The Sheila Variations

On The Last Picture Show

A couple of excerpts from Easy Riders, Raging Bulls about the film "The Last Picture Show", directed by Peter Bogdanovich (this is for you, MikeR):

Now that "The Last Picture Show" was happening, Bogdanovich finally got around to reading the book. He realized, to his chagrin, that it had less to do with the last picture show, or the end of movies, than with the coming of age in the early '50s - in a godforsaken, desolate Texas town, yet. The story revolved around the friendship between two young men, Duane, a charming roughneck from the wrong side of the tracks, and Sonny, the good boy trying to find his place in the world, and the damage inflicted on both of them by the rich, bored, Anarene femme fatale, Jacy Farrow. Thrown into this mix is Sam the Lion, the elderly proprietor of the pool hall and run-down movie theater. Sam, rolling cigarettes and telling stories, is the sole repository of decency in the town, and when he dies, suddenly, of a stroke, it all goes to hell. As Sonny puts it, "Nothing's really been right since Sam the Lion died."

Peter was in a funk. He was a New York boy; what did he know from small towns in Texas? Polly [Peter's wife and business partner and artistic alter ego] liked the book because it could have been her, had she grown up in the Midwest instead of Europe ...

Just as Beatty and [Arthur] Penn, Benton and Newman saw "Bonnie and Clyde" as a French treatment of American themes, Peter and Polly saw that by 1969, in Polly's words, at last it might be possible to "make the book in America the way the French would have made it, where these weird American sexual mores could be investigated." [The French New Wave cinema set off a firestorm of imitation and envy in this country - Truffaut, Godard - these were the real innovators - they were the inspiration for Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Scorsese, DeNiro - all the new generation.]

Bogdanovich wanted to shoot in black and white, thought it would convey period better than color, but it was unheard of.

I can't imagine that film in color. It would just be wrong.

And then the film opened.

It is easy to see why people were impressed. In an era of gaudy color, it was shot in a restrained black and white, had a spare, dusty look, Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans set in motion, or better, from Peter's point of view, Ford in his "Grapes of Wrath" period. And yet, as Platt [Bogdanovich's wife - whom he dumped during filming, dumped her for Cybill Shepherd] intended, it delivered a European frankness that was new to the American screen and even more unusual in this Dustbowl setting: Sonny and his girlfriend listlessly making out in the front seat of a truck, her bra hanging from the rearview mirror, a casual shot of her bare breasts, just there, a fact of life, like the dry tumbleweed visible through the windshield...

But Picture Show has a lot more to offer than mere titillation. Everything works, looks, and sounds just right. Tim Bottoms is splendid as Sonny, tentative and goofy-looking, fumbling through the last years of adolescence toward adulthood, eyes sorrowful beneath a mop of tangled hair and blinking as if he's just been hatched, trying to navigate the strange world of adults. Ditto [Cybill] Shepherd, as Bogdanovich instantly understood, perfect at tearing the wings off the boys, self-absorbed, thoughtless, and tempting, a blond lollipop. And the others, Burstyn as her bored mother, trapped in an unfulfilling marriage having once traded wealth for happiness, overwhelmed by melancholy, the feeling of life passing her by ...

The last shot is the one that remains in memory: the desolate main street of Anarene, emptied of people, the wind howling, leaves and bits of debris whipped through the air. It's as powerful an image of alienation and loss as anything in Antonioni...

"The Last Picture Show" was about the end of an era of motion pictures...It was a hit, and a critics' darling as well. As Peter sensed when he approached the project, coming of age in a small town in Texas was not something he knew much about. Not only had he grown up in New York, he had never even come of age, being one of those children who struck people as premature adults. But he had succeeded in making the material his own, if only by throwing himself headlong into an adolescent affair with Cybill that provoked the jealousy of Bottoms and [Jeff] Bridges, mimicking the mechanics of the plot. As [Bert] Schneider and [Bob] Rafaelson [the producers] had recognized, Bogdanovich was aesthetically, at least, quite conservative.

Scorsese put it this way: "The last person to make classical American cinema was Peter. To really utilize the wide frame and the use of the deep focal length. He really understood it."

In contrast to authority-bashing, adult-baiting pictures like "Bonnie and Clyde", "Easy Rider", and MASH, "The Last Picture Show" is reverential toward its patriarchy, Ben Johnson's Sam the Lion, who is the film's teacher, law-giver, fount of values.

When he dies, an era ends, just as surely as it does in Ford's elegiac "Liberty Valance".