The Last Picture Show (Director’s Cut)

(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)