The Talkies
Stein, Benjamin
quote him verbatim. Warhol merely signs a soup can and le voila, un chef-d'oeuvre. The world, concludes Kenner, is becoming one vast musde sans murs Where the proper person can transform almost...
...Nicholson is repellent though because he is so obviously yet a third character--an actor looking down his and the director's and the writer's nose at the person he is playing...
...It is a man's job, he says, standing up on the bridge with the spray billowing all around, Suddenly he _9 notices her smirks and says, defeated by a teenage girl's mockery, that the best thing about his job is that he has a sexy uniform...
...What this poor fish did was, in this glorious era, well nigh unthinkable...
...Why not a clenched fist when he emerged from the Huey...
...Had he called a press conference and announced R. Emmett T y r r e l l , J r . The Alternative May 1974 27...
...The two sailors selected to take the prisoner to prison are experienced navy salts, as familiar with the injustice of military life as Randy Quaid is innocent of it...
...Instead, he grinned...
...There is no sign of that happening...
...They had to address themselves to a worthy cause, the cause of free expression and art...
...The house is messy and littered with empty whiskey bottles...
...The convicted sailor is a person who is so innocent and so dumb that he makes a cocker spaniel seem like Charles Colson...
...But we are supposed to see that the house is symptomatic of the same kind of care and rearing that produced a moronic kleptomaniacal sailor...
...That's how much fun it is to watch The Last Detail...
...She lives in a miserable house in Camden, New Jersey...
...Literature students will wonder whatever happened to Milton...
...The pioneers of adult theater had to loosen up the Supreme Court with a few shots of the First Amendment...
...The minutes seem like hours as we watch the trio move down the dull and dusty road to filmic oblivion...
...Or consider the marvelous breakthrough we are now experiencing in adult films...
...Nixon is imperiling the Republic and the whole free world...
...The Last Detail is a compendium of all the current clichds in moviemaking...
...Would Mr...
...He never got married becausehe had to support his ailing mother...
...Finally, the most pathetic example of sloppy sentimentalism that does not fly: Quaid is taken to a place where he can make an identification bracelet that will designate him as any rank he wishes...
...On top of all of this pretension, the movie is just plain slow...
...The Last Detail tries to make the audience see that life for some people is truly no more exciting than a train ride in the northeast corridor, but it does not succeed in showing any more than that life might be that dull if people were the kind of people in The Last Detail...
...Nicholson is the man who can consider it a triumph of staggering proportions to get a cheeseburger sent back so that the cheese on it is properly melted...
...The movie then becomes, despite Nichoson's best efforts, an invitation for the audience to sneer at the life of people of inferior social station to those in the audience, few of whom, no doubt, think that beer is the world's greatest drink...
...The world, concludes Kenner, is becoming one vast musde sans murs Where the proper person can transform almost anything into art...
...At this point, the first three cheap shots of the movie are squeezed off in quick succession: ~The convicted sailor has been sentenced, for stealing $40.00 from a polio collection box, to eight years of hard labor, because polio is the pet charity of the naval base commander's wife...
...Like everything $1se in the movie, it is an example, not of how the other half lives, but of how the top 5 percent would like to think the other half lives...
...Kenner's shotgun-like wit, on the other hand, leaves wide spaces untouched...
...He could have mentioned the cruel condition of our women, the political castration of our homosexuals, the impending demise of the black-footed ferret, or the heartbreak of psoriasis...
...If he does not resign now the country will be torn apart," they would admonish, and that idiotic chorus that most American journalists fall in with would across a blackboard, pick up the theme and bellow it intermiSo let us wash our hands of this wretch, nably until some other psychopath sent He committed an audacious act and fouled them off on yet another just cause...
...But it does not work because sending back food is insignificant as an accomplishment, and because we suspect that everyone connected with the film knows it...
...Kenner's important achievement is his much-needed emphasis on the Augustans as innovators trying stoically yet defensively to make sense out of a new world...
...Hearst's victuals held a nationally televised food fight...
...Rather, he grinned...
...This question Kenner doesn't handle, though if it's the only art we might just as well ask, is it a tolerable civilization which produces such art...
...But since those characters ring so false, the movie says no more than that it is a hollow, boring movie about characters to whom one cannot relate...
...And, though Newsweek described it as a "cryptic" grin, it was a grin nevertheless...
...Au revoir, oaf...
...Of the latter, little is known except that he is so good that butter wouldn't melt in his mouth...
...A friend remarked, after seeing The Last Detail, that he wondered what had been left on the cutting-room floor when he saw what had been left in...
...If they could be wooden and prosy students of Neoclassical doctrine, they could also be modern in a way that the later Romantics could not...
...Art historians will wish he mentioned a Baroque painting or a Mannerist bust...
...Jack Nicholson, however, is the master of self-delusion, a person who has made it to stardom by playing men who sometimes thought they were something better than they were, yet knew, in their heart of hearts, that they were no better than they feared...
...The cheap shots continue as the movie goes along, gradually dragging i t farther and farther into the realm of the wealthy person's fantasy of the poor person...
...It is condescending, dull, and pointless...
...Preston could have earned for them...
...Presto, progress was at hand, the greatest advance in art since John Cage heard fingernails scratch that his flight was meant to symbolize the exigency of presidential impeachment, he would be on the cover of every newsweekly in the country...
