Lifting The Covers Of A Small Town

Title: The Last Picture Show

Rating: 4 Stars

I’ve been reading Easy Riders Raging Bulls. It’s about a pretty brief period in time (latter part of the 1960s to the middle of the 1970s) when the major film studios realized that they’d been overcome by social/political/cultural events and, desperate, reached out to a number of young directors and gave them significant freedom to create their own films. This unleashed a number of now famous directors with names like Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, and Lucas.

One of the brightest stars at the time was Peter Bogdanovich. He flamed out fairly quickly as a film maker of note, but reading the book inspired me to watch his classic, The Last Picture Show.

I’ve never seen it before, although I’ve certainly heard of it. It’s hard for me to judge films like this. It is coming up on fifty years old. I don’t have enough film knowledge to really identify how it’s dramatically different than previous films. I know that French New Wave directors had an influence on Bogdanovich and I can kind of see the influence, but I’m no expert.

It’s a story set in a small town in Texas named Anarene in 1951. Two young men, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges), are best friends. Duane’s girlfriend is the flirtatious town beauty, Jacy (Cybil Shepherd). At the beginning of the film, it looks like this will be a pretty conventional coming of age story of these young people, but things quickly become not as they seem.

Sonny breaks up with his girlfriend. His high school football coach asks him, as a favor, to take his wife, Ruth (Cloris Leachman), to the doctor. Ruth is very unhappy and frustrated. Fairly quickly, Sonny and Rush start having an affair.

Jacy is bored and is pretty desperate to live a more interesting life. Although she continues to date Duane, she is clearly bored with him and is looking for a more dynamic man to bring excitement to her life and to sweep her away from her small town life. She goes to a nude swimming party at a country club where she meets another young man. He seems intriguingly sophisticated to Jacy, but refuses to be with her until she loses her virginity. Jacy tries to seduce Duane just to get it over with so that she can dump him and move on.

Kind of holding the town together is a man named Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson). He’s a rugged salt of the earth kind of guy that owns the town’s pool hall and movie theater. His abrupt death serves as some kind of trigger that impacts the lives of the three young people.

So, nearly fifty years later, what’s interesting?

First of all, this isn’t any Happy Days. The 1950s, especially in a small town in Texas, seem to be a more innocent time. On the surface, this seems to be true. Just a little deeper, there is an under current of sex. A young woman with her beau casually takes off her bra and dangles it from a rear view mirror. A 40ish woman takes a teenage boy to bed. A teenage couple try to lose their virginity to each other. The nude pool party includes full frontal nudity. All of this is pretty explicitly shown. I’m not talking a porno or anything, but we’re pretty far away from the twin beds of Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore here. The movie was made in 1971. The Hays Code, which served as the film industry’s moral code for decades, had only been fully abandoned in 1968.

Another interesting item of note is that this film is much more about relationships than plot. Jacy is playing off Duane and Sonny. Sonny needs to choose between Jacy and Ruth. Sonny and Duane work through their mutual attraction to Jacy.

Several actors here go on to have significant careers. In addition to Shepherd, Bridges, Leachman, and Bottoms, there is Ellen Burstyn as Jacy’s mom, Eileen Brennan as the diner waitress,  Randy Quaid as a country club swell trying to seduce Jacy, and even a freakishly unchanged (he must be a vampire) John Hillerman.

Looking at it now, I can see how this film must have appeared radically different than conventional films of that era and sparked much excitement.