The Last Movie (1971)

I'd put this review off for a long time after having finally received this movie, but today I just read that Dennis Hopper is supposedly in his last days, health-wise, so I decided what better way to give props to the man than to review a movie that was - for better or worse - all him.

Now granted, Hopper not only directed and starred in Easy Rider, which I'll get to in a minute, but also directed films like Out of the Blue and Colors, and was featured in such important films as Apocalypse Now, Cool Hand Luke, True Grit, Hoosiers and Blue Velvet, so he should in no way, shape or form be dismissed as a hack actor or film-maker. He isn't. The plain fact of things was that by this point in life, things just came together in a way that...well...let's just get to the review and you'll see what I mean.

The Last Movie was an endeavor that came hot on the heels of Hopper's previous directorial triumph Easy Rider, a film that was itself about life in upheaval, youth in revolt, times of uncertainty and the closing moments of the 1960s, where nothing was certain and no one knew what was coming next. And drugs.

The studios were, of course, flabbergasted that such an ungainly thing could have received the kudos, the box office and the respect for director/writer/star Hopper that came from it - this was a movie that spoke to a generation and it was artfully done.

Maybe this guy is onto something, the studio suits thought.

Maybe this Hopper has his finger on the pulse of the kids nowadays.

Maybe we should give him a truckload of money to make another one of these Easy Rider-type things that cater to the youth of America and can get us another huge box-office payday.

...okay, maybe they didn't say that verbatim, but that's what happened.

So BBS Productions (a division of Universal Pictures) lured Hopper away from Columbia Pictures with lotsa bucks and the promise of full creative control over his next film. All they needed was a movie.

At least Hopper followed through.

The Last Movie details the life and times of a Hollywood stunt man named Kansas (Hopper) who, once production wraps on a troubled Western filmed in Peru, stays behind to be with a local beauty (Stella Garcia) and also observes the villagers who, inspired by the filming of said Western, construct their own wood cameras and boom mics to film their own live-action movie, substituting the blank guns used in the Western with live ammo in their own guns, leading to bloodshed and violence.

Now right there is a plot description that would sound like a pretty straightforward movie, am I wrong? Didn't turn out that way, though....

Thing is, conceived as this was, it was accepted initially by BBS Productions but, once the original choice for the lead - Montgomery Clift - died, BBS lost interest with Hopper taking over lead acting chores and dropped the project. Of course, Universal picked up the reins and things went on. Again, for better or worse.

Here is where things get kind of hairy: by the time filming began on this project Hopper was already heavily into drugs and he conceived the story for Last Movie while dazed and confused, so to speak. So while the story (co-written with Stewart Stern, a writer famous for Rebel Without A Cause and The Ugly American) was simple enough, there was a certain disjointed feel that, while it worked for Easy Rider, here felt just like what it was - disjointed scenes struggling for artistic integrity. There were scenes that told a story, to be sure, just not all of it was the same story.

For a few minutes, the Peru Western is shown; then some scenes showing talks between Hopper and some Hollywood types are shown; then the villagers are shown rattling around in bamboo carts with wooden cameras and microphones in tow; then back to the Western; then some travelogue scenes of breath-taking Peruvian mountain vistas; and just to toss another form of disjuncture into the works, some scenes depicting Hopper and some others going on a trek into the mountains to search for gold.

Round it out with some other scenes that are quite obviously shot behind-the-scenes of this very film and chop it all up at random, splice it together at random and there you have it - one hour and forty-eight minutes of artistic pretension...and you know it's artistic pretension because they don't even show the title for the film until about 30 minutes in.

Choppy as it is there is at least the bare bones of a story here, and some flashes of interesting dialogue between Hopper and Garcia and between Hopper and the Hollywood suits. The thing about it is, there are so many flashbacks and flash-forwards and flashbacks from the flash-forwards to the present that a sense of time is absolutely lost and the viewer is left wondering if they are as stoned as Hopper apparently was during this endeavor. Disjuncture is not just an after-effect of watching The Last Movie, it is a plot point. At least with Easy Rider, there was a flow of story to follow.

There is beauty in this film, to be sure. Cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs worked with Hopper on Easy Rider and again contributes value and grandness to the look of this movie. The fog settling into the valleys, the gorgeous panorama of Peru and the various exotic locales all are shown to their utmost. It's not Kovacs' fault that it is strong service to a weak cause. In the case of The Last Movie, the beautiful cinematography is like a fresh coat of paint on a Yugo.

It is said that Hopper wanted to shoot in Mexico originally but the studio refused, then Hopper decided to shoot in Chinchero, Peru - Chinchero being this film's title at one point. The reason he decided on shooting in Peru? Apparently a friend of Hopper's told him about this strain of psychedelic mushroom that grew in the region that he was determined to try.

A shooting location decided by the availability of drugs? Stranger things have happened in Hollywood. Who knows if the story is even true - but given the circumstances of Hopper's life at the time, I wouldn't doubt it.

There's this matter of pretension on Hopper's part, however. The Last Movie has so much disjuncture (there's that word again) and title cards thrown in at random intervals like any given art film that Hopper comes across less a voice of a generation and more the stuffy art snob that he just one movie ago stood as a bastion against. Art for art's sake? Prolly not.

Then there's the cast. At least Hopper was able to assemble a group of actors - some of them his friends - to be in a movie that promised the same kind of counter-culture thrills as his previous hit. Who in their right mind would not want to be a part of that? Faces the likes of Peter Fonda (naturally), Michael Anderson Jr., Toni Basil, John Phillip Law, Tomas Milan, James Mitchum, Russ Tamblyn, Dean Stockwell, Kris Kristofferson (who also contributed "Me and Bobby McGee" to the soundtrack), and directors such as Henry Jaglom and Samuel Fuller bounce across the screen for a few minutes each, vying for time against the assemblage of scenes that hold no context or possess any more symbolism than as images to hold our attention, waiting for something interesting to happen in front of them.

In the end of course, the producers couldn't make heads or tails out of what they saw. Even bringing in some of the younger workers at the studio (the target audience for this "youth film") didn't help matters, since they were as confused by what they saw as everyone else.

So then, after being shown at, and winning no less than the Grand Prize at, the Venice Film Festival, The Last Movie's fate was decided by Hopper's refusal to cut down the lumbering pace of his masterwork so as to be distributed by Universal Independent. Lee Wasserman, executive at Universal, gave the ultimatum that if the film weren't re-cut that The Last Movie would only have limited release in the States and never be shown in Europe. Again, Hopper stuck to his guns and Wasserman - true to his word - stuck to his own. Which is much of the reason why very few people nowadays have ever heard of The Last Movie.

What about it, then? Is The Last Movie a good movie or a bad one?

To tell you the truth, I think it's a good movie, but take into consideration this is the opinion of someone who prizes movies like Frankenstein Island and Monster a Go-Go. This is a movie that is good in the way that watching a huge, pretentious movie collapse under its own weight would be to most of the masochistic viewers out there. Like me.

Then again, most movies I watch had, at one point in their existences, been touted as the be-all-to-end-all, the ultimate in film-making, the greatest achievement in movies since the advent of sound. Battlefield Earth was supposed to be the ultimate science fiction film. The Holcroft Covenant was supposed to be the ultimate thriller. The Beast Within was supposed to be the ultimate horror movie. The Swarm was supposed to be the ultimate disaster film.

And The Last Movie? It was supposed to be the ultimate trip.

And it was.

If you count ego trips, at least.

Hmm. That didn't turn out to be the glowing observation of Dennis Hopper's talent that I hoped. Well, that's art for you.