The Last Picture Show

 Although it is embarrassing to admit, I've avoided Peter Boganovich's The Last Picture Show (1971), the director's first film and, possibly, his best, for almost all of my life. The movie's subject, "coming of age" in a tiny, dying Texas town didn't interest me and the movie's best known subplot, involving an affair between a teenage boy and his football coach's lonely wife, seemed mawkish and repellent.  Indeed, the film is surprisingly depraved, mostly about sex involving High School kids, and certain elements of the movie would induce much hand-wringing today.  The sex between the 40 year-old teacher's wife (Cloris Leachman received an Oscar for the part) and Sonny Boy, played by Timothy Bottoms, is probably statutory rape and, if the genders were reversed, would be subject to considerable moral reprobation by today's much less permissive standards.  (The so-called "Sexual Revolution" at least in mainstream cinema, has been in retreat for the last forty years at least; there is far less nudity and erotic content in Hollywood pictures today than in the seventies).  Bogdanovich films the sex and nudity so as to emphasize the salacious content -- he uses point of view perspectives for much of this material, effectively putting the viewer in the position of his randy teenagers.  And several of the actresses who end up naked in this movie are very young.  This sort of content is problematic today -- witness the re-evaluation of the film that is Woody Allen's masterpiece, Manhattan.  

The Last Picture Show is the kind of movie that reviewers call "moody" -- the film is shot in beautiful, melancholy black and white by Robert Surtees.  The editing is a little choppy but the picture looks great and the complicated roundelay of sexual encounters is lucidly staged and seems a bit like a hillbilly version of a Max Ophuels film, something like a north Texas La Ronde. The picture has an incredible soundtrack, packed with Hank Williams tunes.  I think this soundtrack got the movie in some kind of trouble.  No VHS or DVD version of the picture was issued for many years --  indeed, for the film's first thirty years it was almost impossible to see, excusing, perhaps, my failure to watch the picture. Directors were pretty casual with securing rights for music in movies in the old days and, probably, the soundtrack to The Last Picture Show would, today, cost many millions of dollars in terms of  licensing fees.  (My guess is that home media release of the picture stalled-out over royalties for the innumerable country-western and pop hits that comprise the film's musical cues -- I don't think the picture has any music that isn't extracted from juke-box tunes famous during the early fifties.)   The soundtrack to the film is so good that the picture is worth seeing just for the music cues played in the background.  It seems that the movie was pitched as a country-western riposte to American Graffiti which has a similarly spectacular rock and roll soundtrack -- both movies involve teenage kids and end with a protagonist going off to war:  in American Graffiti, I think the conflict in question is the Vietnam War; in The Last Picture Show, Duane Johnson, with Sonny Boy one of the two protagonists in the film, leaves the hamlet of Anarene, Texas for the Korean War -- the music by Hank Williams and Bob Wills is contemporary to the period depicted by the movie. 

It would be seductive to say that The Last Picture Show spans the period between the first movie shown on the Royal Theater's marquee, Father of the Bride, and the release of Red River -- but this doesn't make sense.  Father of the Bride was made in 1950, and probably would have got to Anarene, a remote village on the Texas-Oklahoma border in 1951 or 1952.   Red River was released in 1948 and so precedes the Spencer Tracy - Elizabeth Taylor Father of the Bride. (Before TV, rural movie theaters couldn't afford first-run movies until the picture had been shown in the big cities and it wasn't uncommon for a film to be screened in little towns more than a year after it's premiere -- and, by that time, the film's print was pretty nearly degraded into illegibility; this phenomenon is very clearly shown in Wim Wender's similarly melancholy masterpiece Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road), made about six or seven years after The Last Picture Show -- in the German film, one of the old Westerns shown in a remote German village burns up before our eyes when it sticks in an antique projector.)  It's fairly clear that the movie is set in 1951 or 1952.  The film proceeds chronologically, depicting landmark events in the senior year for the kids at Anarene High School -- we are told that the two heroes of the film, Sonny Boy and Duane are on the High School football team, a decidedly lackluster endeavor -- in the first scene, everyone in town mocks them for the loss the night before saying:  "You better learn to tackle."  Later the two boys play basketball with similarly awful results --they get beat 126 to 14 or something on that order.  This isn't surprising because the kids in the town aren't athletes but lovers (or would-be lovers) -- everyone is obsessed with sex and, if girls aren't available, they'll have to settle for "heifers" (meant literally I think).  Duane is dating a gorgeous girl, Jacy, who is a teenage femme fatale, a classic destroyer of men using an appeal that she is not really able to control  Jacy is what was once called a "prick-tease" -- that is, she seduces men, but, then, denies them access at the last moment.  In fact, she goes so far with his strategy that she even marries Sonny Boy -- this is after a disappointing sexual liaison with Duane --  only to call things off before they get to the Oklahoma honeymoon hotel.  (Her well-to-do parents, rich with oil money, rescue her.)  When Duane comes back from his basic training --he's enlisted to go Korea -- he gets in a savage fight with Sonny Boy, his best friend, and almost gouges out his eye with a broken beer bottle.  The fight is over Jacy, who has left town for greener pastures (Dallas) and college and isn't on the scene in any event.  This fight and the boy's subsequent reconciliation provides the movie with its climax -- a suitably disheartening one since, a few months after the fight between the boys, a truckdriver runs over the town's simpleton, Billy who spends his time sweeping the middle of the street with a frayed broom.  Sonny Boy carries the dead kid to the threshold of the town's squalid and decrepit pool hall and this seems to symbolize the town's coup de grace.  The picture on its last night shows Red River,  we see the stirring scenes of the cattle drive at the film's end, and the old woman now running the movie theater admits that she doesn't understand the business and has to close down the place.  There is final "dying fall" to the film that is equally depressing -- Sonny Boy tries to leave town, can't summon the nerve, and turns around, returning to his girlfriend, the football coach's doting, lonely wife.  After denouncing him for abandoning her in favor of her rival Jacy (Cybill Shepherd so there's not much of a contest here), she suggests that they can restore their relationship, an implication that is a new "fresh hell" on which the film ends. (In films of this kind, always one of the heroes, can't escape -- a brilliant example of this sort of climax is Fellini's similarly themed I Vitelloni).

