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Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
Starring Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd,
Cloris Leachman, Ben Johnson, Ellen Burstyn
USA, 1971
Rated R (sexuality, nudity, violence)
SMALL TOWN MESS
"Nothing’s ever the way it’s supposed to be at all," says the Cybill Shepherd character, Jacy Farrow, one of the many high school characters in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show experiencing a "sexual awakening" of sorts. The soon-to-be adults are discovering that love and sex aren’t as glamorous or easy as the Cary Grant movies cracked them up to be, and life is no bed of roses. The film, one of the first influential movies of the ‘70s and, I think, one of the greatest motion pictures ever made, is based on the Larry McMurtry novel and is alive with reality, ugly reality. Peter Bogdanovich was a film critic prior to making his first film, Targets, in 1968 and, in the tradition of the French New Wavers, Truffaut and Godard, became successful and well-known in both the fields of directing and criticism. The Last Picture Show was his second film and is regarded as his best.
The film takes place in a dying town, Anarene, Texas, between World War II and Korea. What is gotten across in the film is the complete lack of anonymity there is in small towns such as these, and that there is certainly no less social heat in rural America than there is in urban America. Everyone in this town knows what everyone else is doing. The peace and quiet we usually associate with small towns is no where to be found in this portrait; suspicions run rampant, young men and women have sex with utter disregard, and regret burns strong like fire underneath the surface of families and friends. Sonny Crawford, a high school student, (Timothy Bottoms) is the central character of the film, and we realize the instability on which Anarene is planted and which lives in the hearts of all the citizens who long to escape the town of little opportunity through his eyes.
All the teenagers are having illicit sex and virginity has become a sin in Anarene. Sonny’s best friend, Duane (Jeff Bridges), is being manipulated by Jacy (Shepherd), who only dates him to lose her virginity. She frequents the teenage sex parties, but pretends she is an innocent young thing (she is eventually deflowered by her mother’s lover). When she realizes her boyfriend is sexually inadequate, she kicks him out of her life and moves on, trying and succeeding in seducing Sonny Crawford. This is a world where love has exited and what teens do know about love, they express with mechanized intimacy. The only ‘pure’ love relationship here seems to be that of Sonny and his high school coach’s wife, Ruth Popper (Cloris Leachman). The affair is sweet and tender and misguided, but it is honest love that is not to be confused with the cold farce of Mrs. Robinson and Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. All the elders look on, knowing the experiences of the children mirror their own teenage years. Parents urge their children to move away from the dead town and go to a good college and marry rich.
The Last Picture Show doesn’t make the suffering glamorous, even though the story and style are a bit calculative. Even the ‘pure love’ of Sonny and Ruth is interrupted by the boy’s natural desire for a more ‘normal’ relationship with Jacy. The plainness of Anarene, to be presumptuous, has taught the kids complacency and boredom, and so have the parents, who were unable to leave and feel it is already too late to escape. Marriage in The Last Picture Show is seen as without affection and as a binding institution. When Jacy and Sonny decide to get married, it isn’t because of love but because of Jacy’s seduction and rebelliousness and Sonny’s lack of anything better to do. True love between the older generation in Anarene, we learn, was stifled by marriage, as well.
The title refers to that time in the ‘50s when television became the main means of entertainment and cinema faded into the background. The Anarene movie theater is shut down, its final screening being the John Wayne classic Red River. Television becomes a way to isolate oneself from society, and because everyone knows each other and can’t get away from each other in this Texas town, loneliness and isolation is embraced.
There is a quiet little boy in the film who is one of Sonny’s best friends, and his ignorance and silence almost signifies an innocence that is completely gone from Anarene. When he is run over in the street and killed near the end of the film, it is devastating. The tears of Sonny illustrate a certain desire within the townsfolk to preserve evidence of happiness and naiveté that the characters have not been able to keep within themselves.
The Last Picture Show is one of those films where characters’ lives intertwine and it spawned descendants like American Graffiti, all the mosaic-like Robert Altman films, and even 1999’s sprawling Magnolia. It explores sex and society with accuracy. The film is dull in imagery, its cinematography giving off a somber feel that is appropriate for capturing the sleepy town. Many scenes reminded me of Bonnie and Clyde, visually.
Timothy Bottoms carries the film on his shoulders playing Sonny, and his performance is beautifully executed, but the thunder is not to be taken away from the rest of the cast. Cloris Leachman’s is my favorite performance in the film. Her character, Mrs. Popper, is filled with the sadness and desperation that lies behind the souls of the teenagers in the film, and she is as unstable as a child. Leachman is stirring and she has a face that exudes pain pitch-perfect. She delivers her lines as if she were that frail teenager betrayed by her boyfriend. Ellen Burstyn plays Jacy’s sexy, tough, middle-aged mother. Burstyn was one of the great ‘70s actresses and she has always been able to evoke that outward feminine frustration. Ben Johnson plays Sam the Lion, the town’s only role model, and he is down-to-earth and very good. Jeff Bridges flaunts great talent here as Duane, and Cybill Shepherd, though I feel she is rather weak in the role of the confused, sinful Jacy, has an aura laced with the appropriate insincerity that suits her part.
There are a couple of monologues in the film delivered by the older characters to the younger ones. They reminisce about when they were in high school and talk regretfully about their mistakes in love. The Last Picture Show is so affecting because it shows small town life as a desperate cycle- people are trapped and can’t get out. In its day, it was controversial for its nudity and sexuality, but controversy has never been a true factor in the quality of a film. This movie is more than just provocative hoopla: it penetrates the soul because it depicts sex, love, and life as messy and unfair, and is slightly optimistic at the end without turning sour. The Last Picture Show is not exactly brutally honest to a point of torturing its audience, but it is truthful. Unlike many dramas on such subject matter (adolescent and small town struggle, over the years, have been discussed endlessly in films to the point where they have become something of a dramatic cliché) the film is not very nostalgic, maybe because it hasn’t dated much and the content and characters are still very relevant. Sex here is rarely shown as the result of love but of wantonness, curiosity, desire for status, naiveté, and even boredom. The Last Picture Show is deep, yet it is very much a pop movie; emotional, yet not burdened by histrionics; not blatant but still outwardly emotional. Most of all, I think it is an extraordinarily human movie, a very rare breed of film today.
By Andrew Chan
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