A Job Like Any Other: On Hal Ashby's The Last Detail
Sometimes the way to humanize the men behind the uniform is deromanticize their work
If I could describe my late grandfather into a few significant, character-defining factoids it was that he looked like Lyndon Johnson, loved the Green Bay Packers, loved the Navy, hated the Marines, and his favorite movie of all-time was The Last Detail.
My grandfather was a sailor in the United States Navy and went up the enlisted ranks to a W-4 Chief Warrant Officer on honorable discharge. Almost three decades going up the enlisted ranks, but you never went up to him with the gratitude of, “Thank you for your service.” He hated the term ‘service’. Being in ‘the service’, for him, sounded like he was a delivery boy or wait staff at a restaurant that would never have him as a customer. While he wore his baseball cap embroidered with the Naval carriers and battleships he was on, his perspective, due to serving in one war of no real closure in the Korean War, had him less of a chest-beating, fire-breathing, jingoistic veteran. To quote one of his favorite singers and fellow veteran, the recently departed late John Prine, “Your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore.” My grandfather would never overstate his time in the Navy as some G.I. Joe on the high seas. Most of his tenure was technically during peacetime and a lot of it serving on domestic Naval bases on the mainland United States. It was a job like any other for him, which also would mean with the glories to the job also came the headaches. So it made perfect sense to me that Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail, of all Hollywood movies about sailors and the United States Navy, was the film that spoke to him the most. Personally, going back to my youth, it was a film I forever associated with him and has become, admittedly informed by this familial connection and sentimentality, one of my favorite films too.
Darryl Ponicsan’s novel The Last Detail was published in 1970. Nixon was in office and the Vietnam War was escalating. While there was art commenting on the Vietnam War, the counter culture, divisions around the war among civilians, and generation gap in this era, what was striking and subversive about the novel being about a small group of Navy men in the late 1960s who had their characters not been doing shore patrol duties would probably be knee-deep in the jungles of Vietnam. They are not sweating in the jungles though, but are instead freezing in the colder months of late autumn becoming winter in the northeastern United States.
The Last Detail opens to the sounds of a Navy drum major band playing only for it to abruptly stop on the fade in to show the first image be of the band of sailors, in denim and practice clothes than their sharp Navy blues, walking back with their instruments after practice has finished. They are at their Naval Base in Norfolk, Virginia and there is an air of demystification in presenting contemporary sailor life on their domestic base.
The first singular character the camera follows is an unnamed in the film- but credited in the screenplay as Seaman Apprentice Sweek- who runs into a barracks looking more newsboy running errands than sailor. He is looking for somebody. He asks around, already showing that even the most ordered and tiered chain in the United States armed forces is a vast, scattered, and messy, with his eyes darting around fearing he might be in the wrong barracks entirely. He calls out for the name Buddusky. He leaves one room for another only to find our protagonist asleep in the barracks’ TV room. Sweek is there to tell him the MAA (master-at-arms) wants to see him. Buddusky (Jack Nicholson), barely awake, his combover unkempt, casually retorts, “Tell the MAA to fuck himself.” It is a shocking to any viewers with their preconceptions of sailors being obedient and servile to their commanding officers. Sweek is not offended at this profane response, instead he tells Buddusky to not shoot the messenger. Buddusky restates his feelings about the MAA. Sweek retorts with unconvincing bravado, “It’s your ass if you don’t!” Buddusky is motionless from his chair.
Sweek moves to another barracks that is identical from the last one. Sweek is looking for another sailor named Mulhall who also needs to see the MAA. He finds Mulhall (Otis Young) among a group of other sailors in their white undershirts and underwear as they steam-iron their uniforms. When given the news that the MAA has called for him, Mulhall knows what it means. His reaction is blunt, “I ain’t going on no shit detail!” Sweek decides to rephrase his earlier plea with, “It’s my ass if you don’t go!” Mulhall stands his ground and just asks Sweek to go back to the MAA and say he cannot find him. Sweek notes the MAA and other officers know where he is. Mulhall bites back with, “When you’re in the Navy, shitbird, and you are in transit nobody knows where the fuck you are. Now go tell the MAA to fuck himself. I ain’t goin’ on no shit detail!” Sweek’s whole rapport and dynamic with Buddusky and Mulhall has a pretty lived-in dynamic in being in a push-pull with other sailors who all air their grievances and profanities about the higher-ups through Sweek and he has to absorb it all with while having a narrow selection of responses to convince his fellow sailors to stay in line. And ultimately, in the end, these sailors do not run and hide from their summons. They follow orders and head to see the MAA.
