The Last Detail (1973) on Netflix
Navy men Buddusky and Mulhall are ordered to escort seaman Larry Meadows to the brig. Meadows drew eight years for a forty-dollar theft, so the pair plan a few stops first.
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- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.5/1031,489 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes87%
Trailer
Plot summary
In Norfolk, Virginia, Navy men Billy Buddusky and Richard Mulhall draw a shore patrol assignment: take eighteen-year-old seaman Larry Meadows to the naval prison at Portsmouth. Meadows stole forty dollars from a charity box, one run by the base commander's wife, and a court-martial gave him eight years and a dishonorable discharge. The trip could be made in two days, and the two career sailors have a week. Once they meet Meadows, a timid and naive young man who seems resigned to what awaits him, the detail turns into something else. They take off the handcuffs and decide to fill the journey with the adult experiences he has missed, one stop at a time, through Washington, New York and Boston.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Last Detail (1973)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Rupert Crosse had been cast as Gunner's Mate Mule, but just as the film was about to go into production he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Hal Ashby postponed filming for a week to let Crosse decide whether to continue; he withdrew and Otis Young was cast instead.
- Columbia balked at the swearing in Robert Towne's script; producer Peter Guber recalled 342 uses of "fuck" in the first seven minutes alone. Towne refused to tone the language down, and the project sat in limbo until Jack Nicholson, by then a bankable star, got involved.
- Columbia asked for 26 lines containing the word "fuck" to be cut, delaying the release by six months. The film used it 65 times and, at the time of its release, broke the record for the most uses of the word in a motion picture.
- Robert Towne's adaptation removed Buddusky's "closet intellectualism and his beautiful wife", and changed the novel's ending so that Buddusky lives rather than dying as he does in Darryl Ponicsan's book.
- The script had the three sailors cavorting on the steps of the Supreme Court, but Chief Justice Warren E. Burger refused permission, reportedly in retaliation for Jack Nicholson's public criticism of Richard Nixon, who had appointed Burger.
- Hal Ashby was arrested for possession of marijuana while scouting locations in Canada, and the bust nearly made Columbia drop the project. It went largely unreported, and Nicholson's fierce loyalty to the director helped decide the studio.
- Columbia only gave The Last Detail a full theatrical release after Jack Nicholson won the Best Actor prize at Cannes; producer Gerry Ayres had pushed the studio to submit the film to the festival.
- The editor Ashby first hired was fired the day after shooting ended. Robert C. Jones, one of the fastest cutters in the business, was brought in and six weeks later delivered a first cut that ran four hours.
