The Last Picture Show

A beautiful and heart wrenching movie that gets better and better as the years go by. I saw this when it came out in 1971, I knew it was good, but I didn't really understand how good or why. Over the years I have gone back and watched it again, and as my life changed I began to relate deeper each time I saw it. Bogdonovich was WAY ahead of the game on this one.

This is one of those rare movies that you can go back every five years and watch for the first time. Myself having been raised in Del Rio, Texas in the late 50's and early sixties, I can attest that this is a totally accurate picture of what coming of age in west Texas was really like for most of us.

Here is a movie that perfectly captures a time and place. The time is the year between November, 1951 and November, 1952 and the place is Anarene, Texas, a small town in north central Texas. The screenplay was written by Larry McMurtry, in collaboration with director Bogdanovich, based on McMurtry's novel of the same name. Anarene is just south of Archer City, McMurtry's home town where the movie was filmed. McMurtry knows whereof he speaks, the movie has the feeling of total authenticity.

The story centers around two best friends, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges), as they pass from being high school seniors into adult life. Given their backgrounds, coming from broken homes and living in boarding houses, there is little idea that they will go to college. The movie details how the two handle this pivotal and bewildering time from being on the high school football team one year to being on their own without much of a safety net the next. In a wider context the movie is about larger transitions: from youth to adulthood for the young people, from a frustrated and bored middle age to an even less promising future for the older folks, and from a town with some social cohesiveness to a town dealing with the isolating effects of a bankrupt economy and the advent of television. The rather bleak prospects that Sonny and Duane face parallel the prospects of the town. You are made to think about transitions in your own life.

The movie is populated with many finely drawn characters, all acted with supreme skill. There is not a false note struck in the entire movie. By the end we know the characters so well that they seem real. Jeff Bridges was nominated for an Oscar, and I don't understand why Timothy Bottoms was not nominated as well, since his performance is of equal quality. Bottoms plays Sonny with such genuine good-natured charm and honest sincerity that it is hard to believe he is acting. And Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman both won well-deserved Oscars. Kudos all round to the entire cast.

The movie is beautifully filmed in black and white befitting the stark settings and story, and the time period. It is filmed as if it were made in the period portrayed.

If you have ever lived in a small town or if you grew up in the American heartland in the 1950s, this movie will evoke overwhelming nostalgia. But the story is so powerfully told that I think that for everyone it will evoke nostalgia for a time and place, even for that which they may never have known.

The town, as well as the movie, is held together by Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson) who owns the movie theater, the café, and the pool hall. In fact he owns just about everything there is to do in Anarene, except for watching the hapless Anarene High football team ... and sex. It is no wonder then that sex, in its many faceted varieties, plays a big role in this town, and in this movie.

There are so many wonderful and memorable scenes that it would simply require a small volume to recount them. One scene that grabbed me was when Sam and Sonny are at a lake outside of town, ostensibly fishing, and Sam reminiscences about old times, about when he came to the lake twenty years earlier with a lover. Sam makes the comment, "You wouldn't believe how this land has changed." The camera pans the surroundings and it is hard to see how this area could have changed much in the last thousand years, but Sam is clearly attuned to the subtle changes, since memories were impressed on him in a time of strong emotion. We all have clear memories from when and where we have been happy, even if it is a small lake in a desolate flat land. And Sam's specific comment can be taken to apply more generally to the basic theme of the movie. This incredible scene ends with Sam's saying, "Being a decrepit old bag of bones, that's what's ridiculous," and anyone who is not close to tears at that point will never truly appreciate the beauty of this movie.

Seemingly this movie should be depressing, but the effect is more of a melancholic look into the lives of ordinary people who are just trying to play the hands they have been dealt in life.

It wasn't until the movie was over and I was reading the credits that I realized how cleverly the music had been woven into the film. All of the music is from the time period and is a part of the action and not background music. It is played on home radios, car radios, truck radios, 45 rpm players, jukeboxes, and at a community Christmas dance. The Hank Williams song, heard on the radio in Sonny's old truck in the opening scene, "Why Don't You Love Me Like You Used to Do?" sets the tone for the music as well as the movie. There are great songs taken from over a dozen country and western classics from the era. Ruth (Cloris Leachman) is listening to Johnny Standley's quirky, "It's in the Book," (a unique and strangely satirical offering to be popular at any time, let alone reach the pop charts and sell a million records in 1952) during the final scene between her and Sonny.

Why is this movie so special? That's kind of like asking why one likes a certain piece of music or a painting. Everything comes together here in one of those magic moments - the acting, the filming, the story, the music, the editing - to create a simply-told and remarkably affecting work of art.

