This year’s posthumous release of Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind may reignite interest in another misunderstood film of that period that Welles’ work very much resembles, and which may well have inspired it: Dennis Hopper’s fascinating, flawed, experimental The Last Movie from 1971, about the ritualistic voodoo of cinema, now on rerelease - featuring cameos by Samuel Fuller and Kris Kristofferson. After the smash-hit success of Easy Rider in 1969, awestruck Universal studio bosses agreed to give Hopper and his co-writer Stewart Stern (screenwriter of Rebel Without a Cause) a million-dollar budget and an undertaking not to interfere with what they were doing. Hopper took their money, went to Peru and over a year filmed this audacious experimental picture about a movie shoot. Universal didn’t know what to do with it and it was hardly seen.
The story concerns a crew shooting a western about the death of Billy the Kid, using locals as extras. Dennis Hopper stars as Kansas, a stunt coordinator who stays behind after the shoot is over and the Hollywood folk have all packed up and gone back to Los Angeles, having fallen in love with a local woman, Maria (Stella Garcia).
But he witnesses something very strange: the local people have succumbed to a kind of group hysteria at the sheer excitement and sense of importance induced by the movies. They adapt their existing Christian pageant of carrying the crucified Christ through the streets into a new pagan ritual: carrying around straw models of cameras and sound booms. Dangerously drunk and as excitable as children, they stage real fist fights (apparently not understanding that the movie ones are fake) and the death of Billy the Kid becomes a new Christ-like sacrifice. No one in the village shows the slightest interest in seeing the resulting film, as the filming itself has been electrifyingly exciting and real. Meanwhile, the moody, edgy Kansas becomes abusive with Maria and has nothing to do but get drunk in town, and hang out with seedy and cynical American expatriates who, in one scene, pay for a backstage girl-on-girl sex show in a nightclub: a very bizarre scene, which incidentally has something of Cassavetes. Finally, Kansas becomes obsessed with a local man’s claim that there is a goldmine nearby, just waiting to make them both rich. The movies themselves have caused this strange, aching void in everyone’s lives: now that the crew have gone there is nothing but discontent, anticlimax and sexual anxiety. Reality itself has to be supercharged to meet the unreasonable expectations induced by cinema: and a new dark religion is born.
It is a challenging movie, one that at the time pioneered the mannerism of lens flare: the globules of light that streamed into the picture when the camera was turned into the sun. Once considered a mistake to be removed, it was now a deliberate flourish. Hopper had invented the American new wave’s equivalent of the Godardian jump cut. There are other quirks, such as introducing “Scene Missing” title cards into the edit.
The Last Movie hangs together well enough: what it doesn’t have is an ending. The obvious one, the one you are expecting, does not materialise. The film fades out but not before it’s given us a brilliant, exhilarating adventure in ideas.