The Last Picture Show is noteworthy for its astonishing cast.  Jeff Bridges plays Duane to Timothy Bottoms' Sonny Boy.  Cloris Leachman won an Oscar for her portrayal of Ruth, the football coach's miserable forty-year old wife -- it's the kind of performance that the Academy regards as "brave":  Leachman, a beautiful woman, looks dowdy, plain, and pinched and the part is thankless:  there's no glamor and Leachman's character is pathetically possessive of a boy over whom she has no plausible claim at all. Ellen Burstyn has the part of Jacy's mother -- she's carrying on a very open affair with one of her husband's rough-neck oilmen, the loathsome Abilene (Clu Gallagher)..  She urges her teenage daughter to have sex to "get it over with" and demystify the whole process. (This advice turns to be a little problematic because Jacy, after losing her virginity, gets entangled with Abilene, her mother's lover, who, in effect, rapes her.)  Toward the end of the movie, Burstyn's character is about to seduce Sonny Boy but thinks better of it, and zips away in her big Cadillac.  Randy Quaid plays a rich kid seducer who entices Jacy to a pool party involving lots of nudity -- Jacy does a clumsy strip-tease on a diving board, demonstrating the complexity of early fifties feminine underwear.  (The film has a running joke that the boy's can't figure out how to get the girls out of their intricate undergarments and so the young women, while protesting their innocence, simply disrobe for them.)  Of course, the most notable performance in the film is by Ben Johnson who displays unwavering virtue in the midst of all of the sexual shenanigans around him.  Johnson is Sam the Lion, the owner of the town's picture show, pool hall, and cafe and the film's (and village's) moral center..  He's an old cowboy and Johnson channels forty years of performing in Westerns in playing the role.  He delivers a wonderful soliloquy at a "tank" --- that is, a sort of artificial lake where cattle drink.  In his speech, he remembers a wonderful girl that he courted at the tank twenty years earlier -- she was wild and we later learn that the woman is the character played by Ellen Burstyn:  we see her flee Sam the Lion's funeral when he dies about two-thirds of the way through the movie.  (Bogdanovich and Larry McMurty who wrote the script based on the latter's novel have a tendency to be over-explicit -- later, Burstyn gets a showy scene in which she eulogizes Sam the Lion:  it's beautifully written but unnecessary since the grave-side scene showed us what we need to know.)  When Sam the Lion departs the picture a little of its energy leaks out and some of the final sequences seem a little perfunctory --  for instance, the death of Billy, the town idiot, feels unnecessary to me.  

Orson Welles, Bogdanovich's mentor, famously said that he would never shoot an explicit sex scene because imagery of that sort puts too much pressure on the actors -- they have to pretend physical sensations that they can't be feeling.  Bogdanovich seems determined to prove the old master wrong -- he spares the audience nothing with respect to huge close-ups of his stars being penetrated.  Cybill Shepherd almost loses her virginity on screen -- we survey her face as she reacts with disappointment to Duane's impotence.  Poor Cloris Leachman has to register a whole range of emotions from erotic ardor to motherly solicitude to her inevitable disappointment with the physical act itself, all in a tight probing close-up.  One wishes that Bogdanovich had been a bit more tactful and spared his actresses these close-ups, but, in fairness, Cloris Leachman won her Oscar probably on the basis of this invasive imagery.  

The film has some implausibilities but they don't much matter.  The town sometimes seems far larger than it is in reality.  (It's 25 miles to Wichita Falls where people go for their doctor's appointments and serious business.)  There's a subplot involving a preacher's kid who tries to molest a little girl that comes out of nowhere and leads to nothing.  The degree of illicit sexual activity in the little hamlet (it's a miniature Peyton Place) seems sort of exaggerated but who am I to say? -- maybe, the film is an accurate picture of what it was like to live in a town of this sort.  The film 's three themes don't ever exactly coalesce:  the movie is about sexual yearning and loneliness and the meretricious relationships that flow from such feelings; secondarily, the film is about the gradual destruction of the little town, symbolized by the death of Sam the Lion; finally, the picture is about the closing of the American West -- on the weekend that Sam the Lion dies, Sonny Boy and Duane have gone to Mexico, the last frontier for the kids in the town.  The elegiac use of the film Red River with its iconic profiles of John Wayne embody the film's theme about the demise of the old West and its codes of honor.  These elements of the picture are closely related but they don't precisely fit together, possibly a good thing since the film is not at its best when it is spelling out its meanings.

I wasn't as highly impressed by the movie on actually watching it as I expected-- the film is one of those movies with a reputation that may seem outsized when you first encounter it, particularly now fifty years after the movie was made.  But, a day later, the film has greatly expanded in my imagination and I can recognize why it was accounted great in its day.  It still is great.  

The Last Picture Show prominently features an image of the town's crossroad, Texas Highway 79's intersection with 25.  This establishes that the location for the movie is, in reality, Archer City, the place where Larry McMurty spent most of his life.  On the Internet, you can see pictures of the Royal Theater and the Spur Hotel, both featured in many shots in the movie.