Quintessential Jack

by Scott Edwards

  There are two breaks of tenderness between those two extremes. At the mass funeral after a strike ambush, Jack’s Hoffa opens up slightly with a light trace of a smile upon seeing a boy’s mother show up to bring food to her son after having thought the youngster lost. The clean, economical dialogue is not what we’d associate with David Mamet, nor is Nicholson’s characterization of Hoffa in the scene with the widow what we’d associate with Mamet’s Hoffa. This is a real moment of intimacy, taken down to a human level that contrasts the otherwise larger-than-life persona.

  Nicholson uses a similar sincere understatement when Hoffa gives his speech to the Teamsters on the stairs prior to leaving for jail. He becomes more real, later touched by true warmth and sweetness upon the truckers’ sendoff, with thousands of trucks lined up on both sides of the road like an honor guard. Otherwise, his portrayal lacks subtlety and humanity, likely because Hoffa himself never was less than full-on.

  Mamet described his script as “a paean (and, sad to state, but true, a requiem) to two complex organisms: the American Labor movement, and one of its members, my father.” Though he went to see the film with reservations, Mamet felt it brought the mission to life and captured the spirit of the movement through a “genius performance of a great actor….”7

  Perhaps James R. Hoffa could never stray from his mission or rest from his vigilance, just like Colonel Nathan R. Jessep. Hoffa lives and dies for his union. Jessep lives and would sacrifice his life to protect the union.

  * * *

  A man of another sort approaches the pair, also preparing to enter a court of law. He’s there to take testimony rather than give it. George Hanson’s union, to which he’s taken an oath of duty and honor, is the American Civil Liberties Union. And because he lives in the Deep South, that’s one serious pledge. Hanson’s struggling through his hangover—one of two things he shares with Billy “Badass” Buddusky. The other is a peculiar interpretation of duty, honor and country.

  Easy Rider and The Last Detail were released only four years apart, but for the actor, much had changed. Supporting actor to lead actor. Journeyman to star. Looking for breaks to making them for others. Without Easy Rider, Nicholson’s career could not take off. But without Nicholson, The Last Detail might not have taken shape.

  More than his belated break, the George Hanson role was believed by many to have saved Nicholson’s acting career. Ed Nelson, who worked on Nicholson’s first movie The Cry Baby Killer, told me, “He became a great actor but, boy, when he started, you know he quit he was so bad.” Nelson continued:

  He went off to Seattle, I came back with him on a flight to San Francisco and we sat together quite accidentally. He was going off to do a little motorcycle picture with a friend of his, the other crazy guy, Dennis Hopper … and yeah, Peter [Fonda], that was his closest friend. And I said, “What kind of picture?” and he said it was a motorcycle picture. And he named them, but they were nobodies. You know, I recognized their names only because of their fathers and I said, “Good luck with that, Jack.” And he didn’t know whether or not he was gonna do it or not and he did it and it made him.8

  Bruce Dern described the early struggles—and how the young actors handled it. “Jack had trouble getting in big films and so he went off and made his own films. Dennis kind of the same way … we took a lot of bad raps early on because of [being] a kind of Method-type actor.”9

  Stuntman-actor Gary Kent described a long drive from Bakersfield back to Los Angeles together with Nicholson while working on Hells Angels on Wheels, in response to my question about whether Nicholson had voiced any disappointment about the lack of success of their earlier collaborations (Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting):

  We both smoked something very strange and so he was quite talkative and quite expressive on the way back. He kind of went into what a hard business film was and what a difficult thing it was…. I thought it rankled him a bit that he was more or less ignored, because he worked so hard on his parts and on the film, telling me how big he was in Europe for Weary Reilly [in Studs Lonigan], like, “You don’t know me, Gary, but I played Weary Reilly.”10

  Without Easy Rider, Nicholson may very well have taken a career turn similar to Henry Jaglom and concentrated on making films of his own devisement rather than struggling with television roles and exploitation movies in order to perpetuate his acting career.

