[Kauffmann, one of the most respected and well-known film critics in the United States, has reviewed movies for The New Republic for many years. In the following positive review of The Last Detail, he notes a number of Towne's improvements to the novel upon which the film is based.]

There's a kind of film that reveals its entire shape very early, with a cleverness that makes us both interested and wary. During such a picture the main question isn't "What happens next?" It's "Are they going to muff it?" Some examples, differently successful: The Gunfighter, The African Queen, The Informer, Lifeboat, The Lost Patrol, The Defiant Ones. Latest example: The Last Detail.

The script by Robert Towne is based on, and better than, the novel by Darryl Ponicsan. Two US Navy sailors, old pros, are assigned to escort a young sailor from the Norfolk, Virginia naval base to the naval prison in Ports-mouth. New Hampshire. The story deals with the three men in transit, and the moment you understand that, you see that this is going to be a symbolic film with overtones. The situation is far from new: innumerable Westerns have dealt with a marshal bringing back a prisoner to justice, the two men traveling through wilds and hostiles, facing danger together. But The Last Detail is better than most like it because the story is not so consciously abstracted and, chiefly, because the drama results from the struggle not to change, rather than building to some kind of rosy affirmation. This script ends exactly where it was headed from the beginning. Nothing is bettered. The real agon comes from the fact that, after temptations to go somewhere else, the script gets right back where it was heading—into reality, habit, fear and compliance. The result is not ironic; it's flatly truthful.

Jack Nicholson, of Five Easy Pieces and Carnal Knowledge, is the senior of the Shore Patrol duo. The other is a black actor named Otis Young, previously unknown to me. Their prisoner is Randy Quaid, a big fellow who has been seen before in small parts. Quaid plays a kleptomaniacal 18-year-old boy, insecure, apathetic, uncomplaining. He tried to steal a collection box containing $40—he didn't even get away with it. The collection was for polio, the pet charity of the admiral's wife. Quaid got an eight-year sentence, with a possible two years off for good behavior. The two old toughies have to take this kid to the prison and turn him over to begin this sentence.

Nicholson's first plan is to hustle the kid up to Portsmouth as quickly as possible, so that he and Young can have the rest of the allotted five days on their own. But the boy's continuous presence, the grotesqueness of his sentence, his incompetence to handle his life, his inexperience of practically everything, his puppy-like regard for his guards, all of these have a foreseen but nicely handled effect. Instead of rushing, Nicholson dallies. He obviously wants to give the boy something, some fun, some pleasantness, before he gets shut away. This of course includes first sex, in a Boston brothel. Young argues with Nicholson about his sentimentality. (In other language. The dialogue is, justly, very raunchy.) They either have to let the kid escape or turn him over, and they're not going to let him escape because that would mean their asses; so why all this silk wrapping? Why not just get it over with, without sops to their own nobility? But Nicholson insists, and Young, who really wants to do the same thing, agrees.

"Don't let it go pulpy," we keep hoping. Except for a contrived encounter with some Greenwich Village types engaged in Nichiren Shoshu chanting and some fisticuffs with marines that are right out of Paramount service comedies of the '30s, the script hews to its line. No one short of a beast could have responded less than these escorts; no one but fictional characters would have let the boy escape as a result of that response. They deliver him to prison at the end and walk away, chatting about what they're going to do before they get back to Norfolk. (An improvement over the novel, which has a long tediously ironic coda.) Responsibility, the script implies, is always elsewhere; the lower man bucks it to the higher, and the highest bucks it back to the lowest, en masse. This last is called duty to the corps or the service or the People.

A strong undercurrent of the script is the implication, not new but still true, that the armed forces are the career for you if you want to remain a boy. Substitute cokes for beer; eliminate sex, which is only one number on a program, an incidental chance for triumph or patronization; and you have three 12-year-olds on an outing with overeating and dormitory hijinks. A uniform, particularly for the lower ranks, is armor against growing up.

Jack Nicholson, tattooed, comes back. He was figuratively away in The King of Marvin Gardens and A Safe Place; here he has a part that is exactly right for him—a rough romantic, innately furious, frequently gentle but knowingly cruel. To cavil, the only thing wrong with his taking over this picture is that his role has been built for him to take over the picture. Aside from the faint air of virtuoso occasion, he and the role are perfect for each other, and together they galvanize the film.

As his sidekick Young is less effective. He's passable, but I was always conscious of his working; he lacks that last access of confidence in the medium, confidence that the camera will reach in and get the performance from him. Quaid, I thought at first, was not going to be good. But physically he reminded me of so many big country boys that I used to know, with spaces between their teeth (I don't mean missing teeth) his very lack of appeal contributed so much to his pathos that my reaction soon became that of his guards. Michael Moriarty, now so fine on Broadway in Find Your Way Home, has a nice bit as an uppity marine lieutenant.

The director was Hal Ashby, who made Harold and Maude and The Landlord. I saw only the latter and disliked its inflated cinema rhetoric. Here his work is hard, businesslike, clean. (But he ought to have watched the fellow-passengers on train and bus; they are strangely oblivious to the trio's broilings.) The opening credits are whipped past briskly to staccato drum rolls. (Military marches occasionally underpin matters—the only attempt at irony, and superfluous, I think.) At Portsmouth Quaid is whisked upstairs into prison without even a chance to say goodbye; it's just the effect that's needed, like the abrupt clanging of a steel door. And two other moments are especially well handled. Nicholson and Young take the boy on a detour to Camden to see his mother who lives there alone. The mother isn't home—another improvement over the novel, which has a trite scene with the mother and her seedy lover. After some chuffing and blowing on the wintry porch, Nicholson tries the door. It's open. We get just a quick look at the scruffy living room. The boy doesn't even step inside. Our look at the room and the boy's reaction to it tell us all we need to know about the past life that has put him where he is.

Then, during a childishly perverse picnic in a snowy Boston park, the boy makes a last-minute unplanned attempt to escape. The guards chase him. He slips; they catch him and subdue him. Ashby holds the camera back from the struggle in a long shot. It's an excellent touch. Ashby doesn't want to maul us with immediate violence; he wants us to see the three men, former friends, struggling in the middle of open space, three physically and humanely entangled items of humanity. Instead of being shocking or gory, which it might have been, the moment is perfectly sad.