The Last Detail

Hal Ashby, 1973

The fact that this was directed by Hal Ashby two years after Harold and Maude, and stars Jack Nicholson two years before One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest should get your attention.

It's certainly a serious precursor to Nicholson's role as McMurphy; the same delicious headstrong cockiness and that prominent level of unfocussed intelligence that isn't quite as high as he reckons.

Two soldiers accompany a third across the country to a long stretch in military prison for stealing 40 dollars. It's an allegory about the way the military brutalises its recruits, for the way it brutalises society at large, even at a stretch for the arc of an individual life itself. Our guardians flail around offering us a good time for a short interval, but it's only ever going to have one outcome in the long-term.

As with many Coen brothers pictures, the wide American landscape offers plenty of opportunity for cattle, yet we're left wanting.

No cows.