  Shirley Knight, who attended Jeff Corey classes with Nicholson and later played Helen Hunt’s mother in As Good as It Gets, said that luck and chance made all the difference. “If Rip Torn and Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper hadn’t quarreled, Rip Torn would have been doing that part in Easy Rider…. So, sometimes careers become accidental. I think Jack, he was doing Roger Corman movies, and he got that break because Rip and Dennis and Peter quarreled. Life is so bizarre!”11

  Odd as the comparison may seem, Nicholson’s portrayal of the ACLU lawyer seems a refinement of his Wilbur Force invention (Little Shop of Horrors). Though less broad in general, mannerisms like the big smile, eyebrow lifts and hand-circling around his elongated neck are quite similar in both roles. Even the voice and accent have a character connection. The later film introduced some new Nicholson “business,” like lots of tongue action and expanded open mouth, furrowed brows and yawns, along with the signature drinking ritual of flapping his winged arm as he grimaces and recites a nonsensical blurt picked up from the movie’s motorcycle wrangler.

  In her excellent study of ten key roles, Jack Nicholson: Anatomy of an Actor, Beverly Walker writes that Hanson is loosely modeled on a recurring figure in William Faulkner novels, progressive lawyer Gavin Stevens. They both live among people whom they are unlike, yet get along with on the surface, all in the service of aiding those who most need it. They were in the South (Stevens in Mississippi, Hanson in Louisiana) but not of it, getting along while exercising a courage that had to carry risk. Faulkner biographer Jay Parini acknowledged the plausibility of the connection, that of the insider whose conscience resides outside their culture.12 Walker credits screenwriter Terry Southern for the literary antecedent: “Southern conceived George as more conventional than the two hippies, yet capable of articulating their melancholia about America—‘a mouthpiece,’ Southern called him.”13

  The then 32-year-old Jack Nicholson only appears in the film for a half-hour of running time, yet he seizes the screen as only a superstar can. His best “acting” probably was feigning innocence about marijuana, but his most precious scene is that entire campfire sequence, particularly when he can’t keep it together during his “Venusians” monologue. Jack loses it, breaking up, and repeats part of it (something that normally would have been cut out, but was instead kept in to fit the stoned behavior).

  Fonda explained that he purposely pushed Nicholson to get more and more stoned before shooting the master of the campfire scene. “Jack began his UFO speech. He was letter-perfect, and very stoned, a pro. As we got deeper into the scene, I began to feel a strange energy from the other side of the camera.” Medicinally fueled laughter spread from actor-director Dennis Hopper to sidekick Fonda and toward storyteller Nicholson. They all struggle to stifle and muffle and deflect the laughter. “Jack’s speech and character were doing just fine, but the absurdity of the speech’s content was almost too much to handle, even for The Pro. When Jack got to the words ‘meeting with people from all walks of life,’ it all went over the edge.” The most important scene in the most important film at the most important moment in Nicholson’s final shot at acting was seemingly ruined. He pleaded with Hopper to start at the top, close to tears, but Hopper moved on. The screw-up, the breaking of character, the place that “went haywire” was instead the happy accident that made Jack a star. Perfection in the moment outplays perfection in the technical sense.14

  On a weed-fueled campout, we learn about how Venusians are among us, meeting with people from all walks of life—and that this used to be a helluva country. Peter Fonda plays Captain America to Nicholson’s ACLU lawyer, George Han
son in Easy Rider (1969), the film that made Jack a star.

  Two images from Easy Rider have other Nicholson connections. First, Hanson’s gold football helmet—the lawyer’s substitute for a proper motorcycle helmet—looks very similar to that used by Ray Nitschke in Head. The way Nicholson examines it is quite like the manner in which William Tepper studied an enigmatic orange in Nicholson’s Drive, He Said. Second, Nicholson’s freedom ride on the back of Fonda’s Captain America bike had to inspire his motions during a similar freedom ride when racing his convertible on the beach in Terms of Endearment. Arms outstretched, these two images of pure joy in travel also seem a possible inspiration for Maria Schneider’s free-flying passenger ride in the convertible driven by Nicholson in Antonioni’s The Passenger.

