Saw The Last Detail, a 1970s film about two navy officers bringing a puppy-eyed cadet to military prison. His sad little crime, we learn, was merely stealing $40 out of a charity box. The puppy-eyed cadet is glum and miserable but also passive and cooperative so, soon enough, the officers start feeling feelings for the boy and try to show him one last good time before he's sent off to jail. The film is about the relationship between the three men as the officers come to see themselves as big-brothers to their woebegone prisoner. Seeing as the film is about male emotions in the 70s, it's a sort of mystery story. The film progresses in it's shaggy-dog, 70s way, ambling from event to event, obliquely and slyly revealing their true emotions.
This film was thematically similar to One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, which also stars Jack Nicholson. Both films are fundamentally about people struggling against oppressive systems which are metaphors for society. This film is a bit more subtle and direct however, using the military bureaucracy as a stand-in for the world at large, instead of Nurse Ratchet.
This is a fairly typical 70s film. The lighting and sound are ambient, the dialogue raw and natural, the emotions muted and secret. The film's subject is man being swallowed up by a system larger than himself, but these films would vanish in the face of the summer blockbuster, which ruled the 80s. Not a bad film. Very much a product of it's time, but a good product at that.
No comments:
Post a Comment