Director Dennis Hopper on the set
Hopper with cameraman László Kovács
Hopper on the set with Sam Fuller (with cigar)
Dennis Hopper and wife Daria Halprin at the Jack Tar Hotel, San Francisco
Hopper wth Jack Nicholson and Michelle Phillips. Phillips and Hopper were married briefly (all of eight days), and she appears in The Last Movie. She also dated Jack Nicholson, among other stars of that time.
THE LAST MOVIE B-
USA (108 mi)
1971 d: Dennis Hopper
Very representative
of the times (Nixon was in office), written, directed, edited, and starring
Dennis Hopper (sensationally covered by the press), though not, however, the
long lost masterpiece that many might have been hoping for. While it’s certainly outside the Hollywood
mainstream, nearly indecipherable in terms of content, showing prominent use of
experimental or abstract techniques, yet there’s plenty of ugliness to this
film, not the least of which is a blatant mistreatment of women, including
several scenes of Hopper slapping women to the ground, which does not go
unnoticed, as this kind of abusive mistreatment of women actually followed
Hopper throughout his life and is not simply overlooked today as it was in the
era when it was made. Unfortunately,
this is part of his long-lasting legacy (along with being a model of
self-destruction), as it can’t be eradicated or easily removed from his
artistic footprint, though to his credit, it’s rare for American directors to
explore the effects of emotional violence, where his deplorable onscreen
persona is more representative of the deranged psycho maniac that began to
define Hopper’s acting choices later in his career, playing roles completely
outside of and alienated from society’s mainstream. While this became his specialty, he’s already
fulfilling that role to some degree in this film, something of a follow-up to Easy Rider
(1969), where the financial rewards from that film were so ridiculously
excessive that Hopper’s descent into alcohol and drug abuse lasted well over a
decade, typically consuming half a gallon of rum, 28 beers and three grams of
cocaine daily, eventually shooting up speedballs (coke and heroin mixed), the
lethal combination that killed John Belushi, almost always accompanied by an
assortment of loaded guns he constantly waved around, chronicled in the rarely
seen documentary The
American Dreamer (1971), with Hopper obsessing over the film’s editing
while in the throes of drug and alcohol addiction. The film, however, is the initial descent
into a metaphorical madness, given a million dollars and total artistic control
by Universal Studios (which was cynically attempting to exploit the youth
market), he set out for the unexplored realms of Peru, bringing along friends
and coworkers, making something of a Billy the Kid home movie cowboy western
starring Hopper himself (clean-shaven and with a new haircut) as an extra named
Kansas in a film being made by an assertive cigar-chomping director, Sam
Fuller, which features plenty of outlaws and bandits confronted by a fierce
lawman, becoming a shoot-out spectacle of grandiose spills and pratfalls,
almost ballet-like in its extended choreography, but an actor is accidentally
killed on the set. While no local
Indians are included in Fuller’s film, they are a surrounding presence, like a
Greek chorus, silently watching with interest.
Once the shooting’s finished, Hopper sticks around for a while, enjoying
the majestic beauty of the mountainous landscape with a beautiful Indian girl
from the local whorehouse, Maria (Stella Garcia), thinking he’s found paradise,
but all is not as it seems, where his dream gets lost in a haze of alcohol and
discontent, reeling from one disappointment to the next, lost in a seemingly
mythical universe created by the Hollywood movie industry.
The initial cut of a
more conventional western was never released, though viewed and disparaged by
his friend, fellow director Alejando Jodorowsky, urging him to re-edit the film
with a more disjointed narrative that showed more cinematic ingenuity, which he
apparently did. When completed, the film
was initially screened at the Venice Film Festival in a non-competitive year,
with every entered film winning an award, but the studio was devastated at the
results, finding a completely non-commercial film that was vilified by critics,
quickly pulled from the theaters after a short run, and then remained something
of an enigma for decades, something only spoken about but never seen, remaining
in hibernation until a recent restoration was released nearly 50 years later. Interestingly, the inspiration behind the
film came from Hopper’s experience working on a John Wayne western directed by
Henry Hathaway, THE SONS OF KATIE ELDER (1965), which was shot on location in
Durango, Mexico, with Hopper wondering about the effect of the movie crew’s
intrusion into the lives of the indigenous population, “I thought, my God,
what’s going to happen when the movie leaves and the natives are left living in
these Western sets?” A few years later
shooting in the small village of Chincheros located high in the Peruvian Andes
(a region known at the time as the world capital of cocaine trafficking), a
cadre of friends along with a boatload of cocaine were about to find out, as
this becomes the central premise of the film.
