The Last Picture Show (1971)

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Directed by Peter Bogdanovich.

Starring Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Ellen Burstyn, John Hillerman, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Randy Quaid, Cybill Shepherd.

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Produced by Hollywood iconoclast BBS Productions, film critic-turned-director Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 film pays homage to Hollywood's classical age as it chronicles generational rites of passage in Anarene, a fictional one-horse Texas town. In 1951, high school seniors Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges) play football, go to the movies at the Royal Theater, hang out at the pool hall owned by local elder statesman Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson), and lust after rich tease Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd in her film debut). As the year passes, Sonny learns about the pitfalls and compromises of adulthood through an affair with his coach's wife Ruth (Cloris Leachman) and a thwarted elopement with Jacy after she dumps Duane. Following two tragic deaths, and with Duane gone to Korea and Jacy packed off to college in Dallas, Sonny is left behind in Anarene, wise enough to absorb the life lessons of Sam the Lion and Jacy's mother Lois (Ellen Burstyn). He is determined to honor Sam's legacy as the town's conscience, despite a telling sign of incipient communal disintegration: the closing of the Royal Theater after a final showing of Howard Hawks's Red River. Paying tribute to classical Hollywood directors like Hawks and John Ford, Bogdanovich used old-time cinematographer Robert Surtees and shot The Last Picture Show in crisp black-and-white, with a restrained style devoid of the kind of "new wave" techniques (jump cuts, zooms, and jittery hand-held camerawork) used by such contemporaries as Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, Mike Nichols, and Martin Scorsese. As in such Ford films as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Bogdanovich relies on careful visual composition in deep focus to help communicate the regret over the passing of an era. Hailed as one of the best films by a young director since Citizen Kane (1941), The Last Picture Show premiered at the New York Film Festival and went on to become a hit. It was also nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay for Larry McMurtry's and Bogdanovich's adaptation of McMurtry's novel. John Ford stalwart Johnson won Supporting Actor and Leachman won Supporting Actress, beating out their cohorts Bridges and Burstyn. For an audience steeped in movie history and caught up in the chaotic 1971 present, The Last Picture Show presented a nostalgic look backward that was not so much an escape from the present as a coming to terms with what the present had lost. Its 1990 sequel Texasville, in which Bridges and Shepherd played later incarnations of their original characters, was not as successful. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

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Reviews and discussions

He is a camera: My Life On Ice
by jlgdrd in Wicked Fun

loved it.

Was this review helpful? [Be the first to tell us!]
"Etienne's grandmother gives him a video camera for his seventeenth birthday. Right away he takes to it, trying the whistles and bells, zooming in on his mother's face, urging her not to pose. Etienne's story is all about distances, intimacy, alliances. At the beginning, the subjects of his video-biography (his mother, grandmother, best friend, teacher) are flattered, self-conscious. Gradually they become annoyed, then barely tolerant, and finally, subdued. From the moment he starts shooting, he gets bolder and bolder, asking personal questions, spying, catching his mother in her skivvies. Some of this we can chalk up to adolescent mischief, curiosity, lack of respect for privacy. What therapists call boundary issues. But by the final chapter, he is capturing incidents far better left off-camera. Which is, of course, what makes for good cinema.My Life on Ice (originally titled Ma vraie vie à Rouen or The True Story of My Life in Rouen) is the directing project of Olivier Duca ... " [More]

A Thousand Clouds of Peace: Poe ...
by jlgdrd in Wicked Fun

loved it.

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"A Thousand Clouds of Peace is an ode to loss and yearning, an extended fever-dream or hallucination that we share with Gerardo (Juan Carlos Ortuño) as he carries Bruno's letter in his pocket, haunted by the words he used to explain why he can no longer see him. Sometimes he appears to be looking for Bruno (Juan Carlos Torres), for others he meanders and malingers, making contact with friends, clients, and strangers. There is something intuitive and almost preverbal about the way he connects, as if he knows them intimately and not at all, as if they can read each other's minds. It's a familiarity of attraction and repulsion that reminds you of Bergman. Like when you mingle drunk at a party where social conventions have been dropped and there's a kind of jovial, empty intimacy. It doesn't seem adequate or appropriate to describe Gerardo as a prostitute. He accepts money from the men he engages only grudgingly, as if looking for something else. His urgency i ... " [More]

Dogboy: O FANTASMA
by jlgdrd in Wicked Fun

loved it.

