George C. Scott is The Mechanic…or at least, he is a mechanic, as we see in the first scene of this 1971 thriller, released a year before the classic Charles Bronson vehicle of that title. First seen through the undercarriage of his beloved BMW, Scott’s character, retired getaway driver Harry Garmes, makes an entrance about as far removed from his majestic first appearance in the previous year’s Patton as you can get. Resigned to his quiet life in an out-of-the-way Portuguese fishing village, his non-automotive emotional interactions largely limited to local fisherman Miguel (Aldo Sambrell) and local whore Monique (Colleen Dewhurst), Harry acts as if he’s an extension of his vehicle’s garage-bound existence. Unlike a crime film such as Thief (1981), the titular “one last job” isn’t driven by the need for money, but by Harry’s need to prove he, and his car, can still be of use. The Last Run fits squarely into the niche carved out by Thief, and countless other depictions of the American professional criminal, in that it’s a paean to hoods the way they used to be, when they were allowed to do their jobs the way they saw fit, and not the way of some young punk or middle manager.
This movie’s regard for old-fashioned professionalism seems doubly meaningful now that a Region 1 DVD release of the film is finally readily to North American home video consumers through the good graces of the Warner Archive, the flagship MOD (Manufacture on Demand) line of hard-to-find films and TV shows. Having this very solidly constructed, Academy Award Winner-starring studio movie finally available to legally own, if not to easily rent (I managed to find a copy at a local library), doesn’t reveal an all-time classic of the genre or period. It does, however, uncover something of a flawed gem from an era already overpopulated with masterpieces. At least as shot by director Richard Fleischer, the script by Alan Sharp, one of the early 1970s’ great screenwriting talents, doesn’t quite stand up to his best work from this era. Harry’s new mission, to ferry prison escapee Paul Rickard (Tony Musante) and Rickard’s girlfriend Claudie Scherrer (Trish Van Devere), always feels like the plot of a crime movie, and one that you’ve seen before. It’s not as haunting as the mystery Sharp wouldn’t allow Night Moves’ (1974) private detective to solve, or as forceful as the hard truths spoken about warfare and terrorism by Burt Lancaster’s Indian scout in the Western Ulzana’s Raid (1972).
If original director John Huston hadn’t walked off the project, maybe The Last Run would have been welcomed to home video earlier, and with a little more fanfare. Maybe not, though, considering how slow and difficult the process of getting all of Huston’s vast filmography onto DVD has been. It also might have been stronger, but then admittedly the director of The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Fat City (1972) was as capable of phoning in his work as any studio contract director. Certainly it’s hard to imagine Fleischer, his replacement on the film, doing an appreciably worse or more soulless job with the likes of Annie (1982), the pinnacle of Huston paycheck gigs. If the kind of gossip I’ve come across in Hollywood bios is to be believed, the great man had little use for Scott personally anyway after working with him on The List of Adrian Messenger (1965). Fleischer, on the other hand, reunited with Scott the following year for the Joseph Wambaugh adaptation The New Centurions, which if nothing else suggests a better working experience with the famously difficult actor. Word of Wambaugh’s dislike for the movie dissuaded me from seeking it out and watching it, but I may have to change that now that I’ve seen The Last Run.
There’s nothing to do about the looming shadow cast by George St. Patton, and that towering American flag, over everything else Scott did, before and after, in his career, but there’s also nothing wrong with this follow-up performance. Though not literally impotent like the doctor he played that same year in The Hospital, he’s still far diminished from the military glory and rigidly erect bearing of his most famous role. Crouching under his car, or slouching against walls in his black leather jacket while putting up with Musante, this movie’s designated young punk, Scott instead plays to the full effect of his battered appearance. Sven Nyvkist’s cinematography, his first for Hollywood, certainly seems attuned to the project’s straightforward nature, but in some of Scott’s close-ups finds a certain desolate beauty in the man’s ruined face that digs a little deeper than all of the picturesque location photography.
Not that there’s anything wrong with picturesque location photography, or Richard Fleischer’s brand of straightforward filmmaking. Like his fellow studio pro directors Robert Wise and Mark Robson, before graduating to the glossy likes of Dr. Dolittle (1967), The Sound of Music (1965), or Valley of the Dolls (1967), Fleischer had cut his teeth on tough, terse post-WWII genre fare, the kind now preferred by many movie fans to Hollywood’s spectacles. The Last Run doesn’t have the cold-shower shock of Fleischer’s career-making The Narrow Margin (1952), which hit Hollywood and its audiences in the early ‘50s with the same impact as Dirty Harry and The French Connection in the same year as this film. Instead, from that moody opening shot of Scott readying his car, and first bars of Jerry Goldsmith’s jazzy score, the director keeps a reassuringly steady hand at the controls. He doesn’t push his solid craftsmanship with new areas, which he’d done earlier with the interesting but questionably motivated split-screens in The Boston Strangler (1968). He does give us a thriller that’s as linear and confident as Harry Garmes’ journey. If this movie’s Old Hollywood roots show at all, it’s in the fakey, postsynched-sounding dialogue for the European characters, quite unlike how naturally Coppola would handle his Sicilian actors in The Godfather (1972).
It may not quite be the best ‘70s crime film you’ve never seen, but The Last Run can at least holds its own in that section of your DVD shelf for an ending as uncompromised and blunt as a classic like Get Carter (1971) or The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1974). In a sense, not the one I firstreferred to, it can be seen as George C. Scott’s The Mechanic, pitting Tony Musante’s somewhat overly callow young killer against the experience of his old crook, just as that Michael Winner movie contrasted Jan-Michael Vincent to Charles Bronson. Off-screen, The Last Run played out as Scott’s version of The Getaway (1972), which of course resulted in Steve McQueen ending his first marriage and beginning a new one, to his leading lady Ali McGraw. Scott actually managed the not inconsiderable feat of doing McQueen one better, beginning production married to one of his co-stars, Colleen Dewhurst, and ending it married to another of his, Trish Van Devere. If Scott’s nowhere nearly as convincing an outlaw as Bronson or McQueen, it’s because he always seemed too naturally authoritarian, comfortable in uniform and bellowing orders at people, to represent much of a menace to society. His character here, who doesn’t even like to carry a gun on his jobs, functions more as an adjunct to the underworld than a full-fledged member of it. In the same way, The Last Run may always be something of an outlier to the great crime films of the 1970s, but viewed today, up against such young punks as The American (2010) and Drive (2011), it’s a tough little movie that, like Harry Garmes, didn’t deserve its long exile in obscurity.
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