10 • The Last Movie
In the wake of Easy Rider, Universal enlisted the two totemic figureheads of its success, Hopper and Fonda, with a promise of complete creative freedom for their subsequent directorial efforts. The resulting films, Hopper’s The Last Movie and Fonda’s The Hired Hand, further expand on Easy Rider’s play with western iconography, each arriving at different end points of the western genre. Beyond their shared thematic material, the two films could not be more different, with Hopper’s sprawling, barely contained film contrasting pointedly with Fonda’s determinedly small-scale work. Both films were the subject of critical derision and box-office failure, curtailing their filmmakers’ further directorial ambitions. Just two years after Easy Rider, the critical and commercial demise of The Last Movie and The Hired Hand demonstrates that the limits of the New Hollywood project had already been determined.
Production Background
Dennis Hopper conceived of The Last Movie long before Easy Rider, when he was on location in Mexico as a performer in Henry Hathaway’s The Sons of Katie Elder (dir. Henry Hathaway, Paramount Pictures, 1965) and found himself wondering what would happen when the film crew departed, leaving the western sets standing: How would the local community interact with these buildings?1 Hopper took the concept to Rebel Without a Cause screenwriter Stewart Stern, who penned a screenplay with Montgomery Clift in mind for the role of an American stuntman who remains behind in a Mexican town after completing a film shoot there.2 Hopper’s costar in The Sons of Katie Elder, John Wayne, and that film’s director, Hathaway, were to play themselves, but the project fell through when record producer Phil Spector backed out of his planned investment, and the screenplay languished until Universal executive Ned Tanen, who also greenlit Two-Lane Blacktop and Fonda’s The Hired Hand, courted Hopper with the promise of total creative control for his follow-up to Easy Rider.3 Universal put up the $850,000 budget with a guarantee of no studio interference so long as Hopper stayed within budget. For his part, the director took a relatively meager salary of $500 per week, along with a 50 percent slice of the profits.4 In a feature article covering the shoot in Life magazine, Hopper candidly told Brad Darrach, “This is the big one. . . . If I foul up now, they’ll say Easy Rider was a fluke. But I’ve got to take chances to do what I want.”5
The Last Movie was shot in the town of Chincheros, Peru. The New York Times, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and Life dispatched envoys to the set in Chincheros. These reports were quick to note Peru’s informal status as the “cocaine capital of the world.”6 The tone of these pieces is typified by the title of Darrach’s Life piece: “The Easy Rider Runs Wild in the Andes.” Like the other reports, it is mostly concerned with Hopper’s at-best eccentric personality and reports of wildly debauched activity on set. Yet despite lurid media reports of his prodigious drug intake, Hopper’s shoot was completed on budget and on time, with production running just one week longer than the Easy Rider shoot.7
Narrative and Form
Mirroring Hopper’s own experience on the Hathaway film, The Last Movie’s principal narrative follows Hopper’s stuntman, Kansas (the part originally intended for Clift), as he remains in a small Peruvian village following the completion of a Hollywood western shoot, hoping to secure work on subsequent runaway productions. He becomes romantically involved with a local woman, Maria (Stella Garcia), and concocts a gold prospecting scheme with fellow expatriates, including Neville Robey (Don Gordon). They attempt to secure the financial backing of another expatriate, broom magnate Harry Anderson (Roy Engel), a venture that ends in destitution and Neville’s intimated suicide. Meanwhile, a movie does come to town, but not the one Kansas was hoping to work on; the local population of the village, inspired by the Hollywood production, stage a film of their own, with pretend movie cameras, but real, unsimulated acts of violence. Kansas becomes dangerously embroiled, and the line between fiction and documentary blurs, as outtakes from behind the scenes of The Last Movie are intercut with documentary-style shots of village life.
This tension between documentary and fiction is a feature that persists throughout The Last Movie. The film unfolds in multiple stylistic registers, from pseudo-documentary material to more lyrically cinematic sequences. The opening sequence of the film contains vérité-style documentary footage of a religious rite conducted by the Chincheros locals, which stylistically resembles the New Orleans sequence from Easy Rider with its use of handheld cameras, wide-angle lens, and noncontinuous montage. Enraptured, Hopper’s Kansas watches and freaks out. The religious rite that opens The Last Movie is intercut with footage from the Billy the Kid film that is being made in Chincheros. No narrative clarification is provided to privilege the diegetic authenticity of one sequence over the other, so the audience is unaware of which sequence represents the “true” narrative of The Last Movie.8 Actor Severn Darden is seen standing onstage singing a minstrel song while Toni Basil performs high kicks. The film cuts to a slow-motion shot of an explosion ripping through a store, knocking a number of cowboys from their horses, as Kris Kristofferson’s “Good for Nothing Blues” anachronistically, and nondiegetically, plays on the soundtrack. A card game in a saloon culminates in a bloody shootout on the town’s main street, mimicking, and perhaps parodying, the iconic slow-motion bloodletting of Peckinpah’s recent The Wild Bunch (Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, 1969), as horses are pulled to the ground and cowboys topple from rooftops. Unlike the equally bloody shootout that opens Peckinpah’s film and that functions as an exercise in narrative suspense and payoff, Hopper’s shootout is narratively irreconcilable with the pseudo-documentary sequence that precedes it. Stylistically, the use of hyper-real slow motion contrasts with the documentary-style mode of the religious ceremony. The latter employs a set of stylistic markers that emphasize veracity by deploying familiar documentary conventions. By contrast, the subsequent shootout sequence employs all of the standard stylistic conventions of Hollywood action cinema but highlights the emptiness of this mode of cinematic representation by depicting spectacular events that have been abstracted from narrative context. The act of killing is repeated ad nauseam, and the conventions of continuity editing and spatial coherence are left intact as a succession of unfamiliar characters blasts away at one another for reasons that are unclear. The scale of the action in this lengthy sequence would put the climactic moments of many “straight” westerns to shame, and Hopper places it before the ten-minute mark of his film, divorced entirely from an expository framework.9 The Last Movie offers few other such conventionally depicted moments, even as narrative gradually emerges.
