Peter Bogdanovich  (1971)

This was the third time I’d seen The Last Picture Show.  (There were only half a dozen other people in the Curzon Richmond so the closing down of the cinema in the film had a new resonance.)   I liked it when I saw it first, around the time of its original release, but was disappointed on a second viewing, only six years ago at BFI.  I found it rather thinly depressing then and it’s not a film to raise the spirits but it seemed stronger again, because richer, this time around.   The nostalgic elements in The Last Picture Show are more ambiguous and cut deeper than in Bogdanovich’s other best-known work Paper Moon (even though it was watching that on television the other week that made want to see The Last Picture Show, which is showing again at BFI and being given a wider re-release).    This portrait of a small Texan town called Anarene in 1952 has an elegiac quality yet the lives in the film are steeped in anomie.  The black-and-white photography is more completely convincing here than in Paper Moon:  it serves as a means of mythologising the material as well as suggesting a monochrome way of life (the DoP was Robert Surtees).  There’s pretty well nothing to do in Anarene, once you’ve reached adolescence, but to have or want sex; the relatively affluent characters aren’t any less frustrated or regretful than those of slender means.  Of the three principal youngsters – school contemporaries – two eventually progress by making an exit:   Duane (Jeff Bridges) joins the army and goes to fight in Korea; Jacy (Cybill Shepherd) goes to college in Dallas.   The film’s central consciousness, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), stays put.

The Last Picture Show is based on a 1966 novel of the same name by Larry McMurtry.  According to Wikipedia, the book is semi-autobiographical:  McMurtry was born in 1936 in Archer City, Texas and Anarene itself is described on Wikipedia as a ‘ghost town’ in Archer City.   McMurtry graduated from North Texas State University in 1958 and by 1961 he had published his first novel, Horseman, Pass By, on which Hud (1963) is based.  McMurtry didn’t work on the screenplay for Hud but he adapted The Last Picture Show with Bogdanovich.  He’s had a variety of success in the years since:  his 1975 novel Terms of Endearment was turned into a multi-Oscar winner by James L Brooks in 1983; in 1985 McMurtry himself won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Lonesome Dove, which became a hugely successful TV mini-series; more recently, McMurtry and Diana Ossana won an Oscar for their adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain (2005).   He’s currently adapting his 2000 novel Boone’s Lick for the screen.

There are one or two things I don’t understand in The Last Picture Show – especially the absence of any reference to Sonny’s family (or, if he doesn’t have one, his home life).  As Pauline Kael points out in her review, the selection of movies showing at the Royal cinema in Anarene (changed from the novel) is less than subtle:  the last picture show in the film is a screening of Red River and the connotations of a ‘classic’ Western obscure the fact that lesser films were no less culturally important to kids in places like this in the years before television took hold.  But, all in all, the screenplay is very skilful in the way it dramatises bored and often uneventful lives.  It’s not just that Bogdanovich and McMurtry make these lives interesting.  They also succeed in making things happen in the story without this seeming a violation of, or a loss of confidence in, the boredom at its heart.  Bogdanovich uses music on the radio intelligently too:  hearing Hank Williams’ ‘Cold, Cold Heart’ repeatedly creates a strong sense of how much songs like this formed part of the texture of the time and place – words and music that spoke to people’s own experiences but must also have got on their nerves and reinforced their sense of being trapped.   (Williams’ relatively jaunty ‘Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used To Do)?’ is played both at the beginning and over the closing credits.)  It’s an odd thing about The Last Picture Show:  even between the 2005 and yesterday’s viewings, I found I’d forgotten most of the events in the story – including major ones, like the fight in which Duane badly damages Sonny’s left eye or, right at the end, the death of Billy (Sam Bottoms, Timothy’s younger brother), the simple, mute boy who’s devoted to Sonny.  Yet I remembered the people – their situations and characteristics – clearly.  This is partly a tribute to the actors; but it’s a compliment to the writing and direction too – to how fully McMurtry and Bogdanovich create the world of the film.

