Welcome to another entry in the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com! Still over here chippin' away at the list....
Today I'm reviewing Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 adaptation of Larry McMurtry's semi-autobiographical novel, The Last Picture Show. Boasting a cast of future stars, the film is a coming-of-age story set in a dying rural Texas town in the early 1950s. Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges play Sonny and Duane, two high school seniors and football players who spend their free time at the local pool hall (where Sonny works), the all-night diner and the one movie theater in town, all owned by their middle-aged friend Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson). Duane is dating the town's only well-to-do student Jacy (Cybil Shepherd), who professes her love for Duane but is always looking for a better deal and a way out of town. There's so little to do in this shambles of a burg it seems that everyone is sleeping with someone on the side. Sonny breaks up with his girlfriend and begins a tender affair with the wife of the school coach, Jacy goes off to a naked pool party at the home of a rich kid in the next town, Jacy's mother is sleeping with her husband's construction foreman, and so on. A line from the Oliver Stone film U-Turn sprang to mind as I watched this: "Is everybody fucking everybody in this crazy fucked up town??"
Shot in moody, grainy black and white, the film is blanketed by an oppressive malaise that conjured up another movie quote, this one from To Kill a Mockingbird: "There's no hurry, for there's nowhere to go. There's nothing to buy, no money to buy it with." Everyone in town seems to lack purpose and human connection and they're all just looking for a raison d'être.
Bogdanovich was an Orson Welles disciple and that comes across here in his shot composition, with lots of deep focus images, often with one character centered in frame and close to the camera while other characters linger in the background, plus the occasional Dutch angle. The cinematography was my favorite aspect of this film, particularly the choice to shoot in black and white; the lack of color adds to the town's sense of desolation.
The Last Picture Show was filmed in McMurtry's actual hometown of Archer City, lending the story authenticity and what Werner Herzog calls "voodoo of location." The place may be out in the open Texas plain, but it feels like a prison and only Sam the Lion seems to have figured out how to be content there, particularly when fishing at the only local body of water.
Bottoms gives a very understated performance with not a lot of dialogue; his melancholy facial expressions and hangdog body language do most of the talking. Cybil Shepherd's Jacy seems to have taken most of her social cues from the myriad of films she and her friends must have viewed at the Royal movie theater; it plays like a 1951 performance in a 1971 movie, and at first I wasn't convinced it was a good one, until I thought about the choices behind it. Bridges is oafish and full of bravado as Duane, too obtuse to see that Jacy is using him to gain experience and too bewildered to satisfy her. Ellen Burstyn plays Jacy's cynical mother Lois, who is sexually frank with her daughter and urges her to aim for a life outside this shabby Podunk little town. The show stealer though is probably Cloris Leachman as Ruth, the football coach's wife, with whom Sonny has a torrid May-December romance. Ruth is in a loveless, joyless marriage and is so cosmically lonely she is often moved to tears. There's a great scene where Ruth calls Sonny out on the carpet for ignoring her for months, and this moment no doubt clinched her Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
The Last Picture Show is an unusual film, in that very few of the characters are truly sympathetic; each of them has moments of goodness and compassion but they're all so beaten down by this place they don't know how to properly relate to other people. Sam the Lion seems slightly above it all, regarding everyone with a detached sadness. It's a damn tough town to crack, a quality this film shares in a way.
I give The Last Picture Show ***1/2 out of ****.
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