Peter Fonda appears briefly onscreen, framed only in wide shots as one of the many anonymous characters to be killed off in the first ten minutes of the film. By casting and then formally and narratively diminishing the presence of his Easy Rider costar, Hopper reveals his subversive intentions for the shootout. Indeed, it would be possible for the inattentive viewer to miss the cameo of the Easy Rider star altogether, as Hopper effectively curtails the mechanics of stardom, reducing Fonda to the most minimal of on-screen roles. Many other Hollywood identities, such as Toni Basil, Samuel Fuller, Henry Jaglom, Dean Stockwell, and Russ Tamblyn, briefly appear in this early film-within-the-film and soon disappear from The Last Movie, which for its remainder is predominantly populated with unknowns alongside Hopper.
It is not until later in the film that the status of this sequence as movie-within-a-movie becomes apparent, as Hopper mingles with the cast and crew of the western at an out-of-hours party. This sequence is one of many explicitly Godardian moments in The Last Movie, as Hopper employs the fragmented didactic editing style and jarring nondiegetic audio intrusions that were hallmarks of Godard’s late New Wave films, from Pierrot le fou (Pathé Contemporary Films, 1965) to Week End (1967). In Hopper’s party sequence, a lengthy tracking shot follows Kansas as he walks down a hallway past various rooms. In each room a different song is being performed: John Buck Wilkin performing the country song “My God and I”; a barrelhouse honky-tonk piano piece; and a traditional Peruvian chant. For Nick Heffernan, the overlapping, simultaneously performed soundscapes “reveal at each stage different aspects of the interpenetration of American and local cultures.”10 The sequence concludes as Kansas goes outside and cries as all three sounds are heard at once, clashing on the soundtrack.
Throughout The Last Movie, Hopper (an uncredited editor), editors David Berlatsky and Antranig Mahakian, sound mixer Le Roy Robbins, and uncredited supervising sound editor James Nelson continue to play with the use of sound. One notable instance occurs at the five-minute mark of the film, when a hammering sound intrudes upon the soundtrack, accompanying a shot of a mock steeple made from paper and wood being raised in front of the village church, followed by a low-angle shot of a dead cowboy/actor from the film-within-the-film, which tilts up, revealing the presence of a boom microphone. The intrusion of this piece of film equipment is The Last Movie’s first intimation that all may not be as it seems, further bringing into question the source of the continuing offscreen hammering sound. The origin of this sound is revealed in the twenty-eighth minute of the film, as Kansas casually strides past a sculptor at work, producing the same hammering sound. Such moments of play with form relentlessly reinforce the artifice of the film, as Hopper intermittently allows nondiegetic sound effects to intrude into his soundscape. At various points the sounds of hammering, audio reels being cued, electronic beeping, a music box, the clamor of machinery, and disembodied voices are heard, often incongruously clashing with what is being presented on-screen. Heffernan argues that the sound design of The Last Movie “functions as an aural palimpsest, reinforcing the idea of the culture as a collision and succession of influences rather than the simple domination of the colonized by the colonizer,” sonically reinforcing the theme of cultural imperialism that runs throughout the film, while simultaneously acknowledging the conditions of its own production.11
Visually, too, the artifice of the film is repeatedly highlighted, not least through the subplot involving the Chincheros locals remaking the Billy the Kid film. The shootout sequence that forms the opening of The Last Movie is reenacted three additional times in the course of Hopper’s film. Its second depiction repeats the sequence from the perspective of the Hollywood production unit, the action playing out as Samuel Fuller, playing himself, directs Dean Stockwell in the role of Billy the Kid, with the crew and camera equipment now visible on-screen. Fuller, seen in wide shot, yells the direction, “Get your camera ready! Move your camera over where it’s supposed to be!,” at which point Hopper’s shot tracks left in a moment that melds, for Andrew Tracy, “both planes of [cinematic] reality,” as Fuller appears to be directing the movie he is in.12 Portions of the shootout are re-created before the film crew, this time with Hopper’s camera regarding not just the action but also the crew, taking in camera tracks and dolly, sound equipment, and several reflectors, which dazzlingly direct light at Hopper’s camera. This assembled equipment all obscures the view of the (staged) gunplay.
Later, the villagers enact their own version of this sequence, with mock cameras constructed from wood, but real guns. Their final reenactment concludes with Kansas’s death, at which point Hopper includes seemingly candid footage of himself on set and behind-the-scenes documentary footage from the real production of The Last Movie. In Hopper’s film, the line between reality and fiction is never clearly delineated. No one strand of the fractured diegesis is elevated to be more authentic than any other. Fuller’s Hollywood western, its reinterpretation by the Chincheros, Kansas’s moments of pastoral idyll with his girlfriend Maria, and Hopper’s appearance as himself in the rushes and behind-the-scenes shots at the film’s conclusion are all presented with equal degrees of authority and authenticity, and self-referentiality abounds. The village priest, concerned that his movie-obsessed congregation has stopped attending church since Hollywood came to town, leads his flock to the movie-set church façade, hoping to demonstrate that faith and morality persist within the “movie church.” Within this structure, a large painting depicting a valley and mountain range in turn obscures the view of the actual mountains beyond. In another documentary-style sequence in which a handheld camera follows Hopper walking through a market, the roaming camera becomes Hopper’s subjective eye, interacting with the locals he encounters as they gaze directly down the lens or cover their faces, explicitly drawing attention to the presence of the camera. At another point a dialogue scene is interrupted by a title card reading “scene missing.”
Instances of playful surrealism abound, often with no obvious narrative purpose, providing moments of alienation in which Hopper’s film becomes a cinematic realization of the Brechtian model of “politicized theory and practice that opposes standard codes of realism, while implementing an artistic practice that is political and performs work on representation, subjectivity, and pleasure.”13 Hopper embraces these elements of the Brechtian tradition as he emulates two of his acknowledged cinematic influences: Luis Buñuel and Alejandro Jodorowsky.14 The Last Movie offers repeated bizarre interludes, as otherworldly images intrude on everyday moments, passing by unremarked upon by characters and the diegesis itself; for example, while driving through the mountains (and a painting of a snow-capped mountain standing before the actual mountain it depicts), Kansas almost collides with another vehicle—inexplicably, a man is tied to the rear of the passing car. Later, at the house of the rich US expatriate broom magnates, the Andersons, the camera captures the conclusion of a bizarre argument between the parents and their daughter, played by an adult woman clutching a ridiculously oversized doll, who has a childish tantrum and impetuously storms out of the room.
