Robert Towne, the movie director, screenwriter and script doctor who died last week at 89, was best known to me for three work outputs: he wrote the screenplays for The Last Detail (1973), Chinatown (1974), and, with Warren Beatty, Shampoo (1975). Born in 1934, he had a hot hand while coming up to and then passing "the big 4-oh."
I watched The Last Detail last night on YouTube and it's standing up better than, say, our president. It resembles Chinatown in the respect that a rollicking and often funny surface hides, but only a little, quite a bleak view of things. The movie is a road trip, up the east coast to a naval brig at Portsmouth, Maine, and America, as seen out the windows of Greyhound buses and AmTrak trains, looks down-in-the-mouth. It's not any better close up, as evidenced by a detour the traveling trio takes to the house in which one of them grew up in Camden, New Jersey. This Jersey guy, a gentle dimwit, age 18, has been given an absurdly harsh sentence for a minor theft that offended the sensibilities of his commanding officer's wife, and the other two sailors, members of the shore police, are trying to show him a good time before turning him over to the authorities in Maine. But there isn't much fun to be had. While their young prisoner is having his first sexual experience in a whorehouse, the other two wait in the scroungy anteroom and discuss their pasts. "Have you ever been married?" the one asks the other, played by Jack Nicholson, who answers, without sentiment, and as near as I can remember, "Yes, once, she had nice titties and wore argyle sweaters, but she wanted me to go to trade school for TV repair, and I just couldn't do it."
The back story to how one more patriotic American came to serve his country in its armed forces.
Near the desolating conclusion, the three have a picnic of hot dogs in a park on a day too cold for a picnic. The Nicholson character has forgotten to buy buns. His partner complains that it's not a hot dog without a bun. Their prisoner, who has run a stick lengthwise through a wiener and then dipped the end into the top of a small mustard bottle, offers the mustard to his guard.
The method of sketching a character's past, in a way that's funny while advancing dark themes, has something like a functional equivalent in Chinatown. Jake Gittes, played again by Nicholson, is a private investigator in LA. He used to be a cop but quit to open a practice specializing in "marital investigations." A new case brings him to the city morgue, where he runs into a former colleague, an overfed, alcoholic, corrupt dope who mentions that, in the drought that's hit southern California, water service to his apartment has been cut off. Nicholson, in Towne's script:
How'd you know? You don't drink it. You don't bathe in it. Did the water department send you a letter? Oh, but then you'd have to know how to read.
It helps, in these conversational snippets, if you can hear Nicholson's voice, the way he hangs on to vowel sounds, drawing out the pronunciation, which somehow memorably expresses the emotion of contempt. As a cop, he'd been assigned to the Chinatown precinct, and it seems that crime, abetted by rampant police corruption, had driven him into the field of marital investigations. If everyone is on the make, he'd at least do it honestly. He sees himself, and so does the moviegoer, as a noirish good guy schooled in the ways of the world by his Chinatown experience. But by the time the curtain falls on the movie's crushing last scene, you come to understand that Jake's cynicism had been insufficient. In the last line of dialog, Towne has a cop comfort the marital investigator,
Forget it, Jake. It's just Chinatown.
even though what the movie has demonstrated is that the rot is general, unconfined.
In Shampoo, Angelinos cavort sexually with the husbands and wives and significant others of friends and colleagues and acquaintances while unwatched TVs announce the news of Nixon's 1968 electoral victory. It's amusing, even if the idea is something of a downer: people get the leaders they deserve. In the last years of his life, Towne presumably felt no need to recant.