The Last Detail sits in the midst of Jack Nicholson’s raucous 1970s run and features one of his trademark, smug iconoclasts. This time, he’s doing the smugging from the inside, playing a Navy signalman who raises at least one eyebrow at his orders, even as he ultimately obeys them. Adapted from the Darryl Ponicsan novel by Robert Towne and directed by Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude, Shampoo), The Last Detail functions as a laconic reappraisal of America in the dismal ’70s. As Nicholson’s Billy “Badass” Buddusky and fellow Navy serviceman Richard “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young) escort a court-martialed seaman (Randy Quaid) from their base in Norfolk to prison in Maine, we traverse by train, bus, and foot across a gray, cold landscape in service of corrupt orders. (Meadows, the seaman, is an 18-year-old kleptomaniac who’s been sentenced to eight years for impulsively grabbing $40.) Egged on by Buddusky, Mule agrees to show Meadows a good time along the way, but how far are they ultimately willing to stress the system? This tension is the source of Buddusky’s rage, which bursts to the fore in a few memorable scenes. Berating Meadows for not getting mad about his situation, Buddusky screams, “Don’t you ever just wanna fuckin’ whomp and stomp on someone, bite off their ear, just to do it …? I mean just to do it, just to get it out of your system?” If impotent anger was a hallmark of these Nixon years, Nicholson’s Buddusky fiendishly channeled it.
(6/26/2025)