  While Jessep informs Kaffee that he can’t handle the truth, Hanson reveals that none of us can. Around a campfire, Fonda and Hopper serve as his apparent listeners, but we are all the true targets of his eternal truths. The freedom Jessep provides is just a sham. You can talk about it, but just try being it—and don’t tell anybody because they’ll use violence to prove their freedom. When Nicholson gives the campfire speech, it’s as if he’s spontaneously speaking what he thinks and believes and wants to share rather than delivering words from a script.

  Another truth we could not handle is Hanson’s assertion that Venusians live amongst us, seemingly natural and completely unnoticed in every part of society. Yet this clearly is not the reason the USA was no longer a “helluva good country.” America was scared of the image of freedom the bikers (and freaks and hippies) represented, a truth that simply could not be handled. Hanson lived the code of defending civil liberties to protect those unprotected misfits, while Jessep’s code was to defend the nation and protect an unprotectable freedom—whether it was real or delusional.

  * * *

  Ostensibly, Badass Buddusky also defends the country, though he was unable to see how that could possibly be the case. Without getting his orders for more meaningful service, he was left with details like transferring prisoners. In The Last Detail, Buddusky is introduced the same way as Hanson is in Easy Rider, hung over and hard to stir. Though summoned to report on-the-double, Jack takes his time to smooth his hair, swill and spit his beer, slowly study his flat hat, and leisurely create his character before our eyes.

  Nicholson has cultivated a look that suits the nickname “Badass,” with the cop mustache, gum, cigar and attitude of disgust. Dennis Bingham wrote that Nicholson’s visualization of Buddusky, as represented in the bare-chested pose seen in the film’s advertisements, “suggests something a bit off balance, since the signs of masculinity are so overdetermined as to suggest parody.”15 When Badass first presents the name to his detail’s partner, Mule, he does so with a classic Jack grin and repeats it with varied meanings and emphases. His hair sweep gesture, seen before in Little Shop and later in Terms, is part of this characterization. At this point in his career, Nicholson’s voice is in transition from the nasally hyper-pitched drawl of his earlier years toward the lower registered and softer delivery used in his later roles.

  This is an experienced actor at work, with true moments and authentic emotions on display. After Meadows (Randy Quaid) falls asleep on a train and his shoplifted candy bars fall from his sleeve, he bolts, is subdued by Buddusky and Mulhall (Otis Young), and is brought back to his seat. Nicholson’s complex emotion of revulsion mixed with sympathy and apprehension is real in his reaction to Meadows’ pathetic blubbering.

  Film historian Don Schiach called this “an aware, true performance,” emphasizing that it was not a middle-class actor impersonating a working-class character but that Nicholson had obviously “known, observed and empathized with men like this in his own life.”16

  He shows flair when demonstrating hand signals to Meadows in a hotel room, followed by a nice scene in which he quietly and patiently teaches the procedure. Nicholson’s arm motions are disciplined, with his trunk and body remaining stationary and erect.

  As Quaid’s character reminisces about his high school on the way to a doomed trip to see his mother, Jack reacts wordlessly, with a look conveying Buddusky’s disappointment in life; a dismay and sadness that’s tinged with loathing; plus a compassion that’s marked with bitterness. It is an eloquent moment, a reaction shot to what the character actually sees, how it triggers personal feelings, and how it culminates in a spontaneous generation of new thoughts. One face, one moment in time, several true emotions.

  The actor was considered something of a “subversive force” in his 1970s films, full of criticism of the dominant order. Bingham called The Last Detail “a convincing example of Nicholson’s deconstruction of character and the masculinity that determines it.” His performance dominates nearly every scene, thus derailing “the naturalistic character motivation perfunctorily present in the script.”17

  Nicholson masters the use of his body and masters his character energy, with motion and gesture that makes Buddusky a dimensional swabbie. There’s even a Jacksplosion in full bloom, the victim a bartender who learns the hard way that Badass is the shore patrol who’ll pull his sidearm to prove it. He encourages Meadows to romp and stomp with great animalistic demeanor and expansive, explosive gestures that shoot out and get pulled right back in. Trying to get Meadows to fight, Badass gets apoplectic, with bursts of inarticulate compressions of many words into smaller strings of nonsense.

