THE LAST MOVIE (US - 1971) Directed by Dennis Hopper. Written by Stewart Stern. Cast: Dennis Hopper, Julie Adams, Daniel Ades, Stella Garcia, Don Gordon, Tomas Milian, John Alderman, Michael Anderson, Jr., Donna Baccala, Toni Basil, Rod Cameron, Severn Darden, Roy Engel, Warren Finnerty, Peter Fonda, Fritz Ford, Samuel Fuller, Henry Jaglom, Clint Kimbrough, Kris Kristofferson, John Phillip Law, Ted Markland, Sylvia Miles, Jim Mitchum, Michelle Phillips, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, Chuck Bail, Tom Baker, Michael Greene, Toni Stern. (R, 108 mins) The kind of film that can only result from everyone involved tripping balls, 1971's THE LAST MOVIE almost became a self-fulfilling prophecy for Dennis Hopper, completely quashing the momentum he had going from 1969's landmark EASY RIDER and effectively killing his career for the better part of the next decade and a half. Sure, there were high points during that time--Wim Wenders' THE AMERICAN FRIEND in 1977, Francis Ford Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW in 1979, and OUT OF THE BLUE in 1980, a low-budget film Hopper was co-starring in and took over directing early in production--but THE LAST MOVIE began a downward personal and professional spiral for Hopper, who would continue to be mired in alcoholism and substance abuse and would soon be working almost exclusively in low-budget European productions after being deemed an unemployable pariah in Hollywood. Hopper would occasionally find work in a bonkers cult movie like the 1976 Australian adventure saga MAD DOG MORGAN, or he'd temporarily behave himself enough to get a respectable gig like Coppola's RUMBLE FISH or Sam Peckinpah's final film THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND (both 1983), but much of his work from these lost years (BLOODBATH, REBORN, LET IT ROCK) has fallen into obscurity or was never even released in the US. He hit bottom when he was fired from the trashy 1984 West German/Mexican-produced fashion models-in-prison potboiler JUNGLE WARRIORS when, coked out of his mind in Mexico, he wandered naked into a village 20 miles from the set, ranting about people trying to kill him, and was promptly put by the producers on a flight back to Los Angeles, where he had to be restrained after freaking out and trying to open the plane's emergency exit. It was his meltdown on JUNGLE WARRIORS that finally served as a wake-up call to Hopper to get his shit together and get clean and sober, and within a couple of years, he was the Comeback Kid with the likes of BLUE VELVET and HOOSIERS, finally exorcising his demons and shaking the career self-immolation that began 15 years earlier with THE LAST MOVIE.
EASY RIDER was part of the post-BONNIE AND CLYDE "New Hollywood" movement, and Hopper found himself in the bizarre position of being both a counterculture hero and an unlikely toast of the town. As a result of the film's success, studios began giving the green light to artistic, auteur-driven projects to capture the youth market. Paramount backed Haskell Wexler's politically-charged, X-rated MEDIUM COOL and MGM brought trailblazing Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni to America for ZABRISKIE POINT, but Universal went all-in, giving a handful of notable independent filmmakers carte blanche to make whatever they wanted to make with no studio interference, most notably Monte Hellman with TWO-LANE BLACKTOP and John Cassavetes with MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ. THE LAST MOVIE was part of this push by Universal, and the primary reason why the studio's enthusiasm for the avant-garde indie craze ended almost immediately after it began. Hopper spent almost all of 1970 on location in Peru going over budget on THE LAST MOVIE, a project he conceived with screenwriter Stewart Stern, best known for scripting 1955's REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, which was also Hopper's film debut. He brought an entourage of friends from the movie and music industry with him and shot over 40 hours of footage that he spent nearly a year in holed up in his New Mexico home trying to corral into a releasable, two-hour film. He even scrapped an initial, relatively mainstream-ish cut completely when he showed it to EL TOPO director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who derisively mocked it and advised Hopper to rearrange the story in a non-linear and more experimental fashion. THE LAST MOVIE found significant acclaim at the Venice Film Festival, where Hopper took home the Critics Prize, but Universal execs were much less impressed, especially since his final cut was several months overdue (they wanted it by the end of 1970 and he kept working until April 1971), and the end result was impenetrable and unsellable. It ended up opening in the fall of 1971 to largely blistering reviews from American critics, and it was soon yanked from distribution, never coming close to the zeitgeist-capturing success of EASY RIDER. Without Hopper's involvement, THE LAST MOVIE was re-released on the drive-in circuit a few years later in a shortened, recut version rechristened CHINCHERO (which was actually Hopper's original title), but beyond that, it was extremely difficult to see for many years, even with a 1989 VHS release from the exploitation outfit United American Video, likely to capitalize on Hopper's major career resurgence in the late '80s and into the 1990s.
Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)
Its relative obscurity did much to bolster its reputation as a "lost" classic, and Hopper would frequently do Q&As at screenings once he reacquired the rights to the film in 2006. But Hopper died in 2010, before he was ever able to oversee a DVD/Blu-ray release, though thanks to others, THE LAST MOVIE finally made the restoration rounds in 2017 and 2018. It's now out on Blu-ray and is widely accessible again after 47 years (because physical media is dead), but minus L.M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller's THE AMERICAN DREAMER, a 1971 documentary chronicling the making and editing of THE LAST MOVIE and serving as its own BURDEN OF DREAMS and HEARTS OF DARKNESS. When something is out of circulation as long as THE LAST MOVIE has been, there's always a tendency among cineastes to mythologize it, as if its long absence is a sign of neglect or unacknowledged greatness. It's interesting that its Blu-ray debut has virtually coincided with the Netflix release of Orson Welles' THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (in which a LAST MOVIE-era Hopper has a small role), another much-ballyhooed film whose legend stems primarily from it being unfinished and unseen for over 40 years. Like WIND, THE LAST MOVIE is now a curio at best, a disjointed, largely improvised, self-indulgent misfire in which Hopper doesn't capitalize on EASY RIDER as much as he buys into the hype surrounding him.
The nominal plot has Hopper, looking a lot like he would as a pre-Matt Damon incarnation of Tom Ripley six years later in THE AMERICAN FRIEND, as Kansas, a disillusioned stuntman and horse wrangler working on a Hollywood western being shot in a small Peruvian village outside of Chinchero. It appears to be a formulaic bit of moviemaking, with an old-school, cigar-chomping director (Samuel Fuller), and starring an aging, John Wayne-esque cowboy actor (Rod Cameron) as Pat Garrett and a young up-and-comer (Dean Stockwell) as Billy the Kid. Once shooting wraps (other cast members in the film-within-a-film include familiar faces and Hopper buddies like Peter Fonda, John Phillip Law, Kris Kristofferson, Henry Jaglom, Severn Darden, and Russ Tamblyn), and the cast and crew head back to Hollywood, Kansas stays behind and shacks up with Chinchero local Maria (Stella Garcia) and is in no hurry to return home. His idyllic getaway, where he spends his days lounging about and having waterfall sex with Maria, is interrupted by the village priest (Tomas Milian), who informs him that the locals, led by "director" Thomas (Daniel Ades), are re-enacting the production of the movie and imitating what they witnessed--even constructing film "equipment" like cameras and cranes out of wood and sticks--and are so taken with their Hollywood experience that they can no longer differentiate fantasy from reality. Kansas also gets involved in role-playing sex games with Mrs. Anderson (Julie Adams), the horny socialite wife of an Peru-based American businessman (Roy Engel), and goes off on a hunt for gold with skeezy American expat Neville Robey (Don Gordon). That's before he's coerced back on the still-standing movie set by Thomas and the villagers and forced to re-enact his stunt work all over again in what seems to be shaping up as a proto-WICKER MAN but, like the rest of THE LAST MOVIE, goes nowhere.
