Movie Reviews : Hopper’s ‘Last Movie’ Returns for a Second Look

Making a myth of yourself is a dangerous job, and in “The Last Movie” (Nuart), Dennis Hopper stumbles into some of the traps and scales some of the heights.

This impressive, little-seen film--which never got a wide-scale American release, despite winning the top prize at the 1970 Venice Film Festival--distills Hopper’s personality, lays it out bare. A follow-up to his 1969 hit, “Easy Rider,” “The Last Movie” is easily his most ambitious, audacious work. It’s no wonder he’s always regarded it, against the opinion of his studio and most 1970 critics, as his masterpiece.

“Please don’t understand me too quickly,” that Andre Gide phrase Norman Mailer is fond of quoting, may be applicable here. This is movie making on the edge, without a psychic or stylistic net. Working with screenwriter Stewart Stern (“Rebel Without a Cause”), director-star Hopper lines out a crazy cross-cultural ballad, with earthy, lyrical Laszlo Kovacs camera work. Hopper’s subject: the corruptions of civilization, the shriveling of modern humanity and the chaos of modern relationships.

The metaphor is extreme. After the departure of an American film company, shooting another “Billy the Kid” Western in Peru (with Dean Stockwell as Billy and Sam Fuller as the “director”), one of the wranglers, Kansas (Hopper), stays behind and tries, ineptly, to enjoy or exploit the glorious wilds around him. He romances a tender prostitute (Estelle Garcia), babbles about opening a mountain resort and then searches for gold in the desert with his deranged buddy, Neville (Don Gordon).

Meanwhile, as Kansas’ world collapses, the villagers begin a strange cult: “shooting” their own movie with a camera and microphone boom made of wood or bamboo. They stage real fistfights, spill real blood and suck the dubious village priest (Tomas Milian) into the shoot. Finally, they cast Kansas as their Billy.

As in “Easy Rider,” Hopper’s character is a man of radical misperceptions, trapped in pop culture cliches, running feverishly through a threatening maze.

Civilization and primitivism poison each other in the story, and church and theater become locked in a combustible embrace. It’s an attempt at a visionary adventure film of the kind Herzog, Wenders and Guerra made later in the ‘70s, and a fusion of four kinds of cinema: the action genre, psychological drama, a clash of modern and primitive cultures and a poetic evocation of myth.

Trying to work on all four levels, the film inevitably falls short. Packed so full, it almost stutters from the inward pressure. But, at its best, “The Last Movie” is a piece of spiritual autobiography, a metaphoric striptease, a cinematic self-immolation of astonishing ruthlessness and candor. It’s not at all the huge Hopperian ego trip that critics lambasted in 1970: Hopper the director throws many scenes to his fellow actors, showcasing Gordon or Fuller as selflessly as he earlier did Jack Nicholson or Peter Fonda.

Oddly, “The Last Movie” (Times rated: Mature for sex, violence, nudity and language) might work better if it were more disjointed, edited in the the style of Nicolas Roeg’s later ‘70s films. It’s when Hopper completely fractures chronology at the end, or juxtaposes several levels, in his mountain of ambition and desert of hope, that all the metaphors of “The Last Movie” blossom. Then, it achieves its full richness and power.