...He somehow keeps his persona at some distance from his person...
...He had a two-way radio, why did he not use it...
...It simply doesn't work...
...Huey P. Newton be the fantastic celebrity he is today had he admitted that he shot cops and tortured fellow blacks because '~there wasn't anything else to do...
...Not only is he a grinning ignoramus, but he is also selfish...
...Nicholson and Quaid make a slight detour to the home of Quaid's mother...
...Will it be good art...
...The story of The Last Detail is that a moronic sailor, playe d by Randy Quaid, has committed a crime and must be transported by two other sailors from the Norfolk naval base to the brig at Portsmouth, New Hampshire...
...Neil Howe The Talkies by Benjamin Stein The Last Detail IMAGINE HOW MUCH fun it would be to ride from Norfolk, Virginia, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, by train and bus with a sailor who kept telling you jokes and stories you had heard before...
...He merely stepped from his wounded helicopter and confessed, "There wasn't anything else to do"--not a word about political repression, ecological suicide, or the rampant poverty of those thousands of starving young Californians who after queuing up for Mr...
...It is all just piled on a bit too thick...
...Jehovah must have been appalled, and surely many sharp public relations men still shake their heads as they muse upon the vast fortune poor Mr...
...For instance, in one scene, Nicholson tells ar} obviously bored girl how great it is to be in the Navy...
...It was as though Harry Truman had turned down the call to public service and continued to bankrupt himself, or the Pope had snubbed the summons of the angels and opened a spaghetti parlor...
...ROBERT PRESTON...
...He 26 The Alternative May 1974 chooses to be the same rank as Nicholson...
...More important by far, it is almost a parody of how to make a boring film...
...For all we know, Averell Harriman's house might be messy and filled with empty whiskey bottles sometimes...
...The "story" unfolds as Nicholson and Young take pity on Quaid, despite his innocent kleptomania, and decide to show him some "fun...
...Last Detail would have served some purpose only if it were clearly seen to be so dull and so condescendingly offensive that moviemakers tried to serve up a little more realism and excitement...
...And the avant-garde would prefer that the entire book had confined itself to Buster Keaton...
...Another example of failed cheap shots-by the time Quaid is near the end of his journey, he too has summoned the nerve to tell waiters to take back improperly prepared food...
...Now we in the audience know that Nicholson knows that it really is not so much fun to do those things...
...He committed a mischievous and indeed criminal act and did not make the faintest gesture to embroider it with noble purpose or high-toned symbolism...
...He is someone's dream of an obedient puppy of a man...
...He is always a little bit above it, looking down upon it...
...He is never really into his role...
...un" for Nicholson, Quaid, and Young is supposed to be having a really good time drinking beer in a parking lot in Washington, D.C., getting terribly drunk in a crowded hotel room in Washington, also on beer ('~rhe greatest drink in the world," says Nicholson), watching hare krishna chanters in New York, and then visiting a depressing house of ill repute in Boston...
...Imagine where the Black Panthers would be today had they merely grinned after a shoot-up...
...These considerations are outside The Counterfeiters as Kenner has written it, foreign not to the topic but to the lightheartedness of his venture...
...That is where the element of condescension comes roaring into the movie, like a tornado crashing into a mobile-home colony in Tupelo, Mississippi...
...That is supposed to be terribly meaningful...
...If the forward-looking aesthetes who produce these delicate renderings of man's goatish nature had stated at the outset that they wanted to create foul movies so that they could make mounds of money and retire to Arizona, how many opportunities do you suppose we would have to appreciate the beauties of sadism, bestiality, masochism, sodomy, and other libidinal variations...
...The Counterfeiters is a strikingly ambitious journey, and if it is guilty of bewildering gaps, so does it entertain and enlighten...
...Had he possessed the astuteness to boom for any one of the aforementioned causes he would be a free man today with a gorgeous publishing contract, lecturing engagements for the next decade on the college Chautauqua circuit, and an office in Washington paid for by some occult rivulet of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare...
...When the sailors arrive, she is not there, and they open the door and look inside...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) millions of other similarly endowed patheticoes stumble through a meaningless existence, wait for their breaks and grouse about the "good fortune" of their betters...
...it with a stupid and irresponsible grin...
...Quaid is too dumb to be believed...
...Any of a dozen just causes could have been put over on the American people had he but uttered a threatening declaration...
...The two guards, one white and one black of course, are played by Jack Nicholson and Otis Young...
...Not since a youthful Edward Kennedy turned his back on driver's education classes has a mortal so thumpingly sealed his own fate...
...The implication, of course, was that the answer to his question was "nothing...
...Hero worship...
...He would be T/meg "Man of the Year" and the New Republic would be editorializing about how Mr...
...It is supposed to show us something about how '~they" live, but it really shows nothing at all...
...He is simply not convinced that it is fun, and it is beyond the range of his ability, at least so far, to persuade us that he is having a really great time...
...This is the myth of the sharpster teaching the rube to be sharp...
...He is also the man who can lean back in the cheapest looking vinyl chair on earth, with his arms on its spindly wrought iron, in the waiting room of a seamy whorehousc, and look down at his shoes and say to his black companion, '~I guess we're just lifers, huhT' When he says that, he means that he is not only in the Navy for life, but he is in life, at a very low level, for life...
...you will probably never hear his name again...
Vol. 7 • May 1974 • No. 8
