The Last Detail (1973)

Billy “Bad Ass” Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young) are two SPs who’ve been assigned to escort a fledgling sailor from where they are stationed, Norfolk, Virginia, to the Naval Stockade at Portsmouth in New Hampshire. The prisoner, not even 20, has received an eight-year sentence for a minor crime. Buddusky and Mulhall take pity on the kid, Meadows (a 22-year old Randy Quaid) and instead of following the original plan of getting him to the brig early and then using the rest of the scheduled time spending the stipend on partying, Buddusky and Mulhall decide to let the kid join them.

Once the trio has reached the point in their destination with enough time left allotted for them to pick up the mandatory trip later, they find themselves looking for ways to pass the dead time while also showing the kid an impromptu last hurrah of hedonism. The film is in no hurry to get back on track. It is in the weariness I felt with its loitering that I realized I was missing the point. The scenes of Buddusky, Mule, and Meadows twiddling their thumbs at a party Meadows has inadvertently gotten them invited to, the awkward languor at the whorehouse, the many moments of listlessness are not a lack of focus on the film’s part; it is the focus. Without ever stating it outright or even really acknowledging it, the film presents Buddusky as a man in the grips of existential despair: the first time we ever see him, he is napping, unoccupied, in the Sailor’s lounge at the Navy barracks. That’s what makes him the wrong choice to lead the guys to Portsmouth: he hasn’t figured out a way to deal with his own existence – his only solution is momentary benders of sex and booze, punctuated by fights spurred by anger it is unlikely he knows the source of. He doesn’t know how to mentor himself, let alone mentor Meadows. Mulhall is right when he tells Buddusky that he's "a menace"; Buddusky could very easily lead them over a cliff, all the while assuring them that “yes, this is the right direction, trust me!” They are a volatile trio, not only because Buddusky is the unappointed leader, but because Mulhall isn’t assured enough to know when and where to properly repress Buddusky’s hell-raising methods of killing time. And forget about Meadows: dull-witted and carrying a defeated air of resignation due to his punishment, he is as malleable to Buddusky’s influence as can be. After spending time with Buddusky, Meadows grows to look up to him, and even Mulhall gradually finds himself astonished with what a character Buddusky is.



Jack Nicholson has a peerless ability to fascinate even when doing nothing, sometimes even more attention-grabbing when he’s doing nothing than when he is strutting and grinning, when you see the fear that’s been hidden under layers of self-assurance. Buddusky takes Nicholson’s irrepressible mischief and magnifies the cockiness; it took a while, for me at least, to notice that much of it is posturing, more for his own benefit than for others’. Everyone has a way of dealing, and Buddusky’s is seizing his already bursting Id and letting it overflow dangerously in an attempt to submerge the anxiety created by his own profound dissatisfaction. You get the sense that even though Buddusky will continue to medicate himself with booze and brothels in the future, secretly he’ll know how futile it is, and this is where Nicholson’s knowing face, his uncanny intelligence, make him perfect for subtly tormented rascals. Marlon Brando was good at playing these roles as well, but without exuding the sharp intellect of Nicholson. Brando’s dissatisfaction was more instinctual; Nicholson’s is cerebral.

But Buddusky is much less thoughtful than that. He’s a sailor, not an intellectual (like the demonically malevolent Jack Torrance), and often acts without thinking, often to great amusement, but at the safety of his companions. This is the role that must have landed him the part of Randall P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Billy Buddusky and McMurphy are one and the same: both are irascible, rebellious, and decent men who are cockily aware of their awesomeness, but are nobly inspired to use their awesomeness to benefit the less fortunate people not born as Jack Nicholson. Consider that the final step in Buddusky’s plan is to get Meadows laid. McMurphy goes out of his way to get Billy Bibbitt laid in Cuckoo’s Nest, with disastrous results. Buddusky wants to show Meadows a good time just like McMurphy wants to take the boys fishin’ in Cuckoo’s Nest, risking life and limb for other peoples’ pleasure. Sure, the fishing trip had an ulterior motive – McMurphy wanted some time alone with Candy, but he could’ve easily escaped for that without 15 mental patients trailing behind. Both are compassionate men, and Buddusky does his best, from the very beginning, to make Meadows feel better:

Buddusky: “You know, Meadows…this eight years, it ain’t necessarily eight years.”
Meadows: “It isn’t?”
Buddusky: “No, it isn’t. They’re going to knock two years off right at the beginning for good behavior, so, that’s six years right there.”

Another brilliant ingredient in the film's success is seeing Hal Ashby’s droll sensibility via his positioning the camera just so, as when he watches Buddusky, Mulhall, and Meadows shopping for candy and soda in a concessions room. He shoots with the wooden doors of the entrance in the foreground, the door handles prominent. While noticing the odd inclusion of the unclosed doors, Buddusky, inside, at a distance, appears, milling past the open entrance from the right side of the room to the left, and I laughed. Three sailors browsing for concessions is not just three sailors browsing for concessions. Ashby composes his frame to produce comical, poignant images in a manner that is as triumphantly assured as Jim Jarmusch. There’s also a good deal of irony, notably the playing of the upbeat U.S. Navy tune, “Anchors Aweigh,” a tune that evokes the innocuous, sexless, clean image of the heroic seaman fighting patriotically for his country. It’s played over the opening credits, seemingly fitting for a film about servicemen, and later, over the ending, as Buddusky rudely spits obscenities to an agreeing Mulhall about the shit they have to put up with. After witnessing the vulgarity, rudeness, grumbling, and despair contained in the personalities of the sailors in The Last Detail, playing “Anchors Aweigh” for them seems absurd.


Grade: A