Peter Bogdanovich, 32 years old in 1971, only had one film to his name (1968's low-budget thriller Targets) when he released this magisterial, black-and-white adaptation of Larry McMurtry's 1966 novel The Last Picture Show. It was a success beyond measure, from critical accolades to robust box office to eight Oscar nominations and two wins.
Set in the early 1950s, the story centers on Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), a sensitive child of divorce who lives in the dying Texas town of Anarene (modeled on McMurtry's Archer City hometown, where filming took place). Sonny's closest companions include fellow senior Duane (Jeff Bridges) and Billy (Timothy's brother, Sam Bottoms), a slow, silent kid with a winning smile.
One day, the coach asks Sonny to drive his lonely wife, Ruth (a touching Cloris Leachman), to a medical appointment, and an unlikely friendship ensues, soon blooming into an affair. By then, Sonny has ditched the petulant girlfriend he had planned to marry, and despite the liaison with Ruth, he carries a torch for blonde homecoming queen Jacy (19-year-old model Cybill Shepherd in a dazzling debut), but she's going steady with the lower-class, hotheaded Duane. For all their chemistry, though, Duane is increasingly frustrated with the flirtatious beauty, who's saving herself for marriage--preferably to someone rich.
None of these young people has a healthy home life, but the boys find a father figure in the philosophical Sam (John Ford mainstay Ben Johnson, an Oscar winner like Leachman), who runs the café, pool hall, and picture show. Like Duane, he once dallied with a rich girl, Jacy's alluring, gin-sodden mother, Lois (Ellen Burstyn), but she was already married to an oil baron.
The emotional twists and turns to come involve spontaneous road trips, tawdry deflowerings, hasty marriages, sudden deaths, and the looming Korean War, but the soap opera elements never coalesce into melodrama so much as a tragedy about the decline of an Old West town from which some locals will escape, while others will remain--and not exactly to their benefit.
Most will reunite in Bogdanovich's 1990 sequel, Texasville, a color feature set in 1984 and filled with the stylings of Willie Nelson and other roots musicians (both films eschew a traditional score). Though also adapted from a McMurtry novel, the author didn't co-write the script as he had before, and it's one possible reason the second film, which revolves around the town's centennial celebration, doesn't measure up to the first, playing more like a tragi-comic epilogue than a full-fledged feature.
This special Criterion edition marks one of their finest packages to date. Highlights include commentary tracks from 1991 and 2009, an insightful behind-the-scenes documentary from George Hickenlooper, and a Texasville director's cut, which strengthens the story while trading color for murky black and white. If the sequel is a mixed success, The Last Picture Show, particularly in this restored version, holds up like gangbusters. It's truly one of the finest films ever made about small-town America.
What film collection does this belong in?
The Last Picture Show belongs in academic and public libraries with other films by Peter Bogdanovich, particularly the two crowd-pleasers he made immediately afterward, the screwball comedy What's Up, Doc? with Ryan O'Neal and Barbra Streisand and Depression-era drama Paper Moon with O'Neal and daughter Tatum—the youngest Oscar winner at 10 years of age.
What kind of film series would this movie fit in?
Peter Bogdanovich's second feature would fit with a series about the key films of the 1970s, films about Texas—like John Sayles's Lone Star or Richard Linklater's Newton Boys—and other films by the director, who worked steadily from 1968 to 2014.
What type of library programming could use this title?
Library programming on the work of Peter Bogdanovich or Jeff Bridges would do well to include The Last Picture Show.