At times The Last Movie operates in a manner similar to Easy Rider, particularly in its musical sequences, which in both films function as self-contained moments of spectacle detached from causally based narrative. Where Easy Rider deploys its rock numbers alongside montages of motorcycles, The Last Movie contains similar sequences of Kansas riding his horse through mountainous regions or frolicking with Maria in verdant meadows, accompanied by a soundtrack of Kris Kristofferson songs. Kristofferson is one of many musical performers to appear on-screen as himself, in his screen debut one year before his starring role alongside Gene Hackman in Cisco Pike (dir. Bill L. Norton, Columbia Pictures, 1972). J. Hoberman contends that in The Last Movie such musical sequences function as a parody of Easy Rider, but it is equally possible that Hopper was sincerely continuing to develop the aesthetic practices employed in his earlier film.15 Kansas’s addled recovery from the bullet wounds that riddle his body after his first run-in with the Chincheros’s Billy the Kid production is depicted with the distorted, scrambled jump cut lexicon of Easy Rider’s acid trip sequence, as Hopper’s frenzied montage whips through a parade of the film’s characters and milk spurts from a lactating breast, while on the soundtrack Hopper insistently whines, “I’m dying,” against the sound of a braying donkey. The commercial exploitation origin of Easy Rider’s acid trip sequence now seems a distant memory as Hopper dives headlong into obscurantism.
Caustic Signification
Where Easy Rider shied away from contemporary political comment even as it donned the clothing and hairstyles of the counterculture, The Last Movie displays no such compunction. The Vietnam War, which goes unnamed throughout Hopper’s first film, is openly invoked in one pointed sequence in The Last Movie, as expatriate Neville Robey plucks a chicken he recently shot, “just like a gook.” Kansas’s reply is, “You love that damn war, man, it’s like a childhood sweetheart to you, ain’t it?”
Elsewhere, Hopper displays what may be taken as caustic satire or the same brand of misogyny that underlay Easy Rider’s portrayal of women. Much of Maria’s dialogue consists of her demands that Kansas buy her American consumer luxuries—a swimming pool, a fur coat, “one General Electric refrigerator”—echoing Godard’s similar quotation of brand name as dialogue. Maria tells Kansas, “Just because we don’t have electricity and running water, it don’t mean we don’t like to have nice things, gringo.” Later, an understated high-angle shot reveals that, bizarrely, a swimming pool has been installed at the base of the mountain where Kansas resides in Chincheros. The legacy that Hollywood has imported, it seems, is one of regimented violence as entertainment and aspirational commodity fetish. Kansas’s seizure of the local woman as a lover is certainly a colonial gesture, just as, for Barbara Scharres, “his dream is built on flagrant aggression of another culture.”16 For Kansas, Maria is nothing but a blank canvas upon which he projects his sexual desires; the other side of this process of colonization appears when she begins to adopt the values and desires of his culture, and he reacts with disgust. At another point, Kansas is shown striking Maria. The nonchalance with which this act is depicted is all the more troubling in light of the accusations of domestic violence that followed Hopper through much of his life.17
For the expatriates who remain in the village after shooting has wrapped, including Kansas, his addled compatriot Neville Robey, the lecherous entrepreneur Harry Anderson, and his lascivious wife (Donna Baccala), a night’s entertainment involves taking in a sex show in a seedy club; even after Hollywood has left town, local labor continues to be exploited in the name of entertainment, which agonizingly plays out in a rare long take. This listlessly performed sex act becomes, for David E. James, self-reflexive, as “the show introduces the spectators to scopophiliac pleasure,” and the audience too is implicated in the exploitation.18 Furthermore, Heffernan perceives allegorical resonance in each character in the sequence, as “Kansas, Neville and the Andersons respectively represent the cultural, military and economic wings of the American imperial project,” all of which are simultaneously active economic participants of the exploitation of the subaltern Peruvian people.19
While it plays out in a pointedly international context, The Last Movie is one of many films from the New Hollywood moment to explore the limitations of the western genre and the idea of the closure of the frontier. Hopper’s film is unique in its acknowledgment that the expansionist conquest of the continental United States culminated in the mastery of one geographical landmass (and the subjugation of its indigenous population), while new frontiers were opened, with new indigenous populations to be displaced. This new expansion would not be achieved primarily through guns and violence, but rather through the commodification and export of US culture. The Last Movie follows the impact that the most fundamental of American narratives, the western, has on a receptive local community when detached from its native context and reconstituted as the site of industrial labor in Chincheros. The Americans who stay behind in this new colony struggle to make ends meet, falling into the narrative that they have imported, idealistically adopting a familiar convention of the western genre, gold prospecting, before falling victim to the very violence that is their stock in trade. The final scene of The Last Movie is a campfire dialogue (another western cliché) between Kansas and Robey, both of whom ramble incoherently about The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Lust for Gold (dir. S. Sylvan Simon, Columbia Pictures, 1949). These two men may not have seen gold and do not possess the language to describe it, but they have seen movies about it.
Hopper’s film is a product of the same mechanisms of cultural imperialism that it sets out to critique. Andrew Tracy eloquently conveys the ambivalence at the heart of The Last Movie: “[Hopper’s] broadside against the American legacy of greed and violence had the backing of a major American corporation, was being made by a group of hedonistic, absurdly overprivileged tourists in the Third World, and turned on the hackneyed and narcissistic symbolism of Hopper’s stuntman as Christ figure, the American naïf dying for the world’s sins . . . [as] the apocalyptic promise of Hopper’s title shuffled back into the cycle of consumption, ritual violence made routine.”20
Perhaps Hopper sensed these contradictions during the sixteen months he spent agonizingly editing his film. The Last Movie, as with so many other films of the New Hollywood, ends with a kind of cinematic death, as the film quite literally collapses upon itself.21 More daringly than the celluloid immolation that concludes Two-Lane Blacktop, at the moment of Kansas’s death at the climax of The Last Movie, narrative becomes unstuck, and Hopper spends the final ten minutes of his film overlaying multiple layers of reality and unreality: outtakes from behind the scenes of his film, documentary-style shots of its setting, revisitations of earlier moments from the film, and the conflation of all three of its narrative strands in a deconstruction of all that has come before, as narrative falls away. David E. James notes that the overall impression generated by the intermingling of these many textual layers is that, for the viewer, “the certainty of . . . ontological autonomy is withdrawn.”22 Indeed, the very process of viewing The Last Movie requires that the viewer become an active participant, constantly scrambling for sure ontological footing.