Navy ‘lifers’ Billy ‘Bad-Ass’ Buddusky and Richard ‘Mule’ Mulhall leave their barracks and have been called to do a detail. The task should be routine but turns into one a moral and philosophical dilemma, making both question the worth and work in their duty to their country where they are looked at differently for their uniform. But in the end, these sailors are in a job like any other; one with the same issues of office politics, favoritism, the façade of meritocracy, and red tape.
Robert Towne’s screen adaptation of Ponicsan’s novel pretty much keeps the rhythmic, wonderfully salty sailor language of the book. Although his other collaboration with Hal Ashby with Shampoo nails a kind of rise of the Nixon era ennui of Southern California and is a lot more remembered, Towne embraces Ponicsan’s presentation of life in the Navy as not something of valor but as something way more relatable. The Last Detail is simultaneously functioning as a hangout movie, a road movie, and a work movie.
Buddusky (played by Nicholson with aplomb, relish, but also a lot of humbleness) and the more reserved Mulhall (Otis Young is a perfect foil) have their detail in shore patrol in taking a court martialed Seaman Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) to a Navy prison in Maine for committing an attempted theft over an attempted robbery of the charity fund run by a wife of a superior senior Naval Officer. The amount that was attempted to be stolen? $40.00. The time Meadows has to serve for that misguided error in judgment? Eight years and a dishonorable discharge. From first looking at Quaid’s lost boy-like, still covered in zits Seaman, he barely looks like he could harm a fly. But there he was, not yet even really having a life to live before having to serve eight years and further having a black mark on his already checkered record.
Buddusky and Mulhall both think Meadows’ punishment does not fit the crime and take pity on him, even as he initially tries to attempt to escape them on a train car but was about as successfully as his failed $40 theft. They have a week to travel from Norfolk, Virginia to Portsmouth Naval Prison to complete the detail and the rest of the film becomes about trying to have Meadows ‘live it up’.
Buddusky and Mulhall (each nicknamed ‘Bad-ass’ and ‘Mule’) are ‘good sailors’ in that they are ultimately not going to disobey their orders and spit in the eye of authority in their position, leaving their grievances left to the ears of people like Sweek. They know what the uniform has given them, especially Mulhall, who is African-American and in a rare place of authority for his race, even if in this case, him and Buddusky are doing their detail that came from a place out of pure pettiness.
The film is remarkable in that for a film made about Navy life for its time-period, that war is not really a topic nor conversation point in the film. Hollywood at the time when making war films in the early seventies either made them on wars that were over and won (Patton) or films that while taking place during another conflict but were quite clearly commenting on the current conflict (M*A*S*H and Catch-22). There was something striking in Ashby and Towne presenting current enlisted sailors still on American soil doing duties that were so unromantic and uninspiring, the types of tasks that none of the Navy brochures and recruitment officers tell you about when they visit you in high school. And while you do not see people around Buddusky, Mulhall, and Meadows in a culture war with them or being critical of their work, they often find themselves getting the short end of the stick, a far cry from our current era where it seems given your seat at a restaurant or on an airplane to somebody in uniform is an easy ‘viral moment’. But Nicholson’s Buddusky often improvises in trying to make Meadows last week as a ‘free man’ worthwhile.
Nicholson’s star persona is now more characterized as outsized, larger than life, with that wide, demonic grin and rascally eyebrows who carries an air of power and movie star even when not in films. But I would say in the early 70s, nobody else captured the New American Cinema’s version of a working man or working class man better than Jack Nicholson. There are a couple of scenes in The Last Detail that feels in conversation in-between his other great working man role in Five Easy Pieces, which contains a scene when he engages in an intense conversation with a waitress to get exactly what he wants to order and blows his lid when he cannot get what he wants. In The Last Detail when he is at a diner and sees that Meadows is going to eat a burger that was not at all what he ordered. He encourages Meadows to just send it back and ultimately does it himself, wanting Meadows to get something to go his way for once. Another scene is him posturing and playing up his Sailor on Shore Patrol exterior. He demands that a bartender give Meadows a beer while barking, “I am the motherfucking shore patrol! Give this man a beer!” He brandishes a gun that he puts on the bar table. It does not work but him, Mule, and Meadows all crack up at how ridiculous it is after they live, in a way playing up people’s stereotypes of their profession of being quick-tempered. Buddusky gets no real personal gain from these gestures towards Meadows but you see a lot of human compassion in how he treats him, wanting a camaraderie with the Seaman even if he is in cuffs. There is something almost paternal in their dynamic (that increasingly grows when he gets a brief glimpse into Meadows’ homelife), such as a scene at the ice skating rink where New York’s Rockefeller Center with Buddusky and Mule crack smiles at Meadows’ childlike wonder in ice skating.