There's some shallow statements about the artifice of cinema and the way Hollywood cynicism poisons a heretofore peaceful village populated by largely isolated people--note the way they production just packs up and leaves, leaving its large set of old-west building facades behind for the locals to deal with--but it's all much too muddled and meandering. It's beautifully shot by the great Laszlo Kovacs, Hopper gets a surprising performance out of Adams (THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON), and the themes he explores have some merit, but THE LAST MOVIE is awfully pretentious and full of itself, from the random intentional placement of "Scene Missing" cards, to the credit "A Film by Dennis Hopper" appearing 11 minutes in and followed a full 15 (!) minutes later by the title card, to Hopper paying homage to himself with a climactic restaging of the EASY RIDER campfire scene with Kansas and Neville. As the film grows increasingly abstract in its off-the-rails last half hour, Hopper simply loses the thread and gets lost up his own ass, as a long sequence with a drunk Kansas in a bar brawl is interrupted by cutaways to Hopper in a makeup chair stating "I never jerked off a horse before, ya know?" and another shot of Hopper lying down and a close-up of a lactating breast squirting milk into his face. Its chaos continues as Hopper breaks the fourth wall by smiling at the camera near the end as a LAST MOVIE clapboard is left in the shot. I suppose it's something do to about the blurring of film vs. life or illusion vs. reality, but the whole meta deconstruction/destruction of cinema thing was done much more succinctly with the unforgettable last shot of TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (also of note is that both films feature Kris Kristofferson's own version of his oft-recorded "Me and Bobby McGee"). THE LAST MOVIE is an insufferable mess, though it does have historical value as a document of its era and perhaps as "New Hollywood" taking a wrong turn prior to the age of the blockbuster ushered in by JAWS in 1975. It's certainly required viewing for fans of Dennis Hopper, but mileage may vary. It's either a hellraising artist's ultimate masterpiece and a defiant "Fuck you!" to the industry or a textbook example of the dangers of being handed too much money and too much freedom when your ego's running amok and you're high AF. In the years after he was in rehab, Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler often quipped that in their hedonistic heyday, the band "probably snorted up all of Peru." Well, yeah, perhaps...or at least whatever was left after Dennis Hopper and his cast and crew were finished with THE LAST MOVIE.
THE KLANSMAN (US - 1974) Directed by Terence Young. Written by Millard Kaufman and Samuel Fuller. Cast: Lee Marvin, Richard Burton, Cameron Mitchell, O.J. Simpson, Lola Falana, Luciana Paluzzi, David Huddleston, Linda Evans, Ed Call, John Alderson, David Ladd, Vic Perrin, Spence Wil-Dee, Wendell Wellman, Hoke Howell, Virgil Frye, Lee De Broux, Susan Brown, Jeannie Bell, Larry Williams. (R, 112 mins) THE KLANSMAN is a film so consistently and unrelentingly repugnant that it opens with a group of white yahoos giving a mentally challenged black man $1 to rape a young black woman as they stand around in a circle cheering him on...and it somehow gets more offensive with each passing scene. A misguided clusterfuck from the moment it was greenlit to the week of its release over Thanksgiving 1974--because who doesn't want to spend the holiday with family watching a movie with rape, castration, and more racial slurs than the combined filmographies of Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino?--THE KLANSMAN is, if you can stomach it, a film that simply must be seen to be believed. The fact that it's a Paramount release with big name stars probably lent an illusion of prestige, but make no mistake, this is as foul, if not more so, as any drive-in exploitation grinder, so trashy and shamelessly gutter-wallowing that, as Johnny LaRue's Crane Shot's Marty McKee stated in his review, "You need a SILKWOOD shower after watching it." Based on a 1965 novel by William Bradford Huie, THE KLANSMAN probably began with the best intentions. Samuel Fuller (FIXED BAYONETS, MERRILL'S MARAUDERS, SHOCK CORRIDOR) wrote the script and was set to direct before quitting the project over disagreements with the producers. Fuller's script was reworked by Millard Kaufman (BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, RAINTREE COUNTRY) and veteran British journeyman Terence Young (DR. NO, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, THUNDERBALL, WAIT UNTIL DARK) was brought in to direct. Though he had some major hits under his belt, Young was pushing 60 and in paycheck mode by that point, primarily working in Europe, coming off three Charles Bronson films with 1970's COLD SWEAT, 1971's RED SUN, and 1972's THE VALACHI PAPERS, followed by the cheesy 1973 sword-and-sandal outing WAR GODDESS, and he reportedly only took the KLANSMAN gig because he was a sugar daddy to a much younger girlfriend and needed some major studio Hollywood cash.
A coasting Young was left in charge of a cast headed by legends Lee Marvin and Richard Burton, and much of the film's budget appears to have gone to their booze supply. Marvin is at least a functioning alcoholic and manages to turn in an actual performance, but Burton was bottoming out personally and professionally while in Oroville, CA working on THE KLANSMAN. His marriage to Elizabeth Taylor falling apart during production, Burton was also dogged by a persistent combined bout of bronchitis and the flu that lasted throughout the shoot, and he was drinking nearly three bottles of vodka per day. He checked himself into a hospital to deal with his alcoholism after filming wrapped, but Burton's condition and his ghoulish appearance are impossible to ignore when you watch the film: he's wobbly on his feet, shaky, pasty, often sweating profusely, slurring his words with his wildly inconsistent accent vacillating from "Richard Burton" to "HEE HAW" in the same sentence, and though it's mentioned his character has a bum leg, it could just be to explain why he's usually seen seated, holding onto, or leaning against something--a table, a chair, a wall--seemingly to keep from falling down. He seriously looks like he could drop dead at any moment.