The American Dreamer
Although Hopper’s prolonged editing period for The Last Movie suggests a degree of uncertainty about how to structure the film (supported by the anecdote that Jodorowsky’s urging prompted Hopper to dramatically reshape the film), in 1970 Hopper told Esquire about his vision of a conclusion even more radical than the final result, recalling the director’s fondness for the experimental film collages of Bruce Conner, which inspired Easy Rider’s acid trip. Said Hopper:
Well, first, man, I want to make the audience believe; I want to build a reality for them. Then, toward the end, I start breaking down that reality. So that it, uh, deals with the nature of reality. I don’t know whether I’m going to die or not at the end, but at the very end you’ll see lots of cuts of old movies, like W. C. Fields and Mae West and so on. Universal, which put up the money, they’ve got a fantastic old film library, man. I can do anything I want with it. Then the film jerks and cuts and tears, and you see the leader number again, so that, uh, it doesn’t matter if Kansas dies or not, it’s the film that dies.23
A similar strategy was employed on Myra Breckinridge (dir. Michael Sarne, Twentieth Century Fox, 1970), which relentlessly incorporated inserts drawn from the Fox studio archive; here it drew a similar level of critical ire to The Last Movie (for reasons not limited entirely to this reappropriation of earlier films). Yet despite being a thematically comparable, acid critique of Hollywood excess, the structurally adventurous Myra pales in comparison next to the scale of Hopper’s experimentation on The Last Movie. It is difficult to imagine another film backed by a major Hollywood studio that so completely embraces incoherence and so mercilessly picks at the conditions of its production and its status as a commodified artwork.
Hopper’s sixteen months in the editing room did nothing to abate media skepticism about The Last Movie. Such sentiments were further inflamed by L. M. Kit Carson and Larry Schiller’s documentary depiction of the protracted editing process, The American Dreamer. This film is overshadowed by Hopper’s bedraggled Mansonite appearance as he fires assault rifles in a desert shooting range, walks naked down a suburban street, and participates in a staged orgy for the cameras. In this respect, American Dreamer becomes a promotional platform not only for The Last Movie, but more generally for Hopper’s cultivated outlaw brand. In the documentary Hopper prophetically muses on the commercial prospects of The Last Movie: “If the audience doesn’t accept it, it will be a long, long, long time before we can dream about that audience I thought was there. I can become Orson Welles, poor bastard. He’s been turned down by the studio that I’m making this movie for, Universal. . . . If there isn’t an audience for Orson Welles and half a million dollars in the universities and for the people in this country, then why are we making movies?”
Hopper’s statement shares the tone of Carson and Schiller’s documentary, at once elegiac and incendiary. Noel King has remarked on the self-reflexive quality of the documentary (a trait it shares with The Last Movie), as the on-camera Hopper asks the unseen documentarians whether they require him to repeat an action or use another take, and “we hear the participants wonder about the pro-filmic event, the extent to which the presence of the camera . . . induces ‘acting’ rather than some more authentic representation.”24 Moreover, the documentary participates in the construction of Hopper’s mythology, as he espouses his philosophies on filmmaking, photography, and sexuality; locks horns with a studio envoy over his almost-comical unwillingness to provide publicity stills for The Last Movie; and fires assault rifles in a desert shooting range. More broadly, the film stands as a preemptive requiem for the New Hollywood moment. Even the title of the film suggests a temporally defined state (the dream), which must at some point end.
Hopper’s uncertainty about the existence of a commercial audience for mainstream American avant-garde cinema and his despair over Universal’s refusal to fund a $500,000 Orson Welles project would prove prescient. As Hopper reflected in The American Dreamer, The Last Movie addresses some imagined, rarefied, cinema-literate audience, even as its aggressively didactic style positions it as a far more difficult prospect than Hopper’s more exploitation-friendly directorial debut. Nevertheless, internally there was optimism that Hopper had produced a major cinematic work. In a 1970 interview with Take One, cinematographer László Kovács said, “I think Last Movie is going to be a much better film than Easy Rider. If you look at Easy Rider in terms of filmic structure, it doesn’t have nearly the drama that Last Movie has. I know the images are better in Last Movie, just from seeing the dailies. And its comment is so powerful, it has such a strong symbolic story. It’s going to be incredible.”25 Such optimism was temporarily validated when The Last Movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 1971, winning the Critics Prize. Variety reports from the festival were cautious and stressed the difficulty in marketing the film: “A miss, but one that cannot be dismissed although its commercial chances call for a careful sell.”26 At the same festival, Hopper told Variety that Universal was not interested in The Last Movie and would not market it appropriately.27 The studio press kit for The Last Movie reveals this ambivalence. Despite prevaricating with typical promotional hyperbole, the press kit does not shy away from acknowledging the tough sell the film represented: “The Last Movie is a mind-staggering experience in film that, by exposing and breaking down the traditional American approach to screen entertainment, could well result in the liberation of the audience. Not an opiate that lulls the audience with an escape into Hollywood fantasy, The Last Movie attacks that reality on so many levels that the individual viewer will either reject the film entirely out of insecurity or have his understanding expanded into the dawning of a new era of film.”28
The American Nightmare