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"Joao Pedro Rodrigues' O Fantasma is a rich, spellbinding celebration of raw male adolescent sexuality unlike any film I have ever seen. It is a paean to tawdry, squalid, horndog homo-sex. A glorious reverent escapade in shamelessness. But far more than that, it soars. It is poetry culled the from the trash heap of a mean and meager world where imperative need turns us all into scavengers. Lyricism from the reckless rush of teenage testosterone that grips us in its bite and shakes us like a rag doll. Ricardo Meneses, in what has to be one of the most auspicious film debuts of all time, captures all the urgency, electricity and innocence of male coming-of-age without affectation or apology. He is so completely intuitive and unselfconscious that his most outrageous behavior seems plausible and rational. Even sympathetic. 17 when he auditioned for a role that has almost no dialogue, and self-identified as straight, he nonetheless copped to several same-gender experiences, which he read ... " [More]

Re: Top 5 black and white movie ...
by BigJeffLebowski in Top 5

loved it.

"Manhattan's my favorite film, so that's obviously going to have to be my number one. Beyond that, though, the question must be raised: how much can the mere aesthetics of the film affect our selections? There are some black and white films which are beautifully shot, but are not as good as a Jarmusch or Clerks. Trying to focus on the film itself, I'm going to have to say:1. Manhattan (and also Stardust Memories and Broadway Danny Rose by Allen)2.The Last Picture Show3. Raging Bull4. Pi5. LennyThese are all films which I think are superb upon their own merits, but the fact that they are in black and white adds a new dimension.No one really brings this up when they mention the film, but I think the monetary restraints on the original Clerks (black and white, stationary camera) give the film a certain security-camera feel that really helps the juxtaposition of the mundane and the outlandish, and is part of the reason Clerks is able to assimilate the two so well.I really ... " [More]

Stuck in My Head
by MsMaxwell in MsMaxwells Blog

hasn't rated it.

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"I watched this last night. It is a beautiful, sad film about the realities of small towns. What I've been thinking about the most is how this film destroys all romanticized ideas one may have of 1950's Americana. These characters are not rejoicing in their freedom--they're trapped and sad in a landscape of scrub grass, dust, and decrepit store fronts. What's hopeful are Sonny's relationship with Sam the Lion and Billy--but before the end, both of these characters have died and Sonny is left in the kitchen with Ruth, the coach's wife with whom he's had an affair. Nevertheless, the cinematography is beautiful. I love the choice to film in black and white; it's as if the audience enters the 1950's and participates in reality, not some glitzy, full-skirted, shiny appliance world. " [More]

Review by All Movie Guide

All Movie Guide

loved it.

Of the new wave of young American directors who emerged in the early 1970s, Peter Bogdanovich displayed the strongest affinity for the Old Masters of Hollywood's Golden Era, particularly Howard Hawks and John Ford, and The Last Picture Show drew more consciously and effectively from their styles than any other film of its day. With its sharply defined black-and-white framing and simple, straightforward camera setups, The Last Picture Show resembles a classic Hawks or Ford picture; but, while those directors used their techniques to tell sweeping tales of the American frontier, Bogdanovich instead examined a tiny Texas town crumbling into dust in the early 1950s. In The Last Picture Show, the cowboys, Indians, and settlers of Stagecoach or Red River have been replaced by wealthy but ineffectual oilmen with bored wives, and high school kids looking for excitement or a future in a town that offers neither. The sole strong adult role model, Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson, a member of Ford's stock company), is a scruffy misfit showing his age and losing his health; if he's the town's last tie to the strong and noble men of the Old West, he's also decaying as fast as the town itself. Anarene has been reduced to a dusty little Peyton Place, where everyone knows everyone else's sordid little secrets and sexual peccadilloes; when Sam the Lion dies, the town loses its last pillar of dignity, with the later closing of the town's only movie house (where Red River is the last feature) serving as the most obvious symbol of its slow, inexorable decline. The strongest people are the ones who can leave, while those who stay behind follow a circle of heartbreak and romantic betrayals. "You can't believe how this town has changed," Sam says at one point to Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms), always the boy who needed his guidance the most, and Johnson gives those words a rueful weight that makes it one of the most telling moments of this sad, sometimes funny, and deeply moving film. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Tags: extramaritalaffair , nostalgia , smalltown , comingofage , Classic
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