I watched Hal Ashby‘s The Last Detail (1973) for the first time last night and a couple of things stood out that I thought I would mention.
The film centers on two Navy men — Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and Mulhall (Otis Young) — assigned to escort Meadows (Randy Quaid), a young officer sentenced to eight years in jail and a dishonorable discharge for attempting to steal $40 from a charity box. Not necessarily a punishment equal to the crime, but the length of his jail time is directly related to the fact the charity in question is the favorite of Meadows’ Commanding officer’s wife.
Quaid, who must have been 21 or 22 when the film was shot, instantly appeals to your sense of compassion as it’s quite clear he’s been done wrong. Buddusky and Mulhall feel the same and given more money and longer than is necessary to transport him from Norfolk to Portsmouth Naval Prison, they decide to show the youngster a good time along the way, Buddusky being the spearhead for the operation, which leads us to the picture above.
Robert Towne (Chinatown, Mission: Impossible) adapted the screenplay from Darryl Ponicsan‘s novel and what you don’t see in the picture above is the prostitute giving Meadows a blowjob.
So often in today’s films a director will leave us to watch a bobbing head in such a situation, giving the audience the full view of what’s taking place, but in the case of this shot, Ashby moves the camera north, applying all the focus on Meadows as it would appear he’s about to lose his virginity. The focus of the scene is Meadows and not the blowjob. By moving the prostitute out of the image we maintain focus on the most important aspect of the story.
Even better, once they finally do have sex all you see is the after, none of the during.
It reminded me of Heli, the first film I saw at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and the opening sequence, which I described in my review:
The first thing anyone is sure to notice in Amat Escalante’s Heli is Lorenzo Hagerman’s cinematography. The film opens with the sole of a boot pressed against a young man’s face as he is bleeding, bound, gagged and lay flat on the bed of a moving truck. Next to him is another young man whose face we cannot see. All we hear is the creaking of the truck as it rolls down a dirt round in an unspecified Mexican town.
All in one shot, the camera slowly pans up and moves into the cab of the truck as the sun beams in over the horizon. It’s a beautiful shot and I couldn’t help but be reminded of how film limits our knowledge of what’s going on based on what we see. Only minutes earlier we were looking at a grisly scene and now, through the front window, the scene appears as innocent as anything else.
People love to compare film adaptations to the books they were adapted from as if they are one and the same, and yes, an author can slowly reveal bits of information, but this is one explicit example of how movies differ from novels and why when you talk about a film adaptation of a novel how important that word “adaptation” actually is. Movies have the ability to show us everything, but the greater impact can often be found in limiting that focus.
In the example above much would have been lost had everything been in view. While it may have proved titillating for some audience members, the point of the scene would have been forgotten or, at the very least, diminished.
Additionally, I found the overall narrative of the film quite interesting, especially when viewed through today’s class system. A Jumpcut write-up from 1974 by John and Judith Hess caught my eye:
If THE LAST DETAIL were simply an accurate description of the lives of uprooted working class men in the Navy, we would welcome it as a realistic portrait of a segment of American life. Unfortunately there is more to the movie than that. Although this film deals with working class characters and purports to give a realistic portrayal of their lives, the presentation of the three leading characters reveals the film’s essentially middle class bias. These three men are presented as limited, uneducated, lazy, prone to violence, and, worst of all (from the middle class perspective), disrespectful of private property. In other words, they exhibit all the negative qualities which the middle class commonly assigns to the working class. Mule, Badass, and Meadows are presented as centers of barely repressed anarchy; they are held in check only by the institution which feeds and clothes them and manages their lives. They seem to be volatile, unruly men who, without the restraints of military control, don’t know how to behave.
In today’s terms we talk about how the middle class has all but disappeared. By comparison has the middle class become the working class of which the film is said to look down on or have they become one and the same?
The film doesn’t really offer enough in terms of background on any of the characters, but that ambiguity is probably necessary to ensure a broader vision of the society they’re meant to represent. After all, we’ve been placing large groups in class categories forever and with the unemployment rate what it is, you can’t determine who is or isn’t middle class merely by how much they’re making in a given year.
Would the “middle class bias” John and Judith Hess discuss in the passage above be considered an “upper class bias” in today’s terms?
