Episodic films are hard to do well. Hopefully, the vignettes will be entertaining enough on their own to keep your interest for two hours, or at the very least will come together into something more meaningful at the end. "American Graffiti" is able to pull this off because it takes place over one night so there's an immediate impact. "A Christmas Story" envelops the holiday season and does a wonderful job laying out an overview of a nine-year-old's life in 1940's Indiana. Peter Bogdanovich's "The Last Picture Show" has the hard sell of being set over a full calender year, and like real life, has characters go in and out, without worry of whether it's the beginning, middle, or end. Set in a dying Texas town between November 1951 until October 1952 (the senior year of H.S. for most of the main characters), "The Last Picture Show" would probably play better as a book of short stories, but it's still a pretty great movie.
It's strange watching "The Last Picture Show" for the first time in 2012 because there are now so many layers of nostalgia separating it from today's reality. Based on a semi-autobiographical novel written in 1966 by Larry McMurty (writer of "Hud" of my favorite films, and "Lonesome Dove" which I need to see), who was writing about life that took place 15 years ago. By the time the film came out, 20 years had passed and you can tell in the reviews by people like Roger Ebert that "The Last Picture Show" was able to stir up memories long thought eroded. When I watch it, I get a look at a world I've never known and will never be able to. In some ways, it's just as exotic as a foreign film with it's display of small town Texas life. There are a number of characters with their own intersecting plots, but the main action follows two high school athletes, Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges). Their home lives aren't touched upon much and the majority of the time we see them is at school or having fun. Sonny has a father-son relationship with Sam The Lion (Ben Johnson), owner of the local diner, pool hall, and movie theatre while Duane is in a heavy relationship with "the only attractive girl in school", Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepard).
In this time between World War 2 and Rock and Roll, we see a sleepy town just going through the motions. Year-round, the town is dusty and grimy with only the mute street sweeper (Timothy Bottoms' younger brother Sam) showing any sort of care as to how things look and while we see a few people die, there are no births in response. Sonny and Duane are just drifting through life, hoping that they may get a decent construction job after school to make ends meet. Sonny starts off with a dumpy looking girlfriend who celebrates their one year anniversary by removing the gum from her mouth for a kiss. Splitting with her, he enters into an affair with his coach's wife Ruth Popper, (Cloris Leachman) in a deal that gets him sex and her attention. Sonny was the only major role not to get awards attention after the fact and I think that has more to do with his role in the story and less with Bottoms' performance. Sonny sleepwalks through life and has no major character traits or flaws other than perhaps a lack of awareness towards himself and how he treats others.
Peter Bogdanovich was the Tarantino of the seventies, with the same immense interest in films growing up. I've read a few of Bogdanovich's books dealing with his interactions with and memories of various major movie actors and directors of the fifties and sixties and of course he famously was mentored by Orson Welles (who told him he MUST shoot "The Last Picture Show" in black and white). This is Bogdanovich's first major film and it's actually very daring. Shot in B&W with no major starpower, the film is filled with a constant stream of music and chatter with numerous minor characters coming and going around the main cast. He films perhaps the most uncomfortable sex scene I've ever witnessed (on film) between Sonny and Ruth (full of overly deliberate thrusts, loud bed creaking, and Ruth crying) and isn't afraid of showing a high schooler's naked pool party either. But what comes across most is how much fun this must have been to make for Bogdanovich. He goes all out to make this world come across accurate and for a movie-lover like himself, I bet he woke up every morning super anxious to shoot more scenes.
Plot-wise there isn't a ton to say. Some characters grow and move on, some don't. Some die while others just don't interact with the main characters anymore. The acting across the board is superb, but by the end of the film I realized I wasn't totally fulfilled by what I had just seen. Much like the world it's depicting, "The Last Picture Show" starts out if not full of life, at least full of hope and fun. By the second half things slow down to a crawl and the sense of despair and desolation overruns the picture. Like the memoir it's based on, things happen with no rhyme or reason towards character development, but that's OK since we get a view of how a real small town might function and most of us don't get the same arc in real life that someone like George Bailey might in a movie. If this was a book of short stories or a television show, there would be more of a chance to get to know these characters better, but overall it's a great piece of film-making.
Rating - 4.25 out of 5 stars.
Random Thoughts -
The world of the movie is displayed perfectly. The camera moves around the main street, following characters almost like you'd see in a "Grand Theft Auto" video game. The town is small, but that only helps towards getting us familiar with all that it contains. We get a few mentions of and sojourns to the nearest "big" city, Wichita Falls, but for most of the time, we feel just as surrounded by the main town as the characters do.
The use of music is all-encompassing and I bet there isn't even ten music-free minutes in the entire two hours. It's fantastic, with mostly Hank Williams playing on the radio, jukebox, and people's turntables. As the movie goes on and Hank's songs start to be repeated, it only adds to the sense that we are watching real people go through life in a real town over the course of a real year. I will also say that I can almost guarantee the use of Williams' "Kaw-Liga" here inspired its use in Wes Anderson's "Moonrise Kingdom". Actually, this film is almost best described as "Wes Anderson's Dazed And Confused".
There were four acting nominations for this movie with Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman both winning Best Supporting Awards from the Academy and Jeff Bridges and Ellen Burstyn both nominated for the same awards. Johnson's Sam The Lion is the pillar of the community, a man you respect from the moment he appears. He plays the role of decency in the first half of the film, but shockingly dies slumped over his pool table about halfway through the film while Sonny and Daune have gone to Mexico for a wild weekend. Johnson, who spent the majority of his career as John Wayne's stoic sidekick, does wonderful with the speeches he is given and my only complaint is that he didn't get more to do. Leachman as Ruth Popper, the older woman Sonny is having an affair with, won her award for her work in the last scene of the movie. Sonny had thoughtlessly thrown her to side in favor of the now-available Jacy, but after that falls apart, he's got nowhere to go, but back to Ruth who unleashes upon him all her pent-up anger and frustration.
I honestly don't see how Jeff Bridges earned his nomination other than it's a strong performance by a young up and coming actor. Duane is one of those guys who is king of the high school, but you know isn't going to do much afterwards. He doesn't go through much character development, other than his embarrassment about not being able to perform the first time Jacy tries to get him to deflower her. He ends up enlisting in Korea while Sonny stays in town which makes perfect sense by the end. Ellen Burstyn plays Jacy's mother, who at first comes across more as an older sister, encouraging her daughter to have sex to disprove the "magic" of it. However, it turns out that she and Sam have a shared history together which goes a long way towards making her more sympathetic.
The sole mention of Sonny's home life comes at a town Christmas dance when a drunken man wanders up to Sonny and gurgles out "Hi, Sonny" and Sonny responds, "Hi, Dad". They stare at each other for a second or two and that's it. It's a great moment and gives us a ton of information about Sonny without dwelling on it or looking for more meaning. Sonny actually has a surrogate family in the town with Sam The Lion as a father, Genevieve the waitress as a mother, and Billy the street-sweeper as a younger brother. There's a scene early on in the film where he, Duane, and a few other
friends take Billy to the local prostitute to get him
laid. Much like "The Last Detail", Billy erupts immediately and the fat
old whore punches him the face for getting her "all sticky". When Sam The Lion finds out, he's so disgusted, he bans Sonny and his buddies from all of Sam's establishments. This little section of the film is where I realized I was starting to care about these characters and was very happy when Sam was able to let bygones be bygones.
Next - The French thriller "Tell No One", tomorrow the 7th.
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