The Last Movie (1971)

          One of the most notorious auteur misfires of the ’70s, this misbegotten mind-fuck was Dennis Hopper’s follow-up to Easy Rider (1969), the surprise blockbuster that not only transformed Hopper from a journeyman actor to an A-list director but also established him, for a brief time, as a leading voice of the counterculture. Alas, Hopper’s poor choices as an actor, co-writer, and director turned The Last Movie into a metaphor representing the way some people, Hopper included, fell victim to the excesses of the drug era. In trying to escape the constraints associated with conventional cinema, Hopper created a maddening hodgepodge of self-indulgent nonsense and uninteresting experimentation.

          Hopper stars as Kansas, the horse wrangler for a Hollywood film crew that’s shooting on location in Peru. After a fatal on-set accident, Kansas drops out of his Hollywood lifestyle to start over in South America, hooking up with a sexy local girl (Stella Garcia) and scheming with a fellow U.S. expat (Don Gordon) to get rich off a gold mine. Kansas also romances a beautiful upper-crust American (Julie Adams), with whom he engages in gentle sadomasochism, and he gets roped into a bizarre situation involving Peruvian villagers who are “shooting” their own movie using primitive mock-up cameras and microphones made from scrap metal and sticks. (One of The Last Movie’s myriad pretentious allusions is that the “fake” film crew is making more authentic art than the “real” film crew.)

          Simply listing the trippy flourishes in The Last Movie would take an entire website, so a few telling examples should suffice. Early in the picture, a Hollywood starlet (played by Hopper’s then-girlfriend, former Mamas and the Papas singer Michelle Phillips) conducts a ritual during which she pierces a Peruvian woman’s ear with a large pin while people stand around the scene wearing creepy masks and chanting. Later, Kansas leads a group of Americans to a whorehouse, where they watch a grimy girl-on-girl floor show; this inexplicably drives Kansas into such a rage that he ends up slapping around his long-suffering female companion. And we haven’t even gotten to the weird one-shot bits that are periodically inserted into the narrative. At one point, Kansas leans back while a woman shoots breast milk from her nipple to his face. Elsewhere, while getting his hair trimmed, Kansas shares the following random remark: “I never jerked off a horse before.” Good to know.

          The whole movie culminates with a befuddling barrage of images, including scenes of Kansas getting beaten by members of the “fake” film crew, as if the Hollywood runaway is some sort of martyr for art. It’s all very deliberately weird. During the final stretch, for instance, Hopper cuts to silly things like “scene missing” placeholders and outtakes of actors consulting their scripts. The idea, presumably, was to deconstruct Hollywood filmmaking so that a new art form could emerge from the ruins, but Hopper missed the mark in every way. That said, it’s worth noting that Hopper brought interesting friends along for the ride. Cinematographer László Kovács, who also shot Easy Rider, does what he can to infuse Hopper’s scattershot frames with artistry, and the cast includes ’70s cult-cinema stalwart Severn Darden (who does a musical number!) as well as maverick B-movie director Samuel Fuller, who plays a version of himself during the scenes depicting the making of the Hollywood movie.

The Last Movie: FREAKY

Cannon for Cordoba (1970)

          Even though it suffers from a muddy screenplay, the sweaty Western Cannon for Cordoba boasts a brisk pace and impressive production values. Another entry in the seemingly endless cycle of action pictures set during the Mexican revolution, the picture begins when ruthless Mexican general Cordoba (Raf Vallone) assaults a U.S. Army train and steals six cannons from troops led by U.S. General John J. Pershing (John Russell). Determined to reclaim the weapons, Pershing enlists maverick officer Captain Rod Douglas (George Peppard) to lead an undercover assault on Cordoba’s fortress. In the course of doing his job, Douglas gets into a romantic hassle with a sexy Mexican double agent (Giovanna Ralli) and alienates his hot-tempered second-in-command (Don Gordon).

          Despite telling a simple story, Cannon for Cordoba feels needlessly complicated, because Stephen Kandel’s script fails to sufficiently differentiate characters and explain motivations; furthermore, the scene that really gets the story moving, in which Douglas receives his orders from Pershing, doesn’t happen until the half-hour mark. That said, Cannon for Cordobadelivers the goods in nearly every other way. The action scenes are tense and violent, with an exciting mixture of close-quarters combat and big-canvas warfare (people get beaten, blown up, shot, stabbed, thrown off high ledges, and so on).

          The movie also looks and sounds fantastic. Cinematographer Antonio Macasoli emulates the look that famed DP Conrad Hall brought to a better picture with similar themes, The Professionals (1966), so the imagery in Cannon for Cordoba is sharp, textured, and vibrant. The music score thunders along nicely, since the producers hired Elmer Bernstein to give this movie the same gallop Bernstein provided for the Magnificent Seven pictures.

          Alas, Cannon for Cordoba cannot boast star power equal to that found in any of the movies it emulates. None of the supporting actors makes much an impression, and Peppard is merely okay, though he seethes with a suitable mixture of contempt and malice. Yet his chilly characterization doesn’t inspire a rooting interest, and there’s not enough humor to leaven his solemnity, which makes Cannon for Cordoba grim when glib might have been the better tonal choice. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Cannon for Cordoba: FUNKY