The task at hand was having to manage seven tons of equipment that had
to be sent to the top of an 11,000 foot mountain, some delivered by cargo
plane, while having to negotiate with a military dictatorship that took a
curious interest in watching a band of misfit American artists turn a remote
mountain village into a drug infested, open-air brothel, all in the pretense of
making a film about the adverse effects of colonialism. Curiously, the movie runs for a full
half-hour before the credits appear, “A Film By Dennis Hopper,” and then
another fifteen minutes go by before the actual title appears. This disorienting technique along with
ignoring the script happens throughout, including magnificent mountain vistas
shot by László Kovács, frequent flashbacks (jarring instantaneous images),
flashes of “Segment Missing” onscreen, along with the use of overlapping
dialogue and a strangely off-putting sound design. These inventive techniques, however, are not
particularly indicative of a thoughtful or inventive film, feeling clumsy throughout,
narratively slight, not even well acted, as no performances stand out,
especially the leads. Instead it seems
to survive on male bluster and raw bravado, more like Peckinpah than anything
else, given a brush of the avant garde, feeling crude and strangely
unfinished. This is in stark contrast
with Peter Fonda’s acid western with Warren Oates released the same year, The
Hired Hand (1971), which is a gorgeous cinematic offering, artfully shot by
Vilmos Zsigmond, creating dazzling imagery, where Fonda and Verna Bloom are
simply brilliant together, often in wordless sequences. It’s not mere coincidence that Fonda and
Hopper were both obsessed and influenced by a fatalistic, existential element
from the Gospel of Thomas (The Gospel of Thomas Collection
- Translations and Resources) while making their respective films, though
each responded quite differently. To be
fair, Fonda’s film is nearly as obscure and was equally dismissed by the
critics, but it’s way ahead of its time, where acting and extreme artistic
visualization take precedence over plot or narrative, actually foreshadowing
the poetic work of Terrence Malick.
The opening
sequences reveal a kind of rag-tag collective surrounding the film, given a
documentary look as we peer into the makings of a film-within-a-film, with
Fuller embracing a somewhat dictatorial style, shouting orders, giving
directions, where all the people coming up and speaking to him after each shot
feels more like concerted mayhem, a brief insight into the anxious hysteria
surrounding filmmaking, where multiple things are continually happening
simultaneously, where it’s hard to sense any order. The refrains of a young Kris Kristofferson
(an actor in the film) singing “Me and Bobby McGee” with Rita Coolidge (KRIS KRISTOFFERSON &
RITA COOLIDGE - Me And Bobby McGee ... YouTube, 3:16) weave in and out of
this opening section along with glimpses of the countryside, with Kansas riding
his horse through the open terrain, eventually stumbling onto the movie set in
town, getting scolded by the director for interrupting a scene, then falling in
line and performing his duties until it’s a wrap, where they all get together
for a rambunctious party afterwards (which is basically a collection of
Hopper’s friends), featuring plenty of singing, including Michelle Phillips
(who was married to Hopper afterwards, an LSD-laced misadventure that lasted
all of eight days). One of the more
memorable sequences is a long tracking shot that reveals different singers in
every room, each with a distinct character, with Kansas slowly wandering
through the rooms, with the camera probing both inside and out, all feeling
jumbled together, like a layered effect, each representing a different mindset
or state of consciousness, where he breaks down in tears afterwards. By morning they’ve all vanished, leaving him
in the arms of Maria, riding out into the countryside, blending into an
Edenesque natural world, seen getting naked and making love under a remote
mountain waterfall, made all the more humorous as a band of young children
march past on an overhead road led by the priest (Tomas Milian), who
continually glances at the carnal scene as they walk by. While the shot has all the elements of an
exotic fantasy, especially as it’s used to enhance interest in Western
audiences, it also holds a different meaning, symbolic of the white rape of the
indigenous culture, bringing to mind a dictum of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard,
from an interview in 1970, “A movie is not reality, it is only a
reflection. Bourgeois filmmakers focus
on the reflection of reality. We are
concerned with the reality of that reflection.”
