When it came out the critical consensus on Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie was that it was a mess, the result of giving a druggie with questionable talent full creative control of a movie. Nowadays it’s more often seen as a lost cult classic, a bold experiment and an attempt to push the boundaries of what a movie can be.
Neither is really true. It’s not a mess, nor is it really that experimental. From this distance it looks like what it is: Hopper’s homage to Godard, with borrowings from Alejandro Jodorowsky and Robert Altman.
It does not help the movie – then or now – that it arrives panting from carrying so much myth. Everyone was high. Hopper lost his mind. Stewart Stern’s screenplay got junked in favour of stoner improvisation. If a friend turned up (Kris Kristofferson, Peter Fonda, Michelle Phillips) Hopper would write them in. It was massively over budget and over schedule.
Some of it true, a lot of it not. While Hopper was high and did far more improvisational work than was wise, with people who couldn’t really do it (not least himself), crucially the movie was not over budget and over schedule.
The problems really came when Hopper got into the edit suite and started hacking back the 40 hours of footage he’d shot to get it down to a sellable running time. Eventually Alejandro Jodorowsky stepped in and did an edit of Hopper’s material. But Hopper rejected that and had another go at it, using Jodorowsky’s cut – whose psychedelic western El Topo from the year before is a clear influence – as inspiration.
What he came up with in the end is a western that’s also a meta-western, and a meta-movie about movie-making, with Hopper playing a meta-man – a guy called Kansas – who is in Peru working as a stuntman on a movie. When the movie within the movie wraps, instead of heading home, Kansas hangs around, having fun with Maria (Stella Garcia), a local prostitute keen to get more of the Yankee dollar, while the locals start to have their own fun with the deserted movie sets, shooting their own “movie” using cameras made of sticks and so on.
Things get out of control, particularly vis a vis the ignorant, superstitious locals, who never quite grasp that movies are all made up, and that when people get shot, for instance, they haven’t really been shot.
That’s Hopper’s message too, and the entire point of the film, and put as baldly as that it does seem a bit facile – hey, it’s not real! – the pseudo-profundity of someone who’s smoked a lot of good weed.
Perhaps Hopper grasped how shallow his big idea was when he got back into the edit suite and it was this realisation that caused the hold-up in editing – how to render as deep something that really isn’t.
Hopper does it by constantly switching between the movie that Kansas is involved in making (it’s directed by Sam Fuller, no less); some “making-of” footage lifting the lid on how, for example, gunfights are filmed; the stuff with the Peruvian Indians and their increasing fetishisation of all the movie paraphernalia; and Kansas’s post-shoot adventures with Maria (sex under a waterfall, a visit to a brothel). And on top of that he adds overt, fourth-wall-breaking moments, like the intertitle card that comes up a couple of time with the words “missing scene” on it.
Switching between all these using Godardian jump cuts made The Last Movie look distinctly weird and “far out” – to use a Hopperism – back in 1971 but looks a lot more mainstream these days.
It’s all shot by cinematographer László Kovács, so it looks as bright and colourful, sharp and clean as his work for Hopper on Easy Rider (the unexpected success of which had encouraged Universal to give Hopper total creative freedom on this film), and this visual unity helps weld together the different elements, particularly towards the end as Hopper montages things together to an increasingly hectic rhythm and things descend into the realm of the very bad trip.
You can’t imagine John Wayne in it, that’s for sure, though that’s who Hopper originally wanted for it. Which would have been really far out.
The Last Movie – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
