The Last Detail 4K 1973

Two U.S. Navy demobilized men finish their tour of duty and get one last assignment: to escort an 18-year-old boy who has been dishonorably discharged. Tom is sentenced to eight years in prison for being caught stealing forty dollars from a charity fund. Having developed a good feeling for the budding kleptomaniac during the trip, the guards decide to pamper him with the pleasures of life - the ones he was deprived of in civilian life.

Though The Last Detail is off the mainstream, it's not the least of these in the history of American cinema, since it's a major influence on the formation of the so-called "protest films". Here, the lone hero fights not against something (like the Vietnam War), but exclusively for himself, for his little self, which he urgently demands respect from the world around him.

In addition to director Hal Ashby, one of the main exponents of this idea in the 1970s was actor Jack Nicholson. In the image of a demobilized Billy Buddasky (for which he received an award at Cannes Film Festival as best male performer), nicknamed "bad ass" by his fellow officers, it seems here he was trying for his main image - McMurphy, who will play in two years in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Milos Forman saw The Last Detail or not, but one of the motifs of this tape almost literally repeated then in the adaptation of the novel by Ken Kesey.

Although Buddasky's role turned out to be no greater than that of the other two characters, it is Nicholson's character who becomes the central figure in this purely male triangle. The "old sailor," who has no sentimentality, turns out to be much more human than a good society that wants to look fair in everything. It is Baddusky who throws a little party for Larry Meadows, the rugged, do-gooder who has been prying into the savings collected for polio patients.

Instead of sending the boy to the penitentiary as soon as possible (in a couple of days), and then enjoying life at his own pleasure for another three days (the demob rests - the service goes!), Baddasky first escorts the boy to his mother's house, then organizes a greasy fight with "land rats", then lets him go skating, and on top of all that he escorts him to a brothel, where the virgin is stripped of his virginity to the obvious satisfaction of the escort.

You should see the buzz with which Nicholson plays the role of matchmaker here: "Welcome to the wonderful world of female genitalia, son!" he teases the sexually inhibited young man, giving for him his last savings, honestly won the day before. Likewise, unselfishly, McMurphy will give a feast of carnal pleasures to his "cellmates" instead of taking the opportunity to flee from the "cuckoo's nest.

After the 1970s, the last non-conformist decade, had been replaced by the pragmatic 1980s, when any little protest had the hallmarks of measured rationality, heroes like Baddusky rapidly disappeared from the screen. The triumph of commerce was a personal tragedy for Ashby. If in the seventies virtually every film of his became an event at the Oscar level (The Last Detail was awarded three nominations - for the role of Nicholson & Quaid + screen adaptation of Robert Towne, who a year later will still take a statuette for "Chinatown"), in the eighties Ashby began to produce an outright "recycled material". Each of his five pictures produced in the next decade became worse than the previous one. Finally desperate, Ashby found no other way out but to die. At the age of 52.

In The Last Outfit, imbued with bitter irony, the outsiders "suffer their last victories" before finally surrendering their positions to the "new Americans," who will teach the losers how to love life to their advantage.