(Peter
Bogdanovich/1971/USA)
Opening
to the sound of wind with dust and scrub blowing across the screen
the sense of desolation is rife from the get go; we are in
small-town, back end of nowhere America. “Everything is flat and
empty here”, utters Ellen Burstyn a few scenes in and perfectly
describes the context within which we are viewing the characters.
They are trapped in a nondescript existence where the biggest concern
is the college football team and how badly they are doing. But slowly
life creeps on and there is growing up to be done but within this
context of flat and empty existence. So the growing up we see is
predicated on boredom and the warnings from the adult world are not
to get stuck, to try and make the best of what you have or get out
altogether.
The Last Picture show is like Wilder’s Our Town in
existential crisis. It references the Wild West repeatedly, Ford’s
Wagonmaster is advertised at the cinema, which stars Ben Johnson who
plays Sam in this film, and the last picture show of the title is
Howard Hawks’ Red River, a western that focuses on a dysfunctional
Father Son relationship. All around are damaged relationships, Sonny
and Duane both live in a boarding house with one parent for example
and the setting is exactly one of those towns that would have
prospered at the time of the idealised American Western. Even the
name of the town, Anarene, seems to mimic that of Abilene, the town
in Red River. There is also a character called Abilene, the slick
pool shark who works for a big oil company. The film seems to be a
comment on the cultural idea of the Western, the myth of the American
West would appear to have ultimately benefited corporate interests
but the reality of that myth are economically desolate towns like
Anarene. Where has the pioneering spirit of the past gone? These
people are reduced to sexual transgressions to allay the boredom of a
town with only a cinema, poolhall and cafe as social outlets.
It’s
a tremendously layered film but its beauty is in being presented so
simply. Using black & white film and a shooting style reminiscent
of the 50’s The Last Picture Show could have been made in 1951, the
year it’s set, rather than 1971. Bogdanovich was making a work of
art and presaged a golden age of Hollywood that would embrace the
auteur and those daring to be a bit more experimental within the
mainstream. There is no score, just ambient sounds and songs that
occur within the film, on the radio or jukebox and quite often cue
the emotional status of the scene. It’s at once bleak but also
deeply emotionally resonant. It lay a marker down for the decade to
come whilst referencing back to lodestones like Citizen Kane and is
one of the finest movies to ever come out of America. It is at its
most basic a human film examining small-town relationships and the
striving to experience something of life before it’s too late. But
on a deeper level it examines the spiritual desolation caused by
cultural idealism, the disillusionment that occurs in the dichotomy
of the mythic America of the western and the reality of the modern
day American west.
(5/5)
