[Film Review] The Last Picture Show (1971)

Based on Larry McMurtry’s eponymous novel, Bogdanovich’s second feature film, like its valedictory title signifies, is a gritty critique on the American existence of the profound West, its dashed dream and derelict cul-de-sac in the 1950s, distinctly estheticized through an accentuated black-and-white lens. The opening establishing shot pans through Anarene, a dying oil town in northern Texas, a cinema, a pool hall and a cafeteria, all owned by Sam “the Lion” (Johnson), are the trinity of the town folks’s recreational stomping grounds.

Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms, a dead ringer for a young Ryan O’Neal, who would later star in Bogdanovich’s best film PAPER MOON, 1973), is a high school senior who carries a torch for Jacy Farrow (Shepherd, a knockout debutante), the prettiest girl in town and the girlfriend of his best buddy Duane Jackson (Bridges). After breaking up with his puritanical girlfriend Charlene (Targart), Sonny hooks up with Ruth Ropper (Leachman), the neglected, lachrymose, middle-aged wife of the school coach, out of convenience. Their May-December dalliance is unceremoniously dissolves, when Jacy, after jilting Duane for his poor bedroom performance and her humiliating experience of losing her virginity, apropos of nothing, makes an advance towards Sonny. However, marrying the girl of your dreams is pipe dream in this jerkwater town, eventually, Sonny becomes the one who stays, stuck in his birth place, a spiritual inheritor of Sam, sharing his nostalgia over a God’s forsaken town with no prosperity on sight.

Adolescents are possessed with a one-track-mind to shed off their virgin tags (a faux-progressive, ennui-driven gesture masks itself as an expression of sex liberation) and grown-ups are stuck in a groove: The sole human interaction between Sonny and Ruth besides awkward small talks is a rolling in the hay, and pathetically, for her, that’s an earth-shaking revelation; Duane’s incompetence to deflower Jacy is a heavy blow on his virility, which, in this rustic Podunk, is equivalent to a man’s entire masculinity, it punctures his alpha-male front, he is so shame-faced that he must skip town; Lois Farrow (Burstyn), Jacy’s hot-and-bothered mother, has a not so secret lover Abilene (Gulager), a creepy handyman, and isn’t cagey about her insatiability in front of her daughter. Everywhere you turn, you see moral debasement, especially after the straight arrow Sam suddenly gives up the ghost.

Everyone in Bogdanovich’s film seems to be in thrall of a pervasive pall of malaise, dysphoria and restiveness, is also afflicted by a stunted intelligent development, implied by the presence of Billy (Sam Bottoms, Timothy’s own younger brother), a mentally challenged boy whose upshot gets weaponized as a galvanizing bolt to spur Sonny into a full-blown nervous breakdown. Is this a wake-up call for him? THE LAST PICTURE SHOW’s finale evades such a statement.

Notably, the film racks up 8 Oscar nominations, half of which are for the actors (Johnson, Bridges, Leachman and Burstyn), and wins two, for Johnson and Leachman (both win for their first and only nomination). It also kick-starts Bridges’s and Burstyn’ glorious Oscar track records, both would win their golden statuette in due time. Objectively speaking, Johnson benefits immensely from embodying a stolid but sympathetic old geezer whose later absence casts great pathos on audience’s heart meanwhile a 21-year-old Bridges is a natural whippersnapper whose preternatural facility in front of the camera fits the silver screen like a glove.

If Leachman is more dexterous and emotionally effusive for her very tricky role as a dowdy, repressed country wife whose life gets a second wind by sleeping with a much younger lover, Burstyn’s flair of attitudinizing and pragmatic parenting renders Lois a more fascinating character. Also it is noteworthy that Shepherd makes a big splash in her first film, Jacy is a curios case running the gamut from frigidity to nymphomania, and Shepherd calibrates her transition and dilemma with striking aplomb and vexation. Lastly, Timothy Bottoms is often left without applauds, but he really shows a spongy quality while his costars well up. Sonny is absorbent of all the emotions around him but rarely manifest them, and his ultimate goodness and simplicity is the raison d’état why we should cherish a town like Anarene, bemoan its downturn and empathize with its pain and cracker-barrel resilience.

Cued by its diegetic music choices, the screenings of Vincente Minnelli’s FATHER OF THE BRIDE (1950) for sexual awakening and Howard Hawks’s RED RIVER (1948) for reminiscing about a more bullish yesteryear, Bogdanovich’s juvenilia (he was 32 in 1971) is a neorealist dirge bestowed with a pellucidly incisive perspective of its milieu, and executed in such a trenchant fashion that its impact remains indelibly visceral.

referential entries: Bogdanovich’s PAPER MOON (1973, 8.9/10), MASK (1985, 7.7/10); Howard Hawks’s RED RIVER (1948, 7.4/10); Vincente Minnelli’s FATHER OF THE BRIDE (1950, 7.1/10).

Title: The Last Picture Show

Year: 1971

Country: USA

Language: English

Genre: Drama, Romance

Director: Peter Bogdanovich

Screenwriters: Peter Bogdanovich, Larry McMurtry

based on the novel by Larry McMurtry

Cinematography: Robert Surtees

Editors: Peter Bogdanovich, Donn Cambern

Cast:

Timothy Bottoms

Jeff Bridges

Cybill Shepherd

Cloris Leachman

Ellen Burstyn

Ben Johnson

Eileen Brennan

Sam Bottoms

Clu Gulager

Sharon Ullrick

Randy Quaid

Joe Heathcock

Bull Thurman

Jessie Lee Fulton

Gary Brockette

Barc Doyle

John Hillerman

Rating: 8.2/10