In 1971, Dennis Hopper was attempting to complete his experimental film The Last Movie, which the studios were hoping (vainly) would be a zeitgeist moneyspinner to rival Easy Rider. At the same time, Hopper was submitting to the inspection of documentary makers LM Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller; the result was this strange, downbeat study of Hopper on location and in his studio. The film was lost for many years, but now rereleased. It shows Hopper as a withdrawn, distrait figure, fretting over the editing suite and worrying about what he considers to be his career’s resemblance to Orson Welles’s. He’s not exactly the wild man of legend, and not quite, I suspect, the wild man the film-makers were hoping to get on film. Hopper demonstrates the creepy obsession with guns we know about: we see him fondle revolvers in his car, and firing both these and a hefty assault rifle in the desert. Did Carson and Schiller provide the guns? They appear to have arranged for a number of Playgirls to hang out with Hopper, just for this film, and get some bizarre, contrived softcore “group sex” scenes with Hopper and them in the bathtub. These women may have been promised movie stardom, and the sexual politics on display are seedy. There is a fuzzy underground feel to this film: choppy editing, sudden freeze frames, maundering voiceover. It has archival value as a study of Hopper and a footnote to the American new wave.