You see the Nicholson charisma in the smaller moments of this film, drinking Heinken and Narragansett beer in their underwear at a hole in the wall motel room with anonymous women. He just looks cool. Then there is perhaps the biggest moment of brotherhood in the whole film, when Buddusky and the guys see Marines in the men’s room. They get into a fight. Of course they do! Navy men hate the Marines more than anyone else and vice versa! The film had been promoted with a shirtless Nicholson in a sailor’s hat and mustache with a grin as he smokes a cigar. It could be seen as a New Hollywood Uncle Sam ‘I Want You for the U.S. Navy’ type of commercial and yet, Nicholson as ‘Bad-Ass’ Buddusky is still more often than not exasperated, getting the small victories where he can and yet getting cut down to size whether with paper-pushing superior officers or women rejecting his interest. Buddusky is an ordinary, unremarkable man but Nicholson makes him compelling, grinding his teeth, chomping on cigars, and suffering no fools, wearing cynicism like armor until Meadows cracks that armor.
Quaid’s Meadows carries a lot of the film in his sensitivity and awkwardness. The way he hunches, you wonder how any person saw him fit to be in the Navy. He seeks validation from Buddusky and really any human connection, something he knows will immediately be out of reach when in Portsmouth. He loses his virginity awkwardly to a waifish sex worker Carol Kane, who tries to avoid eye contact with him postcoital as to not be drawn to his sentimentality and how loaded and important it was to him. Meadows is impulsive in the worst ways too, such as the robbery that is putting him in prison and his attempted escapes. Yes, he tries to escape again. The journey and hang had to end at some point, Meadows was living on borrowed time. However, even though his failed escape from Mulhall and Buddusky ended with Buddusky beating him up, there is a quality of mercy both express toward Meadows throughout the film. Buddusky tried to give a sailor a good time and level with him but that lax attitude was just enough rope for Meadows to try to leave. Buddusky’s violent reaction to that was not acting out of reinforcing the power dynamics but out of betrayal, a personal place of hurt. The whole forged brotherhood was misguided but also felt like a respite amid a job that Buddusky has consigned himself to for life. Buddusky and Mule both find themselves grappling over the fact that this is a ‘chickenshit detail’ but also that the Navy is the best thing that has ever happened to them. They do not get this level of pay and security working anywhere else. But to what end can they hold onto this security without feeling completely deflated?
The film ends with Mulhall and Buddusky bringing Meadows to Portsmouth, but not without getting an earful from a Marine officer (played by Michael Moriarty) over a paperwork mix-up. This is perhaps the most striking departure the film takes as an adaptation. In Ponicsan’s novel, Buddusky goes on a bender after finishing his last detail, hence the title. The work effectively kills him. In a decade that redefined the ‘downer ending’, I admire Towne’s restraint in just having the ‘punishment’ for Buddusky and Mulhall be that they are stuck in an institution that thinks lowly of them, puts them to work where there is no glory in getting the job done, just different ways for them to face criticism as if it all does not come back to paperwork. ‘Losing’ Meadows, is like losing a friend to the war or rather, like seeing somebody close to you at your job be dismissed and never seen again. There is an absence and loss but they have been programmed to just move on and keep going, telling themselves not to stop and think about it or else they will question everything. The Last Detail might not hit the levels of Chinatown, Network, or even Shampoo in heightened fatalism that encapsulated a lot of 1970s Hollywood cinema, but it gave a human face to a part of the Armed Forces who were increasingly being thrown into an unpopular war, often not even by their own choice, and showed how much they are like the rest of us.
The Last Detail remains a funny and darkly comic road film and hangout film that showed how men deal with their jobs, the shared sense of futility, but still trying to find ways to have fun any way they can. It is not a surprise that Richard Linklater, with a filmography defined by the hangout film, was so taken with the original and made the unofficial sequel and adaptation of Ponicsan’s unofficial sequel book, The Last Flag Flying (which while actually a pretty underrated film with its own virtues and sly commentary, it is best to not have it be compared to The Last Detail for its own benefit). Ashby and Towne in collaboration and on other films that decade would be more known for those other works as would Nicholson. This is still my favorite of all their works. The Last Detail was always the one film from as early as I can remember that my grandfather quoted incessantly, uncensored, until he could no longer speak from his stroke. He knew his share of Budduskys in the Navy and always felt when he re-watched on VHS, it would be as though he was seeing his old friends again which struck an even more bittersweet chord considering the final ten years I knew him he had dementia. Perhaps the perfect summary of what a hangout film feels like is feeling like you are returning to your friends. The film conjured something in him that in many ways, I will never know or be able to relate to because he lived it. But this film gave me perhaps the best glimpse of that part of his life in motion and I will always hold it close to my heart.