The Last Detail

Ebert speaks with hushed excitement about the young Jack Nicholson, awed and envious of this "male sprite". The forces of old and their systems of oppression are always trying to keep Jack down, and we root for him. The poignancy is that he usually loses, this being the 70s and all. George Hanson is snuffed in his sleep in a random act of ignorance. Bobby Dupea disappears from a highway gas station, never heard from again. Jake Gittes turns back in defeat on the septic streets of Chinatown. Randle Patrick McMurphy goes out drooling. And Sergeant Major "Bad Ass" Buddusky is perhaps the saddest figure of them all, resigned to his middling place in the chain of command. He speculates that the dopey sailor he's escorting to military prison will be better off under authoritarian rule where life is simpler...this is an inadvertant apology for his own choice to be a lifer in the Navy. At the end despite the injustice Buddusky has witnessed at the hands of the powers-that-be we know he will return to Norfolk and be found where we first met him, drunk in the barracks and bitchy, putting up only a little fight.