[Kael is one of the foremost film critics in the United States. In the following mixed review of The Last Detail, she argues that despite Towne's improvements on the novel by Darryl Ponicsan, the film remains calculatingly sentimental.]

In The Last Detail, you can see the kid who hasn't grown up in Nicholson's grin, and that grin has the same tickle it had when he played the giddy, drunken Southern lawyer in Easy Rider, but now it belongs to the ravaged face of an aging sailor. The role of Buddusky, the tattooed signalman, first class, is the best full-scale part he's had; the screenwriter Robert Towne has shaped it to Nicholson's gift for extremes. After Buddusky's fourteen years in the Navy, his mind and emotions have been devastated, and he lives on nostalgia, ingrained resentment, a lewd prole's quick anger, and booze. The role has the highs that Nicholson glories in. He plays it like a spaced-out, dissipated James Cagney; his face always has something going on in it, and you feel that you can't get too much of him—though you do. At its best, his performance is so full it suggests a sustained version of Barry Fitzgerald's small but classic portrait of a merchant seaman in The Long Voyage Home; it's easy to imagine Buddusky a few years hence returning to his ship after a binge as Fitzgerald did—a wizened little man with his tail between his legs. The movie is about blasted lives: Buddusky's and those of Mulhall (the black actor Otis Young), a gunner's mate, first class, and Meadows (Randy Quaid), a morose eighteen-year-old seaman who has been sentenced to eight years in a Navy prison for attempting to steal forty dollars from a poliodonation box. Buddusky and Mulhall are dispatched to take Meadows from the brig in Norfolk, Virginia, to the naval prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The movie is the record of their dallying, beer-soaked journey and of their self-discoveries en route.

Nicholson gets a chance to demonstrate his enormous skill, and he keeps the picture going, but he's playing a mawkish role—a sentimentalist with a coward's heart. This time, the emotions he's expressing are, if anything, too clear. The Last Detail, based on Darryl Ponicsan's novel, is the newest version of a heart-wrenching genre that used to work with a huge popular audience—and possibly it will this time, too. Essentially, it's the story of doomed people who discover their humanity too late, and nothing in the movie can keep this from being a sell—not Nicholson's and Quaid's imaginative performances, and not Robert Towne's finely tuned script. It's doubtful if there's any way to extract an honest movie from a Ponicsan novel—Ponicsan also wrote the book from which Cinderella Liberty was derived—because Ponicsan works on us for a canned response. His material didn't play in Cinderella Liberty and it does here, but the same manipulative streak runs through both films, and the same obviousness. Everything in The Last Detail tells you how to feel at each point; that's how the downer-tearjerker has always worked. This picture sounds realistically profane and has a dark, grainy surface, and by Hollywood standards it's strong, adult material, but the mechanism is a vise for our emotions—the mechanism is schlock. The downer-tearjerker congratulates you for your sensitivity in seeing the touching hopelessness and misery that are all you've got to look at.

Meadows, the eighteen-year-old, is a petty pilferer, a bawling, uncommunicative kid, too sluggish and demoralized to be angry at the injustice of his harsh sentence. He doesn't know that he has any rights; he has never learned to fight back. As the story is set up, he's a sleeping beauty; on the drunken trip, Buddusky and Mulhall offer him comradeship, and he awakens and discovers his manhood. We perceive the possibilities in him, knowing that prison life will crush him back down to the listless, almost catatonic state he was in. And, in a parallel process, the tough, damaged Buddusky, who has felt warm and paternal while bringing the kid out, can only retreat to his guzzling and brawling. Buddusky couldn't function except in the service; he's quick to identify with the kid, because he's an emotional wreck himself, living in the past, spinning out tired anecdotes. We're programmed to recognize that he's a man who is always spoiling for a fight so he can let out his frustrations, and we're programmed to respond to each pointedly ironic episode. When the three men go to a Village party, Buddusky comes on with a "line" and he doesn't register that he's bombing out; his peppy cock-of-the-walk act is all he's got—he has no other way to make contact. We see him through the girls' contemptuous eyes; to them he's just a crude blowhard. In contrast, the depressed kid's innocent, solemn dignity is a hit with them. The movie is about the lost possibilities in both Buddusky and Meadows, and about the acceptance of a restricted life by Mulhall. Otis Young's Mulhall has chosen the Navy because it's not a bad deal for him; we can't tell much more about the character. Otis Young has the cheekbones and facial contours of a stronger version of the young Frank Sinatra; his eyes slant upward the same way, and he's marvellous to look at, but the role isn't as flamboyant as Nicholson's or as affecting as Quaid's, and Young's restrained performance doesn't add up to as much as his face suggests. He never quite comes across; he stays as nice-guyish as a black Gregory Peck.

The direction, by Hal Ashby, is not all it might be. I loved much of Ashby's first film, The Landlord—a story about a rich white boy (Beau Bridges) who bought a building in a black ghetto and had an affair with a tenant (Diana Sands). It was adapted by William Gunn from Kristin Hunter's novel (both writers are black), and it had a complicated sense of why people behave as they do. It was full of characters; more and more people kept getting into the young landlord's life, and I became interested in every one of them. In several cases, I don't think those performers have been as good since; maybe the writing accounted for the quality as much as the directing did, but I missed Ashby's second film, Harold and Maude, and I'd been looking forward to more of his work, hoping for a film full of people whose lives can't be reduced to formulas. The material here, though, is on a single track; we go from city to city, but there's never anything to look at. Visually, the movie is relentlessly lower-depths gloomy; it doesn't allow us to think of anything but the pushy central situation. And though Nicholson does suggest some of the qualities of the characters in The Landlord, and Quaid transforms himself before our eyes, they play within a preordained scheme. It's all required. The effectiveness of the movie depends on the director's wringing pathos out of the two older men's gruff tenderness toward the kid and their desire to show him a good time before he's locked away; and though Ashby, to his credit, keeps the pathos down, there is still more mugging than necessary. Ashby's weaknesses show—not so much with the three leads as with the minor players and the staging of the large-scale sequences. That's where you can feel the director trying to get a certain emotional effect, and he gets it, all right (an effect I hate anyway), but he's also heavy and clumsy about getting it (which makes me even more aware of how I hate it). There's a fight aboard a train, and the passengers don't react adequately; there's a church scene in which followers of an Eastern religion chant together, and though it may well be authentic, the way it has been shot it doesn't feel authentic; in a Boston brothel scene Carol Kane does her Pre-Raphaelite wasted-beauty number; and so on. And I think I'd be happier without the Johnny Mandel score, with its antic use of military airs, orchestrated in an unfamiliarly thin way to add a musical layer of irony. It all works together, of course, but the overstressed style and the systematized ironies tighten one's responses. Ponicsan has talent, but he degrades his own material; he milks tragedy for pathos. Towne improves on the novel, and his ear for dialogue gives the film some distinction, but there is only one line that seems to be there for its own sweet sake—when Nicholson tells a story about a whore in Wilmington who had a glass eye—and this was the only minute I freely enjoyed.