Cinema: Not Fancy, Not Free

THE LAST DETAIL

Directed by HAL ASHBY Screenplay by ROBERT TOWNE

It's about three sailors with time on their hands. But possible comparisons to On the Town or Fancy Free end right there. The youngest sailor is on his way to an eight-year prison term for trying to boost $40 from a collection box belonging to the favorite charity of the C.O.'s wife. The 'lifers" (career men) who have been assigned to escort him from the Norfolk naval base to the brig in Portsmouth, N.H., despise their job. No one is about to burst into a carefree song-and-dance number in the course of such a journey.

Still The Last Detail, for all the young men's poverty of language and feeling, the dullness of their ability even to imagine a good time, is a funny, occasionally touching and refreshingly straightforward little movie.

The criminal (Randy Quaid) is as petty as his crime, a puffy adolescent kleptomaniac who needs to be fetched up, not sent up, as his two reluctant guards (Jack Nicholson and Otis Young) soon realize. Feeling too sorry for him to maintain strict discipline for five days, they start loosening him up with a monumental beer bust in Washington. Next they get him into a nice, maturing brawl with some Marines in a men's room at Penn Station, and finally buy him his sexual initiation in a Boston brothel. By the time they deliver him to the brig, it appears he might just be man enough to survive his term there. Anyway, he has grown up enough to attempt a radical solution to his problem: running away from his captors. Ironically, this turns out to be the toughest test in his rue of passage: his guards are also the first friends he has ever made.

Dramas about male bonding have glutted the market recently No one connected with this adaptation of Darryl Ponicsan's novel can be accused of enormous originality. But there is an un pretentious realism in Towne's script, and Director Ash by handles his camera with a simplicity reminiscent of the way American directors treated lower-depths material in the '30s. Quaid plays dumb with canny appeal. Young, as a black for whom a noncom's career is a big step up, makes you feel his sense of risk when he stops going by the book on this detail. Nicholson's bluster only partly masks his insecurity as he moves through the excess of options presented by the civilian world. It is attention to authentic detail by all of them that gives The Last Detail its modest but genuine distinction. Richard Schickel