Stars: Jack Nicholson, Otis Young, Randy Quaid, Clifton James, Carol Kane

Director: Hal Ashby

Summary: Tale of two U.S. Navy petty officers who are ordered to escort a kleptomaniac from one prison to another.

In THE LAST DETAIL the winning combination of director Hal Ashby, screenwriter Robert Towne, and actor Jack Nicholson turned an unheralded novel by Darryl Ponicsan into one of the first of what are now thought of as the classic films of the1970s. Navy lifers Badass Budduskey (Nicholson) and Mule Mulhall (Otis Young) are given a week to escort a teenage petty thief, Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid), from Virginia to the naval penitentiary in Maine. Their plan to bring him there quickly, and spend the remaining time having a good time themselves, changes when they come to sympathize with the naive Meadows. He's clearly an uncontrollable kleptomaniac given an unjust sentence, so they decide to include him in their plans. But as they escort him through the entire sixties scene, from bars, brawls, and drug-addled parties to a visit to a prostitute (Carol Kane), they come to feel that showing him the world he'll be missing in prison might not be the act of kindness they intended.
The film features a breakthrough performance by Nicholson. The killer smile, quick anger, and antiestablishment attitude that brought him stardom in CHINATOWN is well controlled by Ashby's direction. He never lets Nicholson steal the show. The balance with Quaid's and Young's strong performances makes for a very moving character-based dramatic comedy.

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The Last Detailnearly didn't get a release. Columbia, for whom it was made, was alarmed by the movie's barrage of profanity and resented the unorthodox working style of its director, Hal Ashby, who loathed producers and made no secret of it. Only when the film picked up a Best Actor Award for Jack Nicholson at Cannes did the studio reluctantly grant it a release--with minimal promotion--to widespread critical acclaim. Nicholson, in one of his best roles, plays "Bad-ass" Buddusky, a naval petty officer detailed, along with his black colleague "Mule" Mulhall (Otis Young), to escort an offender from Virginia to the harsh naval prison at Portsmouth, NH. The miscreant is a naïve youngster, Meadows (Randy Quaid), who's been given eight years for stealing $40 from his CO's wife's favourite charity. The escorts, at first cynically detached, soon start feeling sorry for Meadows and decide to show him a good time in his last few days of freedom.

Ashby, a true son of 60s counterculture, avidly abets the anti-authoritarian tone of Robert Towne's script. Meadows is a sad victim of the system--but so too are Buddusky and Mulhall, as they gradually come to realise. A lot of the film is very funny. Nicholson gets to do one of his classic psychotic outbursts--"I amthe fucking shore patrol!"--and there are some pungent scenes of male bonding pushed to the verge of desperation. But the overall tone is melancholy, pointed up by the jaunty military marches on the soundtrack. Shot amid bleak, wintry landscapes, in buses and trains and grey urban streets, The Last Detailis a film of constant, compulsive movement going nowhere--a powerful, finely acted study of institutional claustrophobia.

On the DVD:The Last Detaildisc doesn't have much in the way of extras. There are abbreviated filmographies for Ashby, Nicholson and Quaid (though not for Young) and a trailer for A Few Good Men(1992). The mono sound comes up well in Dolby Digital, and the transfer preserves DoP Michael Chapman's subtle, subfusc palette and the 1.85:1 ratio of the original. --Philip Kemp

Aspect Ratio:	1.85 Wide Screen, 16:9 Anamorphic Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Subtitles:	Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
Year:	1973
Release Date:	August 5, 2002
Runtime:	100 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	C D R 10076
Keywords:	Last, Comedy, General, Wide, Screen, Detail
Genre:	Comedy