The Last Detail (1973)

Director: Hal Ashby
Writer: Robert Towne, based on the novel by Darryl Ponicsan
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Otis Young and Randy Quaid

Index: The First Thirty.

I was constantly faced with an odd question as I watched my way through Jack Nicholson’s First Thirty. Did he rise to stardom because he changed with changing times better than any other actor or did the times merely happen to change in a way that suited him best?

I still haven’t figured that out but this marks another change that worked either way. When The Last Detail was released, it contained sixty-five instances of the F word, thus breaking the record at the time. The script contained many more—hundreds more—but Columbia Pictures baulked at the quantity and required changes.

Watching in 2025, however, I didn’t notice it at all. That’s not even one a minute! The Wolf of Wall Street had three and a half every minute and it was three hours long. This was nothing.

The reason that scriptwriter Robert Towne gave for such frequent profanity is that “this is the way people talk when they’re powerless to act” and that’s ultimately what the movie is about. The protagonists of the film don’t have any power to do anything, even if the week we spend with them briefly makes them feel like they do. They don’t and the final scene makes that very clear indeed. We leave them bitching and moaning because that’s all they can do.

The framework for this is elegantly simple. Jack Nicholson and Otis Young play a couple of navy grunts—signalman Billy Buddusky and gunner’s mate Richard Mulhall—given a shore patrol detail. A seaman has been arrested and they’re tasked with escorting him from their base in Norfolk, Virginia to Portsmouth Naval Prison in Maine.

Now, if that sounds like a highly important job, I should explain. This particular seaman is Larry Meadows, who’s only eighteen years old and was caught attempting to steal forty bucks out of a collection box for a polio charity. And, because it’s the favourite charity of the wife of the Old Man who runs their base, that landed him eight years in prison and a dishonourable discharge. He’s hardly Jeffrey Epstein.

Randy Quaid is so softspoken that he makes Meadows seem like a baby. Maybe that’s why a couple of navy lifers, realising that they have seven days with expenses for a two day trip, decide to show him a memorable last week on the outside. And it makes a difference.

What happens from that point is extremely episodic but each episode colours in a bit more of the blank slate that is Seaman Meadows. At the end of the day, his two escorts are exactly the same people they were when they started out, but he’s grown into himself.

Now, that’s not to say that these two escorts aren’t interesting to watch, because they are. In fact, I wonder if Robert Towne made them more interesting by changing elements of the characters from the source book. For instance, Buddusky, the ringleader of this circus, was a closet intellectual with a beautiful wife in the novel and he died at its end.

Here, he’s an everyman drifting through his service with little effort. Nicholson’s success is to take someone fundamentally uninteresting and make them, at least for this brief period of time, someone worth watching, someone who makes a difference in a way that we don’t tend to expect nowadays. This is a long way from a Hallmark card with a glib uplifting message.

And, much like the next film on Nicholson’s radar, that’s because the script was written by Robert Towne, yet another Corman graduate. His first two screenplays were for Last Woman on Earth and The Tomb of Ligeia; this counts as his fourth, if we go by screen credits, though he’d been a script doctor on a bevy of others in between. It made him an Oscar nominee but he lost to William Peter Blatty for The Exorcist. However, he won for his fifth, Chinatown.

The two seemed so perfect for each other, it surprises that they didn’t work together more often. Nicholson wasn’t afraid to look awful on screen, whether that be because of character decisions or just bad hair days, and Towne let no good deed go unpunished. Together they let real people do real things in real ways and the results were ironically something special.

The Last Detail and Chinatown weren’t their first films together, as Towne did script work on Drive, He Said, Nicholson’s debut directorial effort in 1971, but they would only reconnect for The Missouri Breaks, Reds and the Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes.

If we think about who Buddusky is, we can’t come up with much. He hasn’t achieved much with his life; his job’s a dead end, his marriage is over and he has nothing to show for it. What little he earns clearly goes right out again on beer and women, probably in that order. He has anger issues and grabs any opportunity to start a fight with Marines.

However, he’s someone who’s worth having as a friend; a night out with him would always be memorable and he’ll have your back on any occasion. He also gets the job done, even if he complains all the way to the finish line.

Mulhall is more serious and less volatile but is a similarly small fish in a big pond without a chance of ever changing. They’re meant to be equals on this detail, but he quickly becomes a sidekick. Buddusky was written for Nicholson and Mulhall for Rupert Crosse, both friends of Towne’s, but the latter role was recast before filming began after Crosse learned that he had terminal cancer. Otis Young does a decent job but this was always Nicholson’s show.

Almost everything that happens was started by Buddusky having a bright idea, from taking Meadows to visit his mother in New Jersey to getting the boy laid at a brothel. What’s left is the result of chance rather than anything that Mulhall comes up with. Many young faces are recognisable, even though they were nobodies at the time, from Carol Kane to Gilda Radner, via Nancy Allen and Michael Moriarty, but it’s Nicholson at the heart of every scene: arguing with racist bartenders, instigating Meadows to toughen him up, hustling some guy at darts.

The other revelation here is Randy Quaid as Meadows, even though he’s not remotely like the character in the book. While he’s bigger at 6’4” than either of his co-stars, he’s naïve and vulnerable. At the beginning of the film, he’s a kleptomaniac but nothing else. By the time he makes it to Portsmouth, he’s a character who’s learned a lot from his two new best friends.

This is one of those films that underwhelms a little on a first viewing but only grows in our memory. It’s more accessible than Nicholson’s prior few features but it’s just as deep, largely due to his performance and Towne’s script.