The Last Picture Show
Made: 1971
Cast: Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Ben Jonhson, Ellen Burstyn, Cloris Leachman, Elieen Brennan
Director: Peter Bogdanovich
Screenwriter: Peter Bogdanovich, Larry Mcmurty
Cinematographer: Robert Surtees
Producer: Steven Friedman
Ever since I first saw it, the Last Picture Show has been among my favorite movies. It sucks you in to its world unlike almost any other movie I have seen, and part of the reason is that it’s perfectly captures a time and place. Wichita Falls could be any town in Texas during the 1950's, or really any small town today. Graduating from high school is a rite of passage for Americans, and the uncertain feelings surrounding it are universal. But if The Last Picture Show was only about high school graduates and the struggles of poor people during the Korean War era, it would be the fake television show that made people stop going to movies theaters in the 1950's anyway. Last Picture Show captures the essence of a specific time and place and it tells its story in an entirely different way than other movies of its time.
The movies main characters are Sonny (Tim Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges) who are on the football team for the local high school. It is pointed out several times in the film's first minutes that they don't win that much. In fact, nothing in the town works that well. The film theater is on its last legs, the pool hall is often deserted, and the football coach and his wife Ruth (Cloris Leachman) don't get along. Jacy (Cybil Shepard) is the high school beauty who dates Duane almost because she is "supposed" to, though her mother Lois (Ellen Burstyn) advises against it. Are they also supposed to get married and have a bunch of kids? Is there any hope to live in this town, or should they get out and run away? Sonny is fed up with his girlfriend, but not really for a good reason; he's just a horny high school boy that doesn't understand much. Ditto for his little brother figure, the mute boy Billy (played by Tim's real life brother Bill) who is raised by Sonny's surrogate father Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson). The best acting is done by Bridges, Shepard, Burstyn and Leachman, and it's no surprise they all became breakout stars after this movie. Bridges and Shepard especially practically burst off the screen in scenes involving tortured romance and a graduation swimming party no one could forget.
The Last Picture Show also changed the way we as an audience views movies. I think that is why it is constantly compared to being "a debut like Citizen Kane" (though this was not actually Bogdanovich's debut movie). Peter Bogdanovich and Larry Mcmurty (the original author of the book) brought the story to life on the screen with well thought out and edited ideas. It is very subtle, but it shifts focus away from main character and focuses on the side characters. Most films and stories told around the time were about characters like Duane, told from his point of view. The headstrong, impulsive, eager young man who wants to be a soldier. The movie is actually told from the point of view of sensitive Sonny, the thoughtful guy who is more like a sidekick to Duane. When the two have a conversation in their favorite diner, the camera shifts toward Genevieve, the woman who makes them burgers and observes the conversation from her point of view. In effect, her character becomes a larger mythological type figure as the movie goes along. The same is also true for Sam, who we only find out as the movie goes owned the theater, owned the pool hall, and owned the diner. Sam in his own way, set in motion all of the events of the entire film. Jacy is more like "her grandmother" we are briefly told but her mother Lois was, well, more like Sam. Sam and Lois also become bigger and bigger characters as the movie progresses. It is no coincidence that two acting Oscars were won for the movie, and both of them were for Supporting Actors.
The 1970's brought in a new kind of accessibility for movie makers. Most directors were focused on the New American Cinema and the freedom they now had to speak and stylize in any way that they wanted. What Peter Bogdanovich does in this movie, and what he is one of the first directors to achieve, is to speak the language of the time as it was actually spoken. Bogdanovich is an "Assimilationist", which makes sense because he takes the values of the old cinema and applies them to the reality of his time, the 70's teenagers in LPS are hardly Leave it to Beaver; they are intelligent and complex, while also immature and vulgar. Sex and newfound freedom are among the main themes of the movie. For a movie made to look and feel like a black and white film from the 50's, there is an abundance of frank nudity and sex; it still seems modern to this day. The reason is because it is aggressive in its tone, bizarre and awkward in its approach. The kids of the school are afraid and excited about the future outside of high school, like say the classmates of George Lucas's American Graffiti made several years after this. Unlike that movie though, the LPS is a personal portrayal with a more down to earth lesson. There is an odd scene about midway through the movie featuring a child molester named Tommy that has a tossed off feel, but rings very true thrown in the middle of the film. The important thing is not what he was doing with a little girl in his car, but that he was a classmate of Bridges and Bottoms. As tragic as it is, it deepens the sense of change and longing to the people of the town and the young high schooler's eyes. Also, it adds to the devil charm that Bogdanovich always had in his films, from the father-daughter thieves in Paper Moon (1973), the insane ramblings of Barbara Streisand in What's Up Doc? (1972), the deformed child in Mask (1985), Bogdanovich always got away with his oddball ideas.
As the movie develops, the people of the town are explored and developed in different ways. Some are careless and awful people (Jacy and the truck driver that runs over a child), some are wise and teaching (Sam and Genevieve), and some are obviously still finding themselves (Sonny and Duane). Friends fight, lovers quarrel, great people die, but time stands still. The last picture shown in the theater in the movie is 1948's Red River, and its enthusiasm and yippee-kay-ies ring cold in the dead movie house. As the kids leave, the small woman behind the popcorn counter weeps because she says people just stopped coming to the picture shows. All soaked up in television and their own lives. Sure enough, Bottoms last visit to Ruth there is a tv blaring, commercials and all. One of Bogdanovich's mentors, the director Howard Hawks, gave the classic rule: "A good movie has 3 great scenes and no bad scenes." He followed this rule to a tee in LPS.
LPS influence is still being felt, through dramas that focus on multiple characters, through the way adapting a book can really have an effect. As good as the book is, I still can't get over how the iconic scene where Sam talks about his lost love at the fishing pond was actually added by Bogodnovish. "The original scene in the book, Sam talked about pissing outside," Bogdanovich said in the DVD supplements. That would not have made a great movie scene, even though it may have added humor to the book. The scene in the movie is probably the most famous, and it should be. The slow zoom in and zoom out of the camera as Johnson delivers his dialogue is one of the most effective scenes in any drama. It sneaks up on you, makes its point, and then takes your breath away. On repeat viewings, it just adds and adds a sense of lost love and despair. A theme for LPS might be "it's better than to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all." The relationship, only talked about by Sam and later by Jacy's mother Lois, is echoed in Sonny's relationship with Ruth.