Cine-Trash

The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper, 1971)
by William Ham

A little success is a dangerous thing. A lot of success is even worse. Few cinematic artifacts prove this thesis more conclusively than Dennis (“I’m an artist, maaan”) Hopper’s sophomore directorial excretion. The story behind The Last Movie, which is far more interesting and coherent than the movie itself, is as follows: After the enormous and completely unexpected success of Hop’s Easy Rider (1969), the execs at Universal gave him carte blanche and a NASA-esque budget to go south of the border and shoot his pet project, an acid-washed allegory of what happens when the crew of a Western being filmed in Peru splits and the natives construct a reel-igion around the abandoned sets and equipment.

Hopper grabbed at the opportunity, bringing many of his “young Hollywood” cronies with him, and came back with over 40 hours of film, which he spent the next year editing in between drug-addled orgies in the old New Mexico whorehouse he purchased with his Rider residuals. When it was finally finished, it actually won the grand prize at the 1971 Venice Film Festival, but angry execs dubbed it “incoherent” and pulled it from distribution in the first week of its release.

That’s a story. And, yes, the moguls were right – the movie starts at the end, flashes back to the beginning, then ends somewhere in the middle, subsuming its fascinating premise in a mucky puddle of stale Christ imagery, improvisational pointlessness, and confused art-film pretensions. Ingest enough hallucinogens and it might start to make sense. The bitter punchline is that the title turned out to be rather prophetic – Hopper was not allowed to helm another flick until he took over the production of 1980’s Out of the Blue, which tried to do for punks what Easy Rider did for hippies, but without including any punk music. But that’s another story. Stick to acting, Hoppy.