The image of Jack Nicholson in a sailor's suit, as everyone should know, comes from the movie The Last Detail, in my opinion not only a great movie but the quintessential Nicholson performance: lean, angry, disaffected but disciplined Jack. Directed by the late Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude, Coming Home, Being There--all directed by him), with a great supporting cast including Otis Young (whatever happened to him?), a very young Randy Quaid, and bit parts for Carol Kane and Gilda Radner, among others, the story concerns two Navy lifers (Nicholson as "Bad Ass" Buddusky and Young as "Mule" Mulhall) who have to escort the young Quaid to the brig for filching money from the collection basket at the base's church. Read this to get the full story and tidbits about Ashby's inconoclasm, the studio's horror at the profuse profanity in the movie (indeed, wiki prefaces their entry on the film by stating, "The film became known for its frequent use of profanity" and later quotes the screenwriter, the great too Robert "Chinatown" Towne: "This is the way people talk when they're powerless to act; they bitch"), and how Burt Reynolds, Jim Brown, Bud Cort, John Travolta, and even David Cassidy! all almost wound up in the film. Twenty years ago I used to get the itch to see the movie about once a year, so I'd head over to the late great Storytape Video store in Cleveland Heights and ask Tony there if he had it in stock. His reply one year was classic, and tragic: "It's been here since the last time you returned it." How could this great movie sit unrented and unwatched by anyone but me for a whole year?
Anyway, my point. I actually revered The Last Detail for years before I ever saw it, thanks to ABC's great commercials for it that always ended up with, "Saturday night at nine. Parental discretion advised." The tone of the announcer's voice (was it Ernie "Ghoulardi" Anderson as early as 1975?) on that electrically tempting "parental discretion advised," as well as the graphic on the bottom of the screen with the same words, was all I needed to know, at the age of 12, that this was a great movie, along with Klute, The Heartbreak Kid, and The Longest Yard, other staples (though nowhere as great of movies as Detail [in fact, when I finally did get around to seeing Klute, years and years later, I was much more appreciative of the work of the vastly underrated Donald Sutherland than any glimpse of Jane Fonda's bare breasts] of parental discretion advised TV movie fare at the time (likewise, I'd consult the Universe Bulletin--aka The UB--Cleveland's Catholic weekly newspaper that we, of course, um, religiously subscribed to, for its listings of current movies: anything under the most extreme heading, Morally Objectionable, was worth remembering for a somehow future viewing). What made such adolescent cinematic aesthetic appraisals so pertinent, of course, was that back in 1975, as opposed to today, the availability of so much culture was virtually zilch. Before the explosion of cable TV, before even the thought of the ubiquity of VCRs/VHS tapes, and even before the concept of college film societies was known to me (let alone the futuristic world of the Internet and digital technology that now allows you to see, read, or hear just about anything that ever existed), the only way to see non-current movies was on basic TV, always prefaced with that damnable "edited for television" graphic. Now, of course, the thought of watching The Last Detail on network TV is laughable--three quarters of the dialogue is profanity; it must be hysterical in "edited for television" form.
But oh those days of only six viable (if you're actually counting the local PBS station, which for a twelve-year-old boy was a complete dead zone) TV channels, no videos, and no dubya dubya dubya dots. You were forced to get your knowledge of the deeper, darker, more dangerous world in mere snippets. You'd be upstairs in your parents' bedroom, sprawled on their big bed watching the tiny black and white TV because they were downstairs watching something else (who knows, maybe even the parental discretion advised flick) on the big color set. But you just couldn't resist: after taking in the back-to-back Hogan's Heroes reruns or the dozenth viewing of Journey to the Center of the Earth on channel 43 (WUAB-TV, Channel 43, [UHF, good God, remember UHF/VHF?] serving Lorain and Cleveland [Lorain, Ohio, at the time as exotic and foreign to me as Angkor is to me now]), you'd get up and clunk the channel dial over to channel 8 to watch some Carol Burnett, but instead of turning the dial left, the quicker route to 8, you'd go right, past Channel 61 (the inferior UHF channel in Cleveland, which always seemed to be showing Mighty Joe Young, the movie I have probably seen the most ads for in my life without ever actually watching the movie), then down to 3 (where if you were lucky enough you'd time it perfectly to see the blooming NBC peacock, albeit in un-living B&W) and up to 5, ABC (somewhere stats must show ABC led the league in airing parental discretion advised movies), where you'd linger for a few paranoid, lusty seconds hoping to get a mere nugget of discretion advised knowledge, maybe a snapping Jack Nicholson informing the bartender that he, Jack as Bad Ass, is "the #$#%^%%$$ shore patrol, #$%@@$%@!" Of course you couldn't peek too long in case miraculously your parents beamed themselves upstairs, or, more likely, some secret UB censor on the TV would go off and the house would be filled with flashing red lights and some scary canonical voice booming "You are a sinner! You are a sinner!"
I don't know. I would have eventually found my way to The Last Detail, I'm sure, but without those tempting parental discretion advised tags, without the dearth of opportunities to see it and learn of it and all the other paths that movie or others could lead you down, I'm sure my satisfaction of finally seeing it would have been greatly reduced. Less is more, maybe. With everything available now, maybe the value of it all is diminished. Isn't knowledge more precious the more it is limited, available only to the dogged and only then in drips and drabs, as opposed to now when the world and all its knowledge is at our fingertips? Geez I'm getting old.
Anyway, enjoy a great clip from The Last Detail, and go ahead, wax nostalgic about a time when you could order thirty cents of beer in a bar and when this type of raw language was considered scandalous, not par for the course.
The Minutemen-There Ain't Shit On T.V. Tonight
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