On November 20, Turner Classic Movies is airing Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 masterpiece The Last Picture Show. It’s a movie about kids that is best appreciated by grown-ups, especially grown-ups with some mileage on them.
The Last Picture Show is the story of 18-year-olds in a tiny, windblown Texas town in the early 1950s, from Larry McMurtry’s novel about his own upbringing in Archer City, Texas. It’s a coming of age film about teens finishing high school: the sensitive Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), his macho best friend Duane (Jeff Bridges) and pretty, snotty Jacy (Cybill Shepherd), entitled by her looks and her family’s wealth. There’s also a sweet, intellectually disabled boy Billy (Sam Bottoms). The boys’ male role model is Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson in an Oscar-winning performance), an older bachelor cowpoke who owns the town’s cafe, movie theater and pool hall.
The film was actually shot in Archer City, which took the movie name of a Texas ghost town, Anarene. (Decades later, Archer City also showed up in a bank robbery in 2016’s Hell and High Water.)
18-year-olds wonder how they will navigate the world of adults that they are about to enter. It turns out that, for the kids in the movie, if only they paid attention, there’s plenty to lean about life from the adults in Anarene. The other thing that 18-year-olds obsess about is their sexuality, super-fueled by hormones but piloted by immature brains.
It’s a remarkable thing to watch a coming of age story about 18-year-olds when you are 18 and then again forty years later when you know stuff.
When I saw The Last Picture Show at San Jose’s domed Century Theaters in 1971, I was the same age as the main characters, and I was especially interested in their sexual escapades. I was, however, discerning enough to appreciate that this was a great movie, and I fully experienced the heartbreak of the Cloris Leachman character and grasped that Sam the Lion’s authority came from his decency and dignity.
In September, I was privileged to attend one of the year’s most stirring experiences of Bay Area cinema culture. The Roxie Theater screened the The Last Picture Show – with the legendary Bogdanovich himself in attendance for two Q&A sessions, plus a screening of his hard-to-find Saint Jack (1979).
Rewatching The Last Picture Show, I was especially struck by the subtle yet emotionally powerful performances by Ben Johnson, Clu Gulager and Ellen Burstyn
The plot is about the kids, but Ben Johnson’s character is the center of the film. Johnson underplays the part, and Bogdanovich says that Johnson didn’t even like to say lines at all. But Johnson nailed two unforgettable speeches. In the first, his eyes flash as he spits out his disgust at bullying. In the other, he recalls a love affair; as a clueless kid the first time around, I failed to connect the dots as who the woman was. Ben Johnson’s Oscar acceptance speech (you can find it on YouTube) is still my all-time favorite.
Clu Gulager plays an oil rig foreman who is the illicit squeeze of his boss’ wife (Burstyn) . Gulager did scores of TV Westerns in the 1960s, including 105 appearances as the sheriff on The Virginian. The Last Picture Show is probably his best-ever screen performance. The Director’s Cut also adds some sizzle to his sex scene with Jacy in the pool hall. This guy is trapped in a job he will never improve upon and an affair he will never control; Gulager perfectly conveys his bitter dissatisfaction.
Unlike Gulager, Burstyn was already a prestige actress. Here, she brings both searing and withering looks at the men and wise and comforting, if cynical, advice to her daughter.
This is a great film, and it’s just as timeless today as it was in 1971.