Marvin is Track Bascomb, sheriff of Atoka County, Alabama, a hotbed of racial tension and Ku Klux Klan activity. Bascomb is a de facto good guy--he's not in the Klan, is not a hostile racist and he breaks up the rape in the opening scene ("Party's over, get on outta here"), but he more or less leaves everyone be, especially since his loathsome deputy Butt Cutt Cates (Cameron Mitchell) is a loud and proud Klan member and Mayor Hardy Riddle (David Huddleston) is the Exalted Cyclops of the Klan's Atoka chapter. At a town council meeting, the mayor tells his Klan guys to keep things under control, to not kill anyone and maybe just burn some crosses every once in a while and rough up some black folks just so they stay scared and always know their place. That all changes when white Nancy Poteet (Linda Evans) is raped by a black man and Butt Cutt eggs everyone on into blaming Willy Washington (Spence Wil-Dee), who has an alibi but is nonetheless kept in jail by Bascomb. Butt Cutt and his boys decide to harass any black guy they see, castrating one unlucky resident whose angry friend Garth (O.J. Simpson) escapes. The tensions continue to flare over an upcoming equal rights protest to be attended by black "agitator" Loretta Sykes (Lola Falana), who left Atoka years ago to move to Chicago but is back to care for her ailing grandmother. Loretta's grandmother lives in a cabin on Stancill Mountain, a huge swath of land owned by Breck Stancill (Burton), a progressive liberal do-gooder who lets poor black people live in cabins on his mountain rent-free. Butt Cutt and the Klan guys hate Stancill and they hate Loretta, who used to be close to Stancill and is assumed to be his "private piece of brown comfort." THE KLANSMAN just gets more charming from there. Hardly a scene goes by without some jaw-droppingly offensive act or line of dialogue.
Nancy's husband (Hoke Howell) can't bear the humiliation of his wife "gettin' screwed by a n----r," so he leaves town, bellyaching to Bascomb "Why did this thing have to happen to me?" She's also ostracized in church, where a woman shrieks "I can smell n----r on her! I think I'm gonna faint!" and the Reverend refuses to carry on with his racist sermon to the other "decent Christian folk" until she leaves. Garth, meanwhile, is disguising himself in Klan garb and showing up at the houses of the guys who castrated his friend (this was Young's second film--after THE VALACHI PAPERS--to prominently feature castration) and blowing them away with a shotgun. Racist vitriol eventually boils over in an unspeakably appalling scene where Butt Cutt and a bunch of guys kidnap Loretta and drag her to a warehouse, holding her down while Butt Cutt rapes her to send a message to Atoka's black population (Butt Cutt, at his most philosophical: "N----r gal don't mind bein' raped a little by another n----r, but a white man nailin' her would be humiliatin'''). The rape goes on and on, with Loretta suffering massive bleeding from her vagina (the leering Reverend mutters "N----r women are made for this"). Bascomb arrives on the scene and knows Butt Cutt raped her but tells her to say three black men did it, though he's outraged enough over what happened to smear some of her blood all over Butt Cutt's face. At the hospital, it's revealed that Loretta was a virgin and the blood was from her ruptured hymen, a diagnosis immediately dismissed by an incredulous Bascomb, who sensitively tells the medical examiner "Everybody in the county knows a black girl's popped by the time she's 13." Eventually, Butt Cutt, the mayor, and all the other racist assholes finally have enough of Loretta, protests, Bascomb developing a conscience, and liberal snowflake Stancill, who's further incurred the wrath of everyone by falling in love with sullied and tarnished Nancy, and all parties eventually converge on Stancill's Mountain for the inevitable shootout illuminated by a burning cross.
Alternate poster art focused on O.J. Simpson
Astonishing for all the wrong reasons, THE KLANSMAN was ultimately released on VHS in 1991 but has otherwise been kept pretty much buried like a state secret by Paramount, who released the similarly tacky MANDINGO in theaters a year later in 1975. Low-quality bootlegs weren't hard to obtain but they were often cut, losing the worst parts of the castration scene and the agonizing rape, which is probably the most graphically offensive depiction of a sexual assault in a mainstream film outside of the early gang rape of the housekeeper in 1982's DEATH WISH II, and not just because Young meets the demands of no one by giving us a Cameron Mitchell ass shot. It was recently released in uncensored form on Blu-ray by Olive Films, and it makes for interesting viewing decades later. There's probably a serious, thoughtful film buried somewhere in the wreckage and it undoubtedly would've turned out better had Fuller directed it (he and Marvin would eventually work together on 1980's THE BIG RED ONE). But Young is just punching a clock here, and while it's obviously not condoning the actions of its despicable antagonists, it sort-of pulls a CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST by wallowing like a pig in shit in the very ugliness it purports to condemn. There's no need for Bascomb to smear Loretta's blood across Butt Cutt's face or have Falana lie there naked for an extended amount of time with a pool of blood between her legs other than exploitative shock value more fitting for a LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT knockoff.
