The Last Picture Show (1971)

The BFI’s commitment to film restoration continued apace this month with the unveiling of a newly polished version of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 lament to the passing of time The Last Picture Show, a  quintessential American picture that simultaneously resonates as hymn to a fading past and a paean to an uncertain future. At at a time where his peers were looking forward to shatter the conventions of the silver screen, at least in terms of on-screen violence, risqué subject material, a more realistic approach to sex and a more mature and measured reasoning of human relations Bogdanovich seemed to take a look back to the golden era of Hawks and Walsh, providing a bridge between the Old Hollywood and the newly developing epoch, in one of the first entries in the so-called golden Seventies canon along with the likes of Badlands, Taxi Driver, The French Connection and Harold & Maude, to name just a single film from the key directors call sheet. That emphasis on the directors is crucial as although every section of above the line talent has had their relative position in the pecking order augment in different decades – arguably the producers and studio heads throughout the golden era, the actors and agents in the Eighties, the distributors in the Nineties and the pop cultural translations and sequels in the Noughties – in the Seventies it was the director who was king, they were considered the primary creative force behind a pictures strengths and weaknesses, an ideology that was unceremoniously shattered when Michael Cimino’s disastrous Heavens Gate bought an entire studio (United Artists) to its knees. For a brief period films seemed to be made for adults, and I’m talking about the kinds of film that would get the big releases and advertising budgets that the likes of Dreamworks, Pixar and Disney lavish on their kids flicks these days, it was a glorious period which The Last Picture Show can now be viewed as some sort of wider allegory on the changes in cinema itself on a wider context, before the likes of Spielberg and Lucas ushered in a return to spectacle cinema as the decade drew to its close.

Small town West Texas, the early 1950’s. Through the eyes and insights of some denizens of a small dust cloaked hamlet a visual tone poem emerges, the dying town revolves around Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson) Pool Hall and Picture House, the stomping grounds of a group of listless and bored teenagers including Timothy Bottoms, Cybil Shepherd, Jeff Bridges and Randy Quaid in their big screen debuts, ably supported by the fine character actresses Cloris Leachman and Ellen Burstyn. The flirtatious Jacy Farrow (Shepherd) is playing off the adolescent lust of  best friends Duane (Bridges) and Sonny  (Bottoms) who also looks after his mute and backward friend Billy. The teenagers hesitant fumbling in the back of cars and the cinema are reflected by the indiscretions of their adult parents and guardians, the kids perhaps unconsciously realising that similar lives of quiet desperation are on their horizons unless they can escape the towns suffocating isolation and grinding creative poverty.

This beautifully realised, discretely paced and gently directed masterpiece is perhaps the prime example of what a Hollywood auteur could produce unfettered by the demands of a purely commercial cinema. Through the haunting monochrome photography – already an uncertain choice in 1971 when colour was the de rigueur screen palette of choice – we are offered a tantalising glimpse of an America away from the exciting bustle of the East and West coast metropoli, a working class vision of muted dreams and listless hours where only the escape of the local picture house offers a brief respite. The film has no central narrative as such, its more a series of vignettes as the teenagers undergo their rites of passage and the adults search for affection, the film charting those uncertain years from high school graduation to the burgeoning steps of a career, whether that be in the military, or as a home-maker or the local retail store. In that sense it has an Altmansque ensemble feel with an emphasis on performance, on character and on mood, rather than any visual pyrotechnics or finely attuned melee, a fine alternative to the usual Hollywood fare, witness the sisyphean sweeping of poor, simple Billy…

Bogdanovich was heralded as a new incarnation of Orson Welles given his age (which is odd as he was 32 when the film was completed) with his similar employment of deep focus cinematography for certain scenes and an alternative approach to music scoring, The Last Picture Show has no soundtrack away from the crackling radios and laboured LP turntables that silibate the Rock n Roll hits of the Fifties. In that sense the film is a curious cousin to Lucas’s American Graffiti with which it shares a fond nostalgia for a passed generation, they would make an ideal double bill in some converted mid-Western US picture house, a dying breed in these multiplex dominated days. The iconography is wide-brimmed hats and cowboy boots, tumbleweed streets and sparsely decorated bedrooms, as stagnant oil and water derricks wheezingly collect dust in the background, The Last Picture Show’s citizens affect a greying, corpse like pallor, even a revivifying excursion to Mexico on the part of Duane and Sam is transmitted in a wonderfully constructed telegraphing of time.

 Normal Hollywood fiilming practices follow a long-established policy – every scene is covered in master shots to establish the space and environment, then dialogue will be filmed in two pieces to trap the figures at the centre of the action, then in a shot reverse shot approach the close-ups of the actors faces will be captured, this methodology giving three tiers of material to select from the editing room when constructing the film in its post production phase. Time and resources permitting  on-set the director can then move on to a speculative mode and toy with alternative compositions or dialogue twists which is where some different approaches can be gleaned from a scene, this phase only conducted once the indemnity coverage has been secured. Bogdanovich deliberately knew exactly what shots he wanted and needed for which beats in any scene, he abandoned the masters and accordingly only captured his choice of coverage in the negative – it’s a risky proposition but it’s also an insurance policy, when there are no alternatives to insert from the hands of meddling producers and studio executives the chances of getting the film you wanted out of your head and into the cinemas is much more achievable.  The film is a chrysalis of one significant talent – Jeff Bridges – in tandem with that aforementioned bridging effect it also mourned the passing of an American icon, the rough and ready, morally decent, granite hewn men who work the animals and crops of the prairies, all encapsulated in a brilliant performance by Ben Johnson who was a veteran of the Western (he worked extensively with John Ford and appeared in Shane) whose famous speech is quite brilliant;

Even the film’s title signals a baton passed from one generation to the next, a picture show that Bogdanovich acknowledges is his finest work which makes up for the critical mauling that his subsequent efforts and neutered career proved to  be. Watching the film reminded me of my own little ‘Last Picture’ moment, back in I guess 1989 I was the only person in attendance of the final screening of my local Odeon in Peterborough city centre, I distinctly remember walking out after the screening of Pet Semetary of all things to see the usherettes and ticket sellers having a little cry together, the cinema presumably being decimated by the opening of a new multiplex on the outskirts of town. For some reason the projectionist also decided to treat me to the trailer of the classic C. Thomas Howell hilarious race relation ‘comedy’ Soul Man – all in all it was a weird but memorable trip to the flicks. In this months Sight & Sound a succinct interview with Bogdanovich reported that he had bumped into Bridges at some function recently and they got to talking about the old times, Jeff quite rightly observing that The Last Picture Show is unique in that there is nothing else quite like it in American cinema in terms of approach, atmosphere and aura, in comparison to the blossoming of the other auteurs of the era it occupies a solitary position of specific grace and melancholic merit. One of my all time favourites it’s a maudlin, moving, elegiac masterpiece.

April 16, 2011 | Categories: Film, London | Tags: Bogdanovich, Cinema, Film, Hollywood, last picture show, Movies | 2 Comments