The title, "The Last Picture Show", refers to the final screening to take place at the only cinema in the small town of Anarene, Texas, before it closes. The significance of this event is that Anarene is a slowly declining settlement where there is little to do and little to keep the townspeople from drifting away; once the cinema is gone there will be even less. In Larry McMurtry's novel on which the film is based the town was called "Thalia", but director Peter Bogdanovich borrowed the name of a genuine Texan ghost town.
The action takes place over about a year in 1951 and 1952 and tells a coming-of-age story about Sonny Crawford and Duane Jackson, two teenage boys in their final year at high school. Other important characters are Duane's girlfriend Jacy Farrow, Ruth Popper, the middle-aged wife of the school's football coach, with whom Sonny begins an affair, and "Sam the Lion", the proprietor not only of the cinema but also of Anarene's pool hall and café which constitute the town's only other facilities for entertainment or social interaction.
Bogdanovich described the film as homage to Howard Hawks' "Red River", which is the film shown in Anarene's "last picture show". It also struck me as an homage to Martin Ritt's "Hud", also set in a small Texas town and also based upon a McMurtry novel. The two films have a similar look, both dominated by shots of the wide-open Texas plains. Both films were shot in black-and-white, something still quite common when "Hud" was made in 1963 but which had become very unusual by 1971, only eight years later.
The film might look like a movie from the fifties or early sixties, but it doesn't sound like one. Something else had changed in those eight years in that American society had become a lot more permissive, and with the end of the Production Code film-makers could be franker and more open about sex. As one might imagine from a film about teenagers, sex is the major preoccupation of Sonny, Duane, Jacy and their contemporaries and something much discussed. There are some scenes, including one in which a mentally handicapped boy loses his virginity to a prostitute and one in which a preacher's son reveals an unhealthy interest in young children, which could never have been included in films made only a few years earlier.
It is sometimes said of Bogdanovich that his early career as a director was harmed by his insistence on casting his then girlfriend, Cybill Shepherd, in roles which were beyond her acting ability. I have not seen all his collaborations with Shepherd, but I must say that this theory is not borne out by "The Last Picture Show". Shepherd, in her film debut, gives a fine performance here. Jacy, who comes from a well-to-do family, is popular and described as "the prettiest girl in Anarene", but this makes her no more than the biggest fish in a particularly small pond. She knows that she is expected to marry a boy from an equally well-off family and settle down as a housewife and mother, but is looking for more than that, in terms of both love and of life in general. She knows that her mother Lois did just what was expected of her and yet has ended up unfulfilled and miserable, failing to find happiness in either her marriage to Jacy's father or in her frequent affairs with other men.
Shepherd's is not the only fine performance here. The whole film is well acted, with too many good performances to single them all out, but mention must be made of Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges as Sonny and Duane, Ben Johnson as Sam, who becomes a sort of father-figure to the town's youth, and Cloris Leachman as Ruth and Ellen Burstyn as Lois, both in their ways lonely, frustrated women.
Films, especially coming-of-age films, made in the seventies and eighties about the fifties and early sixties- "American Graffiti", "Diner", "Grease"- tended to take an affectionately nostalgic look back at the earlier period, seen as the time of a kinder, gentler America before the trauma of Vietnam and its accompanying loss of innocence. There is little affectionate or nostalgic about "The Last Picture Show". We are reminded that if the young men of the early fifties did not have Vietnam they had their own Asian war in the shape of Korea; in the course of the film Duane joins the army before going away to fight. Yet in a way the Army allows him his only chance of escape from Anarene; most of his contemporaries can see few appealing prospects for themselves in the town, which is in a state of both economic and social decline, yet lack the educational qualifications or the financial means to find work elsewhere.
