Sort of like a service comedy done Chekhov-style - funny but sad at the same time. Jack Nicholson is dynamic as one of the sailors ordered to transport Randy Quaid (who is also superb) to prison, along with Otis Young (who is fine but a bit uncharismatic - his subsequent career never amounted to much). It isn't a very strong story - they have a series of adventures: buy a beer, meet some hippies (including a young Nancy Allen and a funny intense man who keeps going on about Nixon), get in a fight with some marines, and I admit I drifted in and out of it. During the course of the trip Nicholson and Young reflect on how they've spenttheir own lives - but no one goes into bit monologues or spells it out,both in fact say the like the Navy, it's just obvious from things like meeting the hippies, talking about their families and them asking a cabdriver if he knows a brothel where they don't mind servicemen - this sublety is one of the film's great strengths, along with its look: damp,dingy cafes and bars, with that murky early 70s feel. Carol Kane is sexy in her odd way as a hooker; Michael Moriarty and Clifton James are officers at each end of the trip - both pricks in that casual petty tyrant way. The swearing, which was once renowned, merely seems realistic.
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