This applies to all the main characters, in spite of the fact that the younger ones are conceived more individually than some of the older ones.  The latter include Sam ‘the Lion’ – the owner of the cinema, the pool hall and the café in the town, and a father figure to the teenage boys (who seem to have no fathers of their own).  At the time this film was made, Ben Johnson was the best-known actor in the cast, thanks largely to his roles in Westerns.  Casting him as Sam increases the character’s symbolic load but Johnson’s quiet authority makes light of it.  Another of the pictures showing at the Royal in the course of the film is John Ford’s Wagon Master (1950), in which Johnson played the lead.  This cluster of associations around him implies that The Last Picture Show is nostalgic for a more heroic era of one-horse-towns and Sam is given a speech of reminiscence which begins, ‘You wouldn’t believe how this country’s changed’.  This is clearly meant to be a major moment in the movie – the camera is held on Ben Johnson’s face throughout.   It’s to Johnson’s credit that he stays in character and keeps the sentimentality in check during this speech.  (It’s reported that he was unhappy having so many lines to speak in The Last Picture Show but he handles them beautifully.)   The one key event in the film that I did remember was Sam’s sudden death (which happens off-screen) and not only because of Bogdanovich’s memorable staging of his funeral.  Sam the Lion’s passing is convincingly at the heart of the film because, although things weren’t that great for Sonny et al when Sam was alive, we understand and believe that nothing will be the same now he’s gone.

In his will, Sam leaves the pool hall to Sonny and the picture house to the eccentric Miss Mosey (Jessie Lee Fulton, who’s touching in her small role – in an unobtrusive but perfect moment, Bogdanovich picks up Miss Mosey’s private sorrow at the closing of the cinema).   The café is left to Genevieve, a permanent fixture behind the counter there.  The Last Picture Show is remarkable in retrospect in that it not only launched the film careers of the young leads but supplied breakthrough roles to character players already in or approaching their forties, like Eileen Brennan, who plays Genevieve.  In the case of Ellen Burstyn, this was a breakthrough to starring roles for some years to come:  Burstyn plays Lois, Jacy’s mother – stuck in a comfortable marriage that’s so boring she feels it eroding her past as well as closing off a future.  Both Lois and the shrewdly realistic, good-hearted Genevieve come over as somewhat generic figures in this kind of setting – and, like Sam, each is given a summing-up monologue that reinforces this impression, although Burstyn’s in particular is delivered with stylish conviction.

Both Ellen Burstyn and Eileen Brennan are distinctive but not especially nuanced performers.  Perhaps the third important middle-aged female role – Ruth Popper, the high school sports coach’s sex-starved wife with whom Sonny has an affair – is a type too but Cloris Leachman makes Ruth seem one of a kind, thanks largely to what she does corporeally:  this vaguely neurasthenic woman seems to acquire physical substance when she’s sharing her bed with Sonny and to wither again once he’s left her.  Apart from Johnson’s Sam, the middle-aged men don’t come over as strongly as the women (not surprising when their plot function is principally to leave their wives dissatisfied), although Clu Gulager is good as Abilene – who’s employed by Jacy’s father, ravenously desired by her mother, but ends up having sex with Jacy herself.  John Hillerman makes a brief, droll appearance as a high school teacher.

Timothy Bottoms doesn’t look like a star in the making and didn’t become one but he is marvellous as Sonny.   Whether or not this has anything to do with his limitations as an actor, Bottoms is extremely persuasive as a late adolescent who’s not sure what he thinks and unable to express his feelings fully.  He has a sensitivity and a blurred, slightly impacted quality that work very well together – the fact that you seem to be looking into Bottoms’ face rather than receiving what he projects makes Sonny more affecting.   It’s easy now of course to spot Jeff Bridges as the outstanding talent here:  as Duane, he has the affable naturalness that you still associate with him but he also gives a strong sense of a boy with the potential to lose control of himself, as Duane eventually does, when he sets about his friend Sonny.  Bridges’ sunny quality is all the more effective because it seems so threatened in the dusty desolation of Anarene.   Cybill Shepherd isn’t in the same acting league as either of the boys:  when she’s trying to get Jacy’s teasing selfishness through her line readings, she’s a little clumsy.  What saves her performance is that her concentration on trying to get the words right seems to reduce her physical self-awareness and makes her a stronger, more expressive presence as a result.   Sam Bottoms is appealing as Billy and Randy Quaid registers as a smirking lech, although what he does seems unsurprising now.  The lesser-known younger actors who make an impression are Gary Brockette (as a rich boy who won’t screw Jacy until she loses her virginity), Sharon Taggart (as the humourless girlfriend Sonny dumps at a fairly early stage) and Barc Doyle (as a preacher’s son, who features in an odd but well done subplot about the abduction of a young girl).

24 April 2011