Despite their shared trepidation about how the movie might be received, neither Hopper nor Universal could have predicted how comprehensively their adversarial approach to selling the film would be met with overwhelming critical negativity, unmatched anywhere else in New Hollywood. If nothing else, Hopper’s film managed to generate some spectacularly vituperative lines; in reviewing what was, for him, “a hateful experience,” Andrew Sarris speculated that The Last Movie “was lionized in Venice simply because Europeans get orgasms from the thought that Americans are prepared to commit suicide en masse.”29 Stefan Kanfer wrote for Time that “that sound you hear is of checkbooks closing all over Hollywood. The books belong to the smart money; the reason for their action is The Last Movie by Dennis Hopper—the same Dennis Hopper who recently opened the checkbooks with Easy Rider.”30 Charles Champlin went further, foreseeing disastrous consequences for the industry as whole: “Watching Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie is a dismally disappointing and depressing experience. As a piece of film-making it is inchoate, amateurish, self-indulgent, tedious, superficial, unfocused and a precious waste not only of money but, more importantly, of a significant and conspicuous opportunity. The cause of the adventurous young filmmaker and the cause of complete creative control for any film-maker working in Hollywood have been damaged.”31 Joseph Gelmis, who had attempted to create an early New Hollywood pantheon of his own a year earlier with the publication of The Film Director as Superstar, saw no reason to include Hopper in his ranks of great directors, writing in Newsday that The Last Movie was “the work of a kid playing with a toy.”32 Vincent Canby declared in the New York Times that “Hopper has a very small vocabulary as a filmmaker, and his thoughts here have all of the impact of revelations written down during an acid trip.”33 Although finding room to praise Kovács’s photography, Canby ultimately charged that The Last Movie “comes to look every bit as indulgent, cruel, and thoughtless as the dream factory films it makes such ponderous fun of.”34 Roger Ebert, who had been effusive in his praise for Easy Rider (which would later be included in that critic’s collections of writings on “Great Movies” in 1994 and 2004), was among the most unsparing in his condemnation of The Last Movie, calling it a “wasteland of cinematic wreckage” and “just plain pitiful.”35 In its survey of reviews for The Last Movie, the almanac Filmfacts tallied a grand total of thirteen negative, two mixed, and no positive reviews.36
Interestingly, Pauline Kael, whose impassioned defense of Bonnie and Clyde had proved to be a decisive moment in delineating the lines around which the New Hollywood canon would later be drawn, offered one of the more even-handed appraisals of The Last Movie. Kael joined Canby in praising Kovács’s cinematography, along with Hopper, Berlatsky, and Mahakian’s editing (although she also concluded that the distinctiveness of the editing essentially reduced to gimmickry).37 Kael was alone in the first wave of critical responses to highlight the troubling representations of race in the film, arguing that “the Peruvians in the film are an undifferentiated mass of stupid people; not a face stands out in the crowd scenes except Hopper’s—the others are just part of the picturesque background to his suffering.”38 Despite acknowledging Hopper’s offbeat talent and hoping that his directorial career would progress beyond The Last Movie, Kael leveled a charge of incoherence:
His [Hopper’s] deliberate disintegration of the story elements he has built up screams at us that, with so much horror in the world, he refuses to entertain us. It would be stupid to deny that there are reasons for screaming, but I doubt if Hopper knows what he wants to do, except not entertain us, and I’m afraid he will interpret the audience’s exhaustion from his flailing about as apathy and complacency. This knockabout tragedy is not a vision of the chaos of the world—not a Week End, not a Shame [Skammen, dir. Ingmar Bergman, Lopert Pictures Corporation, 1968]—but a reflection of his own confusion.39
Despite singling out some elements for praise, Kael concluded that the difficulty of Hopper’s film was such that “one would have to be playing Judas to the public to advise anyone to go see The Last Movie,” suggesting that the film was too hazardous a proposition for her to endorse.40 This is as telling about Kael’s own self-reckoning of her popular critical obligations as it is about her conception of her reading public and their expectations. Her New Yorker review of The Last Movie, entitled “Movies in Movies,” is paired with two other reviews, both of which demonstrate her tastes and prejudices about the contemporary American cinema. The first of these reviews, on Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, begins with Kael describing a mainstream moviegoing audience altogether tired of modern Hollywood’s experimentations, the very kind of creative freedoms that Kael championed with Bonnie and Clyde, and of which The Last Movie, by way of Easy Rider, was the ultimate beneficiary. Kael writes that “a lot of people put the blame for the recent rotten pictures on the directors’ having too much creative freedom, but what’s probably closer to the truth is that the worst pictures have come about because they represent what the movie businessmen think the young audience wants. In the movie-factory days, the studio heads understood how to make acceptable trash; now the businessmen try to imitate the modern and free and avant-garde. They get hacks to imitate art, and creative freedom is blamed for the results.”41
There is a clear hierarchy of taste at work here, alongside Kael’s cautious auteurism. Kael’s complex relationship with auteurism was already established given her territorial disputes with Andrew Sarris and her long-standing disagreement with Orson Welles over Herman J. Mankiewicz’s claim to the authorship of Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, RKO Radio Pictures, 1941). This latter episode represented an important symbolic challenge to the notion of auteurism as an exclusively directorial domain. Writing about the studios’ conceptions of their audience in 1971, Kael’s line about “acceptable trash” channels her 1968 piece for Harper’s Magazine, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” in which she cautioned against the artistic excesses of, among other titles, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and championed the simplicity of what she believed to be the more straightforward pleasures of genre cinema.42
At the bottom of Kael’s cinematic pecking order are misguided attempts at profundity on an epic scale under the guise of cinematic art (2001, The Last Movie); at the other end of her spectrum are titles such as The Last Picture Show, “a movie that is in some ways, and in good ways, very old fashioned.”43 Indeed, for all its timely sexual candor, The Last Picture Show derives its sense of cinematic style from an earlier era, exemplified by its period setting and narrative concern with the closure of the local cinema literalizing the collapse of the community and the loss of an intrinsically American way of life. In The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich’s cinematic style owes more to such figures of Classical Hollywood as Howard Hawks, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, George Stevens, and Henry Hathaway than it does to the more antagonistic and revisionist tendencies of Bogdanovich’s New Hollywood forebears. Bogdanovich evokes the wistful, nostalgic autobiographical tone that would come to the fore in the subsequent films of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas.
