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The Last Detail

(1973)

Road movie, buddy movie, coming of age movie, and a major Hollywood watershed: part of Nicholson's sensational '70s winning streak, director Hal Ashby's job between Harold and Maude and Shampoo, and Robert Towne's last screenwriting credit before his Oscar-winning Chinatown.

I've long remembered it as the first time I ever saw Randy Quaid; that recollection turns out to be inaccurate, since he'd been in 3 Bogdanovich films already, at least 1 of which I'd already seen. Nor was it my first exposure to Carol Kane, whom I'd seen with Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge (creepily, she plays a whore in each). And I would have seen Michael Moriarty a few months before this in Bang the Drum Slowly. But who would I have seen first here? Well, Nancy Allen, but she never did anything for me. More important, though briefly, as part of a proto-New Agey meditation group, Gilda Radner, two years before SNL.