For Lola Falana's and even O.J. Simpson's sake, let's hope
this Bronco was being pulled on a trailer
and Richard Burton wasn't actually driving it.
In Fuller's hands, the virulent racism in the story and the dialogue would've been hard-hitting and brimming with social commentary, but here it just feels like you're in the middle of a particularly feverish Steve Bannon wet dream. Some of Fuller's intent comes through--that scene in the church where Nancy is ordered to leave is legitimately enraging and upsetting and would certainly still happen in some parts of America today--but it's undermined by one bad decision after another. Who thought it was a good idea to cast Italian sex bomb Luciana Paluzzi (best known as femme fatale Fiona Volpe in THUNDERBALL) as an Alabama secretary named Trixie? Paluzzi always had a thick accent and she's obviously dubbed here, so her casting was probably just Young doing a favor for an old friend but it doesn't work. THE KLANSMAN marked the big-screen debut of O.J., who would still play in the NFL for another five years but was starting to build a movie career during his off-seasons (he was also in THE TOWERING INFERNO, in theaters a month after THE KLANSMAN). Juice was pushed as the star in some markets, but the film doesn't make very good use of him. His Garth exists on the periphery of the story for much of the time, hiding out in trees picking off Butt Cutt's dipshit cohorts. O.J. gets one amazing shot where he performs an extremely dangerous-looking stunt sprinting across railroad tracks in front of a speeding train that almost clips him, but his unintentional highlight in retrospect is a scene where he's in the backseat of Stancill's Bronco, forcing him to drive while waving a gun around, an almost surreal harbinger of things to come for the future double murderer. But nowhere does THE KLANSMAN shit the bed more than in the scene foreshadowed by a throwaway line from Trixie about Stancill learning karate while he was in the Marines.
Richard Burton, Luciana Paluzzi, and Lee Marvin
at a party during production of THE KLANSMAN.
Around 80 or so minutes into THE KLANSMAN, Stancill is buying Nancy a bus ticket out of town and they're confronted by Butt Cutt, who spends his free time hanging racist flyers around Atoka. Butt Cutt starts haranguing Nancy about having "been with a Negro," essentially blaming her for being raped, and a scuffle ensues, with karate expert Stancill giving Butt Cutt a kung-fu beatdown. The sight of Burton going full ENTER THE DRAGON would've been absurd even under the most sober conditions. But between his unsteady wavering, his pasty, sweaty visage, and what appears to be Stancill's entire knowledge of martial arts being limited to half-assed chops with his hand, he looks less like a student of karate and more like Donald Trump mocking a disabled reporter on the campaign trail. He has to grab a wall at one point to stay upright and even with his limited movement, he looks like he's about throw up from motion sickness. The staging of the fight is inept beyond comprehension, but Mitchell valiantly tries to help sell it, flinging himself through a restroom door that's obviously already off its hinges and diving through some luggage that's been strategically placed in the middle of the bus station. If THE KLANSMAN is remembered at all today, it's typically because of shitfaced Richard Burton stumbling and bumbling his way through the most unintentionally hilarious fight scene of the 1970s, not helped at all by accompanying "wacky" music that gives it a DUKES OF HAZZARD quality. This is a film that, no matter how much unexpected relevance it may inadvertently have today with the recent upsurge in hate crimes and backwards-ass racist shitbags feeling emboldened to express themselves thanks to the current occupant of the White House and those who surround and enable him, simply couldn't be made in this fashion in today's world of SJW outrage and trigger warnings. Fuller's original screenplay undoubtedly had a message, and some of it manages to come through every now and again in the finished version. But it's a staggeringly wrong-headed, stunningly tone-deaf examination of racism in the deep south, and regardless of whatever good intent it had at any point in its genesis, THE KLANSMAN is a time capsule relic that remains one of the essential "What the Fuck Were They Thinking?!" movies to ever be released by a major Hollywood studio.
