In 1968, Dennis Hopper, almost by accident, landed the opportunity to direct his first feature film when a buddy of his, actor Peter Fonda, decided it would be a groovy idea to make a Western. Not just any Western, mind you; this would be something of a post-modern, revisionist take on the genre, juxtaposing guys on horses with guys on motorcycles. It was a simple enough premise made all the more attractive by Fonda's star-making turns in a couple of contemporary Roger Corman films of note, The Wild Angels and The Trip. Fonda was a "hot" property now, sort of like the counterculture's answer to Gary Cooper; this new film would unfold along a similar vein. He told the idea to Hopper, and it was decided the two of them would make this movie with Fonda producing and Hopper directing.
The movie in question, of course, was Easy Rider. It cost relatively little to make, and upon its eventual release in 1969, made the kind of money that studio big shots tend to notice. This is important in that the runaway success of this film would enable Hopper to direct the movie he had actually wanted to make in the first place, an idea he had developed years earlier with the screenwriter responsible for Rebel Without A Cause. Universal studios, hoping for something along the lines of Easy Rider 2, gave Hopper carte blanche to make whatever he felt like; thus, a sketchy idea that studio after studio had turned down en masse for nearly a decade would finally see the light of day. The working title of this movie was Chinchero.
Released at long last in the fall of 1971, The Last Movie was, to put it bluntly, an unmitigated disaster for Dennis Hopper. For starters, the debacle effectively ended Hopper's career ambition to make his own films; in certain respects, it wasn't that different from what had happened to Orson Welles a few decades earlier. That this movie never had a chance to succeed is plain to see by the savage degree to which critics attacked it, and by the fact that the studio essentially refused to promote it. They had already sunk somewhere in the neighborhood of a million dollars (serious cash in those days) into the picture, and what they saw on the screen was to them largely incomprehensible, even by "art house" standards. The bottom line for a Hopper or a Welles is that auteurs are only permitted to write their own ticket in this town provided that their work yields a profit. Think Martin Scorsese, or perhaps Quentin Tarantino.
I, for one, think that The Last Movie got a bad rap. Rightly or wrongly, American directors are prone to take some brickbats when they try to make a movie like this. Arthur Penn with Mickey One (1965), Sam Peckinpaw with Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), Robert Altman with Brewster McCloud (1970), practically anything by John Cassavetes. Mainstream critics tend to prefer their Hollywood types to toe the line accordingly; what some critics will overpraise at the hands of the French New Wave or the old German Expressionists, for example, seems "pretentious" or "indulgent" coming from American counterparts.
This is not to say that Hopper's "masterpiece" is not without its problems. The film does suffer from a somewhat disjointed narrative, and it gives new meaning to the term "surreal". Don't laugh when I say this, but The Last Movie is really just a good ol' Twilight Zone episode, only expanded to just over ninety minutes and enhanced with something on the order of a CAULDRON of LSD, or maybe Angel Dust. Imagine the Mardi Gras scene at the end of Easy Rider when everybody dropped all that acid and then freaked out for ten minutes. Picture that for nearly two hours, and you have The Last Movie. Now, much of this stems from the way the movie was edited. The greatest irony between this tarnished movie and its more beloved predecessor is that on Easy Rider, Hopper was involved with other people whose judgement he had to respect (or at least live with, since they had the right to recut that film, which they ultimately did). On The Last Movie, he had an absolute free hand (including final cut), and for better or worse, it shows. Reportedly, Hopper's original cut of the film was more straightforward and in accordance with the dictates of conventional storytelling. That cut fell out of favor with the director, so he destroyed it and put together the cut of the film that is seen today.
Even though I have a more favorable opinion overall, some of the charges leveled at this movie are not without some merit. Inept and pretentious, just plain pitiful, gaseous and overblown mess, an extravagant mess, an embarrassment, endless, chaotic, suffocating, acid-soaked. I actually concur with some of that sentiment to a degree: Hopper was experiencing some serious life issues during this period, including marital discord and rampant drug abuse. He was mostly out of control south of the border while filming this movie, and this time he did not have the stabilizing influence of a Peter Fonda or a Bert Schneider as producers. Pondered in that light, The Last Movie may give new meaning to the term "artistic excess".
Nonetheless, this movie has something to say, and here is my best guess as to what that message is. The Last Movie is a metaphor for the perverse affect that the "conventional" Hollywood film has on our collective psyche. It screws up the way we see ourselves by telling us the way we're supposed to see ourselves; which, of course, is crazy, since nothing shown on the screen is "real", anyway. It's merely an idealized, heavily sanitized impression of who we are and of reality. More specifically, it panders to the way we would prefer to see ourselves. But the truth is, we are not Steve McQueen or Rita Hayworth. The Beautiful People don't suffer the same indignities on celluloid that we do in life, and in the effort to convince us otherwise, the movies LIE. At its worst, Hollywood not only sells us this false self-image, but does so with undue value placed on the material and the commercial. That's a pretty heady idea coming from a guy who was most likely stoned out of his mind at the time, even by his own admission. I would also add, maybe that's what the industry truly resented about this picture: not the quality of the production or lack thereof, but its audacious assertion that Hollywood is simply a bunch of bullshit.
Years later, Hopper was able to mend enough fences in order that he eventually managed to hustle more opportunities to direct. The results were mostly inconsistent; never again would Hopper supervise a more iconic film like an Easy Rider or a more edgy, self-conscious film like The Last Movie. The realities of the business in the eighties and nineties were such that these kinds of films were a lot harder to make than they had been for the Woodstock Generation, and whatever audience they could hope to expect was largely outside the mainstream. But a funny thing happened. As is often the case, the passage of time has a way of casting art, movies especially, in a better and more interesting light than it sometimes enjoys initially, and such was the case with the erstwhile much maligned Dennis Hopper film. Today, the film enjoys something of a cult following; Hopper later re-acquired rights to the film and was planning a DVD release, but his death in 2010 curtailed this effort.
Admittedly, The Last Movie is not an especially easy movie to sit through. It may be guilty of some excesses, but it is well worth watching.
No comments:
Post a Comment