This becomes more evident as their relationship evolves, as Maria
becomes more and more interested in consumer culture, wanting to be showered
with Western gifts, treated like a “white” girlfriend, claiming she must have
regular beauty treatments, have a General Electric refrigerator, a fur coat,
and even a swimming pool, where she can then put all these expensive items on
display in front of her own people, like recognizable signs of success. The most obvious example is a white mink
shawl belonging to Mrs. Anderson (Julie Adams), an extravagantly wealthy wife
of a millionaire American industrialist in town, repeatedly nagging him until
he goes through the depths of raunchy depravity to get it for her, reversing
roles, where he becomes the humiliated and sexually demeaned prostitute for a
mindlessly sex-crazed American wife.
Like Maria, the
local Indian village is equally corrupted by the influence of the movie,
bringing chaotic violence and madness to the land, replicating their actions
with handmade items resembling fake set construction and a wooden movie camera,
with a local leader barking out the orders, while the townspeople play along,
getting into fisticuffs, but for real, as they don’t buy into the idea that it’s
fake, so people actually get hurt. When
the priest tries to intervene, offering a return to existing order, they ignore
him, caught up in this wild new idea that allows them to play out their own
indigenous fantasies of mimicking Hollywood.
But in projecting this new world, all moral order disappears, with
villagers actually shooting and killing their neighbors (invoking a blood
sacrifice). The priest brings in Kansas
to educate villagers about making movies, but he is ignored as well, suggesting
cinema is not an educating mechanism, and instead he is thrown into the role of
the actor chosen to die, where he grows fearful they may mistakenly kill him
for real, ironically becoming the Fay Wray sacrificial figure from King
Kong (1933). Hollywood exports the
sex and violence in movies almost exclusively for commerce, with little thought
about the inevitable consequences. The
cultural insensitivity of this film is glaring, where the poisonous influence
is immediate and crudely visceral, leaving a terrible stain of violent excess
and moral decay that includes excessive drinking and Western debauchery, as
Kansas spends nearly all of his time in raunchy bordellos and saloons, with a
perpetual bottle in his hand, getting drunk, chasing other women, and then
treating Maria like crap, thinking only of himself. This myopic view symbolizes the senseless
repetition of similar films coming out of Hollywood, refusing to develop a social
conscience, instead it’s all about the bottom line, beholden to the almighty
dollar. Yet it’s clear society is
influenced by what happens onscreen, creating stereotypes and myths that last
for decades, like the mythological macho bravado of John Wayne as the virile
cowboy on the range, while continually stereotyping Indians as savages, who get
little if any character development, never perceived as “human” when for over a
century they have been projected as “subhuman.”
Hollywood also provides fairy tale endings, like the handsome prince
that always saves the young princess, which is little more than a fantasy, yet
it becomes an intrinsic aspect of every young woman’s dreams, wondering why
they never meet anyone as handsome or charming as the Hollywood elite, like
Bogart, Clark Gable, or Errol Flynn, as their glamorous image becomes an
impossible to replicate aspect of young girls growing up who are sure to be
disappointed, yet the industry bears no responsibility whatsoever and rarely
engages in a meaningful discussion with the audience, instead it’s a one-way
conversation. In that vein, Hopper
insists upon providing no happy ending, making a film that is deliberately told
out of order, accentuating the flaws and imperfections of cinema, turning his
film into an abstract expression of grim futility, directly challenging the
Hollywood notion of cinematic illusion and the idea of success, featuring the
John Buck Wilkin song “Only When It Rains,”
The Final 'Only When
It Rains' Segment of Dennis Hopper's 'The Last ... YouTube (4:30). At heart, this is a subversive take on the
Hollywood dream, but the sloppy execution is a bawdy tale of drug and
alcohol-fueled excess, perhaps not the right canvas to deliver this
message.
