross every right of passage yet to be undiscovered and make them days that he will never forget. As they gradually open up to each other, they grant the prisoner a certain degree of freedom beginning with the removal of the cuffs in the beginning of the movie. They get him drunk in Washington, D.C., involve him in his first fist fight in New York City and help him lose his virginity in Boston. Beyond these rights of passage, the officers also relate to the emotional side of Meadows. They allow him to visit his mother. What the two officers did not realize is that the journey they would take would be reciprocal. They all end up taking their guard down.

One of the more poignant lines in the film is when Meadows refers to the officers as his beast friends. Although he has only known them for less than a week, the sad fact is that these men are probably the closest friends that he has ever had. Mule and Billy have had much more life experience and are well versed in the details and idiosyncrasies that life involves. They connect with meadows because before this trip, he had been yet untouched by the worse side of life. His general doe eyed demeanor drives home the fact that he really does not deserve the treatment that he's receiving. Upon leaving the prison, I don't believe that Mule and Billy are so much angry with the way the ascending officer treated them as they are with the situation that Meadows is now faced with. "We could have prevented this.

If you respond to this film, you will probably go all the way and love it as much as I do. It is probably the high point of the drama of social realism started back by the like of "Marty."

It is Nicholson's film, yet Quaid and Otis Young(in his only good movie) really shine as well. It is the most heartbreaking of material played without sap or sentiment. Obscenity like this was still pretty new to movies back in 73, be sure to avoid edited T.V. versions. Reading the comments, it is sad that todays movie fans, spoonfed sledgehammer crappola, really can't respond to a drama played with the kind of subtle grace of "The Last Detail." Give it a shot. Ten out of ten.

I saw this movie when it was released and just watched it again, in its entirety, for the first time since. This means that I'm completely discounting the horribly butchered version I saw on Bravo (for shame!) a year or so ago. They didn't just bleep out the expletives as you would expect, whole scenes were cut, leaving the work so diluted I almost forgot why I had loved it. It was like Jaws without teeth!

Revisiting books, films or any work of art first experienced in youth can be very interesting, and I found that watching The Last Detail through my now (# unspecified!) year-old eyes was one of the many times something turned out to be even better the second time around. I guess that makes it a classic.

For those that don't know, this is the story of two career enlisted Navy men who are assigned the dreary detail of delivering a young seaman to prison in Portsmouth, NH, where he will serve an eight year sentence for attempting to swipe $40 from their commanding officer's wife's favorite charity box. It's obvious that poor Meadows, played by Randy Quaid, has been thrown to the dogs for his offense, receiving a dishonorable discharge from the service in addition to the excessive prison term, but this is the Navy and our boys must do as ordered. It's a sh*t detail, but it will take them out of their insulated and listless existence on base "in transition" - that is, waiting for assignment to sea duty - and they quickly formulate a plan to relieve themselves of their charge as fast as possible and spend the bulk of the allotted time and money remaining to party the way good sailors do, namely drinking and whoring.

Enter young Meadows, and the master plan takes on a life of its own as the seemingly hardened "Bad Ass" Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and "Mule" Mulhall (Otis Young) find themselves caught up in Naval-infused fraternity with the childlike Meadows. Resigned to his fate, the hapless swabbie's frustrating passivity is fuel to Baddusky's pugnacious nature, and Mulhall and Meadows are swept along with Chief Signalman Bad Ass on a journey of discovery. From teaching him how to get his hamburger served the way he likes it (with the cheese MELTED, thank you very much), to facilitating the loss of his virginity (Carol Kane is perfect as the young prostitute), this is really a "buddy" movie at its finest.

In the final frames, we watch the two lifers stroll out of the shot in lock-step, "Anchors Aweigh" piping, as they're off to reestablish themselves as individuals for a brief moment before returning to the shelter of their sacred family that is the US Navy.

There's nothing sappy about this film, don't get me wrong. There's a definite hard edge to it and life as a Naval enlisted man is not romanticized in any way. Visually, it's quite somber from our side of the screen, and the military music in the score is to music, as the military justice in the story is to justice. There are some fabulously funny moments, and of course, Nicholson kills in this part that no one could have played better. Otis Young is really good as the "cooler head" who doesn't want to get himself jammed up in any way but who is none the less down with showing Meadows a good time. It's Randy Quaid though, who impressed me most on this viewing. He played the ingenuous, candy bar-filching boy just right, and I'm afraid in retrospect that he got typecast as the big, goofy dumb guy as a result of his w