The Last Detail

In the series "What can cinema do?" guests from various fields dedicate themselves to the potential of cinema in relation to the crises of the present with a lecture on a film they have selected themselves, this month the writer Ulrich Peltzer.

A five-day journey that will lead from Virginia to New Hampshire. It is the early 1970s, the war is lost, but not everyone knows it yet. Two Navy men have been ordered to escort a third one who's been sentenced to eight years in jail. What the institution wants, it gets, but the two feel sorry for the young offender and decide to give him a good time first. The dream is over; however, we see a country on the edge of itself. Suburban streets, cheap motels, a run-down brothel, bouts of senseless violence. It all seems to say, that's the way it is here, stop deluding yourself, the glory days were always meant for others. Rarely has a film encountered its protagonists and their world so unsparingly and yet with so much tenderness as THE LAST DETAIL (Hal Ashby, USA 1973). Without making common cause with them, which is perhaps what comprises the greatness of all art. (Ulrich Peltzer)