Yet the autobiographical dimension of Last Picture Show belongs not to its cinematic auteur, but to its literary origins. Bogdanovich adapted the mournful evocation of small-town Texan life with Larry McMurtry from that author’s semiautobiographical novel. The fact that Bogdanovich spent his formative years in New York belies the commonly perceived importance of autobiography as a key cornerstone of the auteur director’s personal expression in the New Hollywood film. The contrast between Kael’s views on The Last Movie and The Last Picture Show reveals a clear hierarchy of taste. In contrast to the increasingly esoteric concerns of the new American auteurist cinema, Kael states that with The Last Picture Show, “Bogdanovich has made a film for everybody.”44 Stylistically, The Last Picture Show is a classically constructed Hollywood film, with none of the grand-scale narrative or formal experiments of 2001 or The Last Movie, offering instead keenly felt, realist performances, subdued yet carefully composed black-and-white-photography, and an old-time sense of melodrama within a causally motivated narrative. A wistful anguish permeates Bogdanovich’s film, and indeed the cinephile director projects his nostalgic yearnings onto the silver screen of the titular picture house before the film’s ennui-stricken teenage audience. Bogdanovich’s carefully curated selections include excerpts of Elizabeth Taylor in Father of the Bride (dir. Vincente Minnelli, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 1950), and John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River (dir. Howard Hawks, United Artists, 1948), and these clips take on a symbolic resonance by virtue of their recontextualization. The death of Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson) casts the entire community into a malaise from which there is seemingly no escape. Kael was enraptured by the universal appeal to common humanity in Bogdanovich’s film, which she considered a refreshing change from the stridently nihilistic streak that distinguished much of early 1970s Hollywood fare that she herself had previously sanctioned: “Our recent fiction film—especially those dealing with an earlier America—have become so full of self-hatred that, ironically, it has been only in documentaries, such as Fred Wiseman’s, that one could see occasionally decent and noble human gestures.”45 In The Last Movie Hopper eschews such keenly attuned attentiveness to the human condition in favor of the relentless deconstruction of the cinematic form itself.
Kael’s “Movies in Movies” piece concludes with a short review of the comedic western Skin Game (dir. Paul Bogart, Gordon Douglas, Warner Bros., 1971), which she finds “charming—utterly unimportant, but another movie that almost everybody can enjoy”—a description that casts it as less than The Last Picture Show, but superior to The Last Movie. Kael’s hierarchy of taste prizes the lowbrow (Skin Game) and the middle brow (The Last Picture Show), affording little merit to Hopper’s loftier ambitions for what Hollywood film might be and in turn bypassing his optimism that an audience might exist for his work on the college circuit.46 Kael’s early praise for The Last Picture Show found its echo in a critical consensus of praise, which ultimately led to the film’s nomination for eight Academy Awards. It won two, for Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson in their supporting roles.47
In “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” Kael is unequivocal about the brand of entertainment she demands from Hollywood cinema, extolling the virtues of Planet of the Apes (dir. Franklin J. Schaffner, Twentieth Century Fox, 1968), The Thomas Crown Affair (dir. Norman Jewison, United Artists, 1968), and The Scalphunters (dir. Sydney Pollack, United Artists, 1968), while heaping scorn upon 2001 and Petulia. Kael writes that it is “preposterously egocentric to call anything we enjoy art—as if we could not be entertained by it if it were not; it’s just as preposterous to let prestigious, expensive advertising snow us into thinking we’re getting art for our money when we haven’t even had a good time.”48
Parallel Movies
Kael’s hierarchy of taste is complicated by the role that she (along with Sarris and, to a lesser extent, Canby) played in elevating the visibility of the continental European art film in the United States from the mid- to late 1960s, as avenues for art house distribution expanded. Interestingly, many of the stylistic characteristics of The Last Movie that evoked, for its reviewers, the excesses of a drug-addled Hopper on a long studio leash, descend directly from the late New Wave works of that subject of more critical attention than any other filmic figure of the 1960s, Jean-Luc Godard.49 Godardian hallmarks that are present in The Last Movie include the disjointed relationship between sound and vision that becomes particularly prominent from Pierrot le fou onward, the on-screen presence of Samuel Fuller in both that film and Hopper’s, the cynical reclamation of advertising slogans and imagery in 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, New Yorker Films, 1967), the wild tonal shifts and foregrounding of cinematic artifice in Week End, and the onscreen appearance of cinematographer Raoul Coutard and his camera equipment in La Chinoise (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, Pennebaker Films, 1967). This final reference itself echoes Coutard’s appearance at the opening of Godard’s earlier Le mépris (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, Embassy Pictures, 1963), a move characteristic of the deep web of intertextual references and the alternating compression, explosion, and deconstruction of formal elements that intensified throughout Godard’s works of the 1960s and was eagerly adopted by Hopper.50
While Godard’s films were not always the subjects of unanimously positive critical reception in the United States, he remained a serious artist in the reckoning of the press, a presupposition clearly not extended to Hopper. Reviewing La Chinoise, Kael positioned Godard at the very forefront of modern cinema practitioners, calling him, “at the moment, the most important single force keeping the art of the film alive—that is to say, responsive to the modern world, moving, reaching out for new themes.”51 Writing just a month before Godard’s vision of radical student unrest prophetically found its echo in the real-life events of May 1968, Kael praised Godard for working contemporary themes into his films. Kael contrasted Godard with the lack of stylistic, narrative, and thematic innovation in Hollywood cinema, which she found lacking “the excitement of contemporaneity, of using movies in new ways. Going to the movies, we sometimes forget—because it so rarely happens—that when movies are used in new ways there’s an excitement about them much sharper than there is about the limited-entertainment genres.”52
Kael’s review of Week End, from which The Last Movie borrows heavily in its style and sentiment, places Godard firmly within the lineage of postwar auteurs: “Weekend is the most powerful mystical movie since The Seventh Seal [Det sjunde inseglet, dir. Ingmar Bergman, Janus Films, 1957] and Fires on the Plain [Nobi, dir. Kon Ichikawa, 1959] and passages of Kurosawa.”53 Unlike The Last Movie, which she would later condemn for its misguidedly pessimistic worldview, Kael stated that, “Godard’s vision of Hell . . . ranks with the visions of the greatest.”54 Similarly, Ebert, who viewed the fragmented editing and persistent self-referentiality of The Last Movie as “an elaborate rescue attempt” to save an unsalvageable mess, saw fit to praise Godard for employing the same metafictional devices in 1969: “No movie characters are real. No situations or dialogue are real. Isn’t it more real to abandon the attempt at a story and admit that you’re a director making this movie with these actors?”55 In his 1969 review of Week End, Ebert called it Godard’s “best film, and his most inventive.”56
It is important to note that both Kael and Ebert were writing in praise of Godard’s cinematic devices some years before the release of The Last Movie, and it is entirely possible that in the eyes of the critics, the impact of Godard’s techniques had been dulled by their repetition over the following years. Kael alluded to such a possibility in her review of Week End, writing of Godard’s influence on younger filmmakers that “he has obviously opened doors, but when others try to go through they’re trapped. He has already made the best of his innovations, which come out of his need for them and may be integral only to his material. It’s the strength of his own sensibility that gives his techniques excitement. In other hands, his techniques are just mannerisms; other directors who try them resemble a schoolboy walking like his father.”57 This line of reasoning, however, overlooks the fact that despite his immense ideological and stylistic contributions to the cinema of the second half of the twentieth century, the very singularity of Godard’s practices and concerns more often than not rendered his influence diffuse rather than tangible; it is not easy to draw a direct line of influence from Godard to the films that he inspired. In fact, Godard’s most visible legacy resides now in the essay film rather than the fictional form. Godard’s escalating didacticism and departure from conventional narrative throughout the 1960s coincided with the earliest attempts at inaugurating a New Hollywood. Nevertheless, besides Arthur Penn’s early experiments and, in a roundabout way, Bob Rafelson’s Head, The Last Movie is one of very few Hollywood films to tangibly bear the marks of Godard’s influence.