  Bingham contrasts Buddusky’s public side, “an expression of bravado and toughness that he has internalized to the point where there is no interior,” with his private side that bursts forth as “uncontrolled, debilitating rage.”18

  When Nicholson strolls into a train station rest room to confront rival Marines, it’s with a relaxed swagger and physical assurance that’s true Badass attitude that pays off in a punch-up and triumphant escape to the streets and into a cab.

  There are fun, comical and warm moments, such as when Buddusky’s hustling other gamblers with the same wacky tongue push used as George Hanson in Easy Rider; putting on Meadows with a story about a whore with a glass eye who would “wink off” men for a dollar; and both MPs delighting in Quaid’s transformation. Like proud parents, they relish watching Meadows ice-skate; they smile, encourage and talk it up with each other.

  At a get-together at Donna’s (Luana Anders) pad where Nicholson hits on Nancy (Nancy Allen), he talks to and mostly impresses himself while going through his inventory of stories about the power of the uniform and the Navy as a man’s job. She looks bored and snootily unimpressed.

  Carrie and Blow-Out actress Allen told me about the three days of her motion picture debut in freezing Toronto after years of commercial work in New York. “I think that she was supposed to be bored with him and not interested in him. I will admit that I was really kind of terrified [laughs]. And I think that that terror, that natural feeling that came up, was just feeling almost like free-falling in that atmosphere, because I didn’t have anything to ground me. I’d never been on a movie set before and I didn’t have time to sit and talk to the director about what I was to do.” She explained that her defensiveness “appeared naturally, which helped fuel the character. So I think part of it was intrinsically in the script, but it was my own discomfort in the situation that really supported the character.”19

  Her first exposure to film acting revealed a different atmosphere and a different process. But her director and star made it more natural: “Hal Ashby, what he did was create a very safe atmosphere for people to create.” Allen was nervous because it was her first time in an environment like that. They did a little bit of improv and started shooting. “The first thing we shot was where Jack was telling the tale of the sea,” she recounted, “but we kind of improvised, we did a rehearsal, and then Hal Ashby liked it and we just started shooting.”20

  Nicholson biographer Patrick McGilligan described Ashby’s method toward actors as laissez-faire (“the kind of method Jack preferred”), setting up the environment and letting the ac
tors do their job.21

  Nicholson has a nice moment when he accidently knocks into a hanging bulb and starts it to swing, then follows its motion before launching into his hand signals display. He’s seen things, he dramatically intones, but Nancy mocks him with restrained irony about seeing all that it’s done for him. He’s so true in Buddusky’s exaggerated and clumsy build-up of his own significance, so centered on himself that she barely exists even though she is his quest.

  Jack’s second scene with Allen starts with his yodeling (of all things) as Meadows goes upstairs with Donna. Then he turns his yodeling into a tongue flick toward Nancy, likely an ad lib. Allen said, “It really was more free-form than I was used to, a lot of improvisation, and just sort of letting things roll.”

  Allen was amazed at Nicholson’s ability to start the scene without any signs of doing so. “I remember sitting at a table with Jack and we were just kind of talking and the next thing you know, we were in the scene. I couldn’t see him slip into the character. It was just so organic in that moment that at first it disarmed me. I thought, ‘Aren’t we just talking here?’ And ‘What is he doing?’ And ‘I don’t get it,’ which is fine. I was really knocked out by how he just rolled into the scene and I couldn’t even see that he was doing it.”22

  Nicholson’s Last Detail performance is to film what Jimmy Forrest’s 1951 instrumental single “Night Train” is to music. Bump and grind, atmosphere and attitude, they both tease and wink, riffing on a basic groove with panache and bravado. Bingham calls this “Nicholson’s first strongly Brechtian performance, or what Brecht called ‘acting in quotation marks’ in which ‘the character who is being shown and the actor who demonstrates him remain clearly differentiated.’”23