From Adolescent to Puerile

By S.K.

That sound you hear is of checkbooks closing all over Hollywood. The books belong to the smart money; the reason for their action is The Last Movie* by Dennis Hopper--the same Dennis Hopper who recently opened the checkbook:, with Easy Rider. The faults of that film are legendary--the paranoid swagger, the inept drug trips, the comicbook heroism. But the film also shared with other examples of naive art an undisciplined energy and a curious magnetism. Its minuscule production cost (under $500,000) and giant grosses (over $50 million) made it the Volkswagen of the American film.

If this flint-eyed, wild-talking pothead could do it, the smart money reasoned, why couldn't any flint-eyed, wild-talking pothead do it? The Easy Rider fashion caught on, lank hair and sideburns became Hollywood's uniform of the day, and a new era was proclaimed.

The era (of two years' duration) is over. Dennis Hopper has blown it. His directorial debut may have been adolescent; his second movie is puerile. Formless, artless, it is narcissistic but not introspective, psycho but not analytic--a shotgun wedding of R.D. Laing and the Late Show. Its basic idea is not unsound: a movie company shoots a western in the Andes; when it leaves, the peasants mimic the staged violence but cannot separate reality from fantasy.

That is more than can be said for Hopper. Ignoring the plot, the director presents a gallery of his favorite art works: Waterfall with a Distant View of Dennis; Effect of Dennis Through Peruvian Haze; Ruins of Dennis by Twilight; and his favorite: Dennis as the Universal Infant. This portrait can be seen throughout The Last Movie, even when other actors come on--notably Stella Garcia as Hopper's Peruvian mistress and Rod Cameron as Rod Cameron. Hopper never appears sober or coherent. This may account for the film's Godardian device--from time to time the legend SCENE MISSING is mounted on a field of black. During the filming of The Last Movie, Hopper declared: "Being an artist is a heavy scene." That, unhappily, is the scene that is altogether missing.

S.K.

* Not to be confused, although it undoubtedly will be, with Peter Bogdanovich's excellent The Last Picture Show [TIME, Oct. 11].

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.