By the time Hopper was attempting to synthesize the influence of Godard into a specifically American idiom, Godard himself had progressed further toward political and formal radicalism, abandoning the French film industry altogether, making projects instead for Italian television in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin and others under the collective name Groupe Dziga Vertov. The anonymizing of Godard’s brand name as auteur under the Groupe Dziga Vertov banner was an attempt to render his directorial presence largely invisible, demonstrating instead the Marxist value of collaborative labor.58 Clearly these were not films intended for popular, let alone American, audiences. Hoberman writes of their prospects that “save for small groups of committed militants or abstruse theoreticians . . . most audiences found the combination of recondite ideological hectoring and austere formal rigor all but unwatchable.”59 Many of these films were indeed deemed “unwatchable” by the television stations that produced them and were never broadcast; accordingly, these works went largely unseen and received scant attention in the United States, which is particularly perplexing given the adulation showered on Godard in the preceding decade by such critics as Kael.60 By 1971 Godard and Gorin were looking to a different mode of address; their 1970 Le vent d’est features a sequence in which Brazilian director Glauber Rocha (of Deus o Diabo na Terra do Sol/Black God, White Devil [1964] fame) stands on-screen in the middle of a road and is asked by the offscreen narrator, “Which is the way to the revolutionary cinema?,” a question that neither Rocha nor Godard/Gorin seems able to answer.
Figure 10.3. Double trouble: Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Luc Godard. Take One 2, no. 10 (March–April 1970): page unknown.
With Tout va bien, Godard and Gorin attempted to reintroduce their political themes in a commercially viable framework. The film was their first collaboration shot on 35mm, credited to their own names, and featuring international stars: Jane Fonda and Yves Montand. Four years after Godard turned down the opportunity to direct Bonnie and Clyde, he found himself in talks to produce Tout va bien with Paramount, negotiations that were scuppered when the director was hospitalized after a motorcycle crash the day before he was to sign the contract in New York.61 Tout va bien was ultimately financed by French company Gaumont, with reports placing the budget at anywhere from $250,000 to $600,000; either figure would be the largest budget Godard and Gorin had worked together with.62
Tout va bien tempers Groupe Dziga Vertov’s didactic political sloganeering with knowing nods to Godard’s early New Wave work, while intensifying his consideration of the intersection of the commodifying force of capitalism with life, work, and art. In this regard, it is a spiritual successor to the thematically similar Le mépris, relocated from the dream factory of Cinecittà film studios to a Parisian sausage factory, viewed through Godard’s post–May 1968 class consciousness. Indeed, the film overtly and literally quotes from Le mépris, reprising dialogue from that film and accompanying it with Fonda and Montand signing checks, a forthright acknowledgment of both the film’s ideologically compromised commercial origins and its optimistic hope for the broader audience appeal of Godard’s earlier partnership with similarly high-profile international stars. Yet Godard and Gorin’s hopes for Tout va bien were not to be realized, as it was greeted with outright hostility at its Parisian premiere and “tepidly received” in New York.63 The best Kael could find to say of it was that it was “not as deadly in its pedagogical tone as other Jean-Luc Godard-Jean-Pierre Gorin films of the period.”64
If Godard had lost his currency with American critics by the early 1970s, it is perhaps unsurprising that Hopper’s attempts to channel the French director in The Last Movie may have further irked weary critics. Indeed, during the film’s short New York theatrical run, Dennis Hopper told Interview magazine’s Glenn O’Brien and Michael Netter, “I wish I’d made The Last Movie in 1965 when I wrote it, because I think it would have been easier to accept in 1965 than it is perhaps now.”65 The overfamiliarity of the Godardian device, however, does not account for just how comprehensively Hopper’s film was despised. This disjuncture between critical reactions to Godard’s late New Wave work and Hopper’s formally and ideologically comparable The Last Movie is an extension of a far older awareness of, and ongoing attempt to establish, an American cultural and artistic lineage distinct from European traditions. Indeed, as Pierre Bourdieu would influentially argue in the late 1970s, such hierarchies of taste are closely bound to cultural capital of precisely the kind that Kael wielded authoritatively in her role at the New Yorker. Further class-bound distinctions are no doubt at play in her anxiety over the imagined audience for Dirty Harry and Hollywood’s idealized status as unproblematic, easily consumed mass entertainment. Many critics were unable or unwilling to detach Hopper’s ambitions for The Last Movie from their preconceived notions of the kind of product a Hollywood film should be. Following this train of thought on the unclassifiable nature of The Last Movie, Jonathan Rosenbaum writes that its commercial fortunes were
more or less determined by the absence of any media machinery that could accommodate a film that wasn’t protected or claimed by any predefined social constituency. Concise packaging labels were in effect necessary before a film could qualify for membership in any of the existing canons: if it wasn’t a Hollywood film or an art film or an experimental film in any obvious way, and if it didn’t adequately conform to a clear genre classification within or outside any of these categories, in certain respects it didn’t—and couldn’t—exist critically at all, because influential critics at the time usually weren’t disposed to create new categories in order to account for them.66
Whatever the reasons behind the unanimous critical drubbing of The Last Movie (and such responses were no doubt stoked by the excessive prerelease hype in the production features that appeared in Rolling Stone and Life, as well as Hopper’s antagonistic posturing in The American Dreamer), the damage was done, and Universal withdrew the film from distribution after two weeks in New York and Los Angeles and three days in San Francisco, even though the film set a single-day box-office record at New York’s RKO 59th Street Theatre.67 Hopper, for one, blamed Universal for a lack of promotion; despite the copious on-set reports that were published throughout the shoot (many of which took a negative line on Hopper’s perceived excesses), The Last Movie’s Manhattan opening was heralded by a single print ad on the day of the first screening.68
Figure 10.4. The poster for The Last Movie fails to give any indication of the film’s content, beyond the image of Hopper in cowboy garb.
