Ashby: The Last Detail (1973)

Hal Ashby’s follow-up to Harold and Maude gave Jack Nicholson one of his greatest roles – Billy “Badass” Buddusky, a petty naval officer who’s charged with escorting Seaman Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) from Norfolk, Virginia to Portsmouth Naval Prison, with the help of his colleague Richard “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young). The whole film’s devoted to their journey, and since it’s a journey that proceeds by dispersing any real sense of a destination – or removing it to an apocalyptic remoteness – any semblance of story is quickly slackened into a New Wave kind of wandering, a tour of anonymous America in the depths of winter. Against that backdrop, Buddusky’s rage contours most of the film, directed as it is at anyone and everyone who eludes responsibility for the 60s by claiming accountability to the 70s – especially himself – with the result that he’s only able to seek sympathy by stealth, hanging fire for scenes at a time before ambushing or sniping anyone who seems worthy of his disillusionment with his generation and everything it stood for. More than any of his other great roles from this period, Nicholson doesn’t play a character so much as embody a convulsive, nationwide shudder – a shudder away from liberalism that nevertheless hasn’t quite collapsed into the fascist neoconservatism that hangs around the fringes of the film and forms so many ruptures in its naturalistic tissue, perhaps explaining why he feels like a vigilante or action hero in filigree. At times, his impotence is so pronounced that it's almost as if he and his companions are stationary, or at least at sea, hunched and huddled around the same freezing bus stop while the straggling tail-end of the 60s recedes all around them, left stranded in a low-tide limbo of washed-out malaise that makes you realise just how short Nicholson actually is, just how diminutive he can make himself seem when he’s as far from his element as his character is here. And that just brings this high watermark of 70s naturalism – even neorealism – into greater relief, as Ashby offers up the kind of poised perfection you only see once or twice in a career.