I would not rate the film as highly as "Hud", one of the great films of the sixties; the action can sometimes be difficult to follow because of Bogdanovich's fondness of a non-linear style of storytelling with scenes presented to us out of chronological order. Yet when we bear in mind that this was the work of an inexperienced director in his early thirties, "The Last Picture Show" can be seen as a considerable achievement. The teenage coming-of-age story can at its worst descend into sentimental cliché, but here the format is used to examine the American Dream, a dream which can all too often prove illusory for those living in little towns behind the van of time. 8/10
The action takes place over about a year in 1951 and 1952 and tells a coming-of-age story about Sonny Crawford and Duane Jackson, two teenage boys in their final year at high school. Other important characters are Duane's girlfriend Jacy Farrow, Ruth Popper, the middle-aged wife of the school's football coach, with whom Sonny begins an affair, and "Sam the Lion", the proprietor not only of the cinema but also of Anarene's pool hall and café which constitute the town's only other facilities for entertainment or social interaction.
Bogdanovich described the film as homage to Howard Hawks' "Red River", which is the film shown in Anarene's "last picture show". It also struck me as an homage to Martin Ritt's "Hud", also set in a small Texas town and also based upon a McMurtry novel. The two films have a similar look, both dominated by shots of the wide-open Texas plains. Both films were shot in black-and-white, something still quite common when "Hud" was made in 1963 but which had become very unusual by 1971, only eight years later.
The film might look like a movie from the fifties or early sixties, but it doesn't sound like one. Something else had changed in those eight years in that American society had become a lot more permissive, and with the end of the Production Code film-makers could be franker and more open about sex. As one might imagine from a film about teenagers, sex is the major preoccupation of Sonny, Duane, Jacy and their contemporaries and something much discussed. There are some scenes, including one in which a mentally handicapped boy loses his virginity to a prostitute and one in which a preacher's son reveals an unhealthy interest in young children, which could never have been included in films made only a few years earlier.
It is sometimes said of Bogdanovich that his early career as a director was harmed by his insistence on casting his then girlfriend, Cybill Shepherd, in roles which were beyond her acting ability. I have not seen all his collaborations with Shepherd, but I must say that this theory is not borne out by "The Last Picture Show". Shepherd, in her film debut, gives a fine performance here. Jacy, who comes from a well-to-do family, is popular and described as "the prettiest girl in Anarene", but this makes her no more than the biggest fish in a particularly small pond. She knows that she is expected to marry a boy from an equally well-off family and settle down as a housewife and mother, but is looking for more than that, in terms of both love and of life in general. She knows that her mother Lois did just what was expected of her and yet has ended up unfulfilled and miserable, failing to find happiness in either her marriage to Jacy's father or in her frequent affairs with other men.
Shepherd's is not the only fine performance here. The whole film is well acted, with too many good performances to single them all out, but mention must be made of Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges as Sonny and Duane, Ben Johnson as Sam, who becomes a sort of father-figure to the town's youth, and Cloris Leachman as Ruth and Ellen Burstyn as Lois, both in their ways lonely, frustrated women.
Films, especially coming-of-age films, made in the seventies and eighties about the fifties and early sixties- "American Graffiti", "Diner", "Grease"- tended to take an affectionately nostalgic look back at the earlier period, seen as the time of a kinder, gentler America before the trauma of Vietnam and its accompanying loss of innocence. There is little affectionate or nostalgic about "The Last Picture Show". We are reminded that if the young men of the early fifties did not have Vietnam they had their own Asian war in the shape of Korea; in the course of the film Duane joins the army before going away to fight. Yet in a way the Army allows him his only chance of escape from Anarene; most of his contemporaries can see few appealing prospects for themselves in the town, which is in a state of both economic and social decline, yet lack the educational qualifications or the financial means to find work elsewhere.
I would not rate the film as highly as "Hud", one of the great films of the sixties; the action can sometimes be difficult to follow because of Bogdanovich's fondness of a non-linear style of storytelling with scenes presented to us out of chronological order. Yet when we bear in mind that this was the work of an inexperienced director in his early thirties, "The Last Picture Show" can be seen as a considerable achievement. The teenage coming-of-age story can at its worst descend into sentimental cliché, but here the format is used to examine the American Dream, a dream which can all too often prove illusory for those living in little towns behind the van of time. 8/10