Adapted with director Bogdanovich by Larry McMurtry from his own novel, this film remains true to its source. A modern adaptation would no doubt have adopted the voice-over approach of narrative, but here each scene is played out from a more objective point of view. The book consists of a series of events played out over a protracted period of time, with McMurtry's sparse but effective prose acting as a bridging device between scenes. The translation to the screen loses these links, giving the film a slightly episodic feel which runs counter to modern Hollywood film making practice. This is no bad thing, and in every other aspect the film follows the book almost literally, but watching it now does highlight the difference between the formulaic approach we are now accustomed to, with mise en scene, plot turning points and climaxes crudely and obviously spelt out, as opposed to that of Hollywood's final golden age, where the director was given more of a free reign to stamp his own identity on the film, and audiences were more receptive to different styles. Here the spirit of the novel is captured perfectly; that of the desperation and claustrophobia of small town life, where generation after generation undergo the same rites of passage, living out the same lives of frustration and unrealised dreams. The films strength is that it never forces us to identify with any one character, evenly distributing the amount of screen time over the different generations and, almost like a fly on the wall documentary (though heavily stylised in its powerfully expressive monochrome cinematography). Coupled with some sturdy performances from all of the members of the cast, and some memorable images, ‘The Last Picture' comes across as an enchanting, evocative and accessible portrayal of a lifestyle most of us have never and will never experience. Now surely this is what the art of cinema is all about?

This is a really outstanding film. It is a director's movie, with every nuance strictly controlled by Bogdonavich. It's a sweaty, sad, depressing sort of film. The vitality of the town has been drained by decades of malaise. The kids feel hopeless. The adults go from person to person and have affairs and experience emptiness. There's some depressing football team that can't tackle. But mostly there is a street with dirt on it and a mentally challenged boy who likes to sweep. It is rife with symbols. This boy is trying to sweep away the dirt that is infesting the town, but he has no effect. As a matter of fact, he is victimized by the other boys in the town--part of their fun. We have the contrast of the rich family in town with the Ellen Burstyn character and, of course, her daughter played by Cybill Shepherd. The boys who are in a hopeless prison of the town's making are like a bunch of horny bulldogs. She is the queen in the town, but that's not much of an honor. These guys are going nowhere and she might just be there, like her mother, 20 years from now. The director builds a world that isn't pleasant, but it's certainly a total depiction of a place without a future. The movie theater represents a last connection with excitement and enjoyment. But nobody goes anymore.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy to befall any artist is to have their life become more compelling than their work; such is the sad case with Peter Bogdanovich whose meteoric rise to fame was matched only by a truly famous fall from favor and a bewildering journey through tabloid hell. (Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers mined the not inconsiderable drama of the first act of his life to sporadically great comic effect in 1984's Irreconcilable Differences. And his tragic love affair with Playboy model turned actress Dorothy Stratten is fictionalized in Bob Fosse's astonishing, horrifying Star 80 (1983). How many directors become characters in films?)

Bogdanovich's love affair with film is undeniable, though it has, in the past three decades, yielded far more perplexing misfires (The Cat's Meow, At Long Last Love, Nickelodeon) than unqualified successes. That said, The Last Picture Show is an extraordinary accomplishment and worthy of its place in the list of great films of the 1970s.

1971's other important films (Friedkin's The French Connection, Pakula's Klute, Kubrick's Clockwork Orange) are loud, angry, violent and contemporary – in-your-face reflections of a society in which rage and nihilism, engendered by Vietnam and the growing discontent over government corruption, is the currency of communication. The uncertainty coursing through the veins of American pop culture also begat in equal, if not equally graphic, measure a palpable sense of sorrow at the destruction of a simpler way of life (no matter how "true" that memory may be).

Like Jewison's Fiddler on the Roof and Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Last Picture Show is a powerful and poignant evocation of the death of a community and a way of life. Thematically rich and imbued with Bogdanovich's remarkable knowledge and passion for film, the movie works on a dazzling number of levels; and Bogdanovich's use of nostalgia and traditional, archetypal genre conventions both enriches the movie and compounds the heartbreaking loss at the heart of the story.

His deft handling of a cast comprised of then (largely) unknowns (Bridges, Bottoms, Shepherd) is first-rate and he draws forth superb, often sublime performances from everyone (in particular, Johnson, Burstyn and Leachman). There isn't a false note or a misstep in the movie and there is a naturalness here that is not easily achieved or earned. The great production design (by Bogdanovich's then wife and partner Polly Platt whose contributions to his work and her subsequent involvement in the best works of James L. Brooks should not go underestimated) and the achingly beautiful cinematography by the late Robert Surtees are vital to the success (emotionally, intellectually, thematically) of the film.

The Last Picture Show is a truly rare work of surprising depth and emotional resonance; and the heartache for a time and place forever gone and the desperate and quiet struggles of its very real, very human denizens is matched only by the sorrow found in contemplation of Bogdanovich's Icarus-like fall from such exalted heights.