After its withdrawal from the US market, Universal never ran The Last Movie in Europe, despite its winning the Venice prize.69 Nine years before Apocalypse Now, Hopper had already reached a filmmaker’s Armageddon, testing the limits of creative expression within the New Hollywood. His directorial career was essentially ended for a decade.70 Just one year after the release of The Last Movie, Hopper philosophically speculated about the reasons for its failure and the ramifications for his career, again invoking Welles, who is something of a touchstone of martyrdom for directors wronged by the Hollywood system:
It doesn’t really bother me, because I expected it to happen the first time a film of mine stubbed its toe at the box office. I just didn’t think it would happen with The Last Movie, which I thought was going to be a commercial success. What I do dislike is the impression I ripped off Universal International for a million dollars, which is what the film cost to make. I’m not the kind of artist who says, “I don’t give a shit what I do with your money.” I feel that if you do a painting, you should at least get back what the canvas and oils cost you. If you do the Sistine Chapel—not that I have with The Last Movie—you may not get the costs back the first year, but eventually enough people will see it and pay for it. . . . First, though, let me say that I’m not worried about The Last Movie being around when most of today’s films are in dust bins. If only because of the award it won in Venice, the picture will have to be looked at again. I made what I considered an artistic film and I take full responsibility for it, and that includes responsibility for its not being a commercial success at this point. I convinced Universal there was an audience for the picture, and now I’m not so sure that’s true. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be an audience for it, which is where the good story comes in. Often enough, you’ll see a Citizen Kane ten years after it was first released and had lost money, which was also true of The Magnificent Ambersons [dir. Orson Welles, RKO Radio Pictures, 1942]. I could probably run down a heavy list of films we now think of classics but that no one ever saw when they first came out.71
Hopper later fought to regain distribution rights to the film so he could tour it on the university circuit in the late 1970s.72 At the time of his death, Hopper was planning a DVD release of The Last Movie, which at the time of writing has yet to materialize, meaning that the only way for today’s audiences to view the film is via illegal bit-torrent downloads.
Rediscovery and Reappraisal
Despite its unavailability, there have been occasional flickers of serious critical interest in The Last Movie. One of the earliest such defenses came from Foster Hirsch in 1972 in the New York Times, under the impassioned title “You’re Wrong If You Write Off Dennis Hopper.”73 Stuart M. Kaminsky, in the column “Over Looked & Under Rated” in Take One, offered a reappraisal in the same year, positing that each of the film’s layers of diegetic reality represents a discrete parody of an existing genre, from the Spaghetti western and “the intellectual sentimentality of John Huston” to “the middle-class realism of John Cassavetes . . . and even the self-indulgent lyrical involvement of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.”74 Speculating on Hopper’s future just a year after the release of The Last Movie, Kaminsky concluded, “Hollywood will willingly feed the hand that bites it—if there is money to be made, that is to be expected. But when Hopper attacks everyone in sight—and makes no money doing it—he is doomed.”75 Lois Palken Rudnick is equally ambivalent on this count, stating that Hopper “wanted his movies to subvert America’s consumer culture, at the same time that he wanted the kind of praise and acclaim that could only come to one who did its bidding. These conflicting—and unresolved—desires caused his film statements to be both morally and aesthetically confusing, and damaging to his own revolutionary intentions.”76 In one of the first major analyses of the film, David E. James writes, “Hopper’s film stands . . . as a comprehensive and fully articulate analysis of capitalist cinema, and the neglect it has suffered for lack of serious criticism is as unwarranted as the violence with which it was treated by its early reviewers.”77 James’s article provides a detailed survey of how the film navigates its multiple layers of diegetic reality, affirming that far from being the undisciplined mess for which it is often mistaken, Hopper’s film is a multifaceted work of formal and thematic unity: “Through the systematic scrutiny of all the different aspects of filmmaking, a scrutiny in which all the various formal features of film as well as the different contexts invoked by the western as a political event are progressively reduced from fictions to reality, Hopper attains a sophistication in self-analysis in which formal considerations are revealed as inextricably combined with content and with social function.”78 Dan E. Burns, writing in Literature/Film Quarterly, took a very different line, offering a close thematic reading of the imagery of The Last Movie, arguing that Hopper’s film is an adaptation of sorts of The Gospel According to Thomas, a noncanonical Christian gospel that was unearthed in the Nag Hammadi library in 1945, and which obsessed Hopper throughout the production of the film.79 More recently, Jonathan Rosenbaum, J. Hoberman, and Andrew Tracy have all made positive comments about the film, while Nick Heffernan, in a detailed piece for Film International, argues that The Last Movie is a “rare example . . . of daring and politically progressive Hollywood film-making rooted in ideologically problematic conditions of production.”80
The range of readings suggests that like Easy Rider, The Last Movie is a flexible text, offering itself to a number of different interpretations. At the very least, its existence points to the fact that for a brief moment in time, the rigidly codified Hollywood production practices faltered to such an extent that this film could slip briefly into the world, an industrial self-appraisal that for Hoberman, represents “the most elaborate autocritique ever produced by a Hollywood studio.”81 Negative critical reception ensured that this avenue was swiftly closed, while the eventual triumph of the critically sanctioned The French Connection and The Last Picture Show at the Academy Awards helped enshrine an alternate kind of New Hollywood. This nostalgic strain more accurately anticipates the works of Coppola and Scorsese than the earlier films of Robert Altman or Arthur Penn. As Heffernan writes, almost a decade before Heaven’s Gate, “New Hollywood’s moment had arrived and expired virtually within the duration of a single production.”82 At the same time, the box-office dominance of films like Fiddler on the Roof and Bedknobs and Broomsticks attested to the fact that in 1971, mainstream audiences were entirely untroubled by any of these developments, so long as they could go to the movies.