The narrative begins with an impressive long shot of Anarene, Texas, in a cold morning in 1951. It’s dawn, and except for the old white Nash, which belongs to the night watchman, the Square is deserted. The wind blows the curling dust down the empty Main Street, and the camera pans across the Royal Theater (the picture show), a laundromat, a dinky beauty parlor, and a grocery store.
Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms), the film’s hero and moral conscience, struggles with the choke of his black Chevrolet pickup, but to no avail. Most of the action takes place either in the pool hall or in the town’s cafe. Shabby, the pool hall has a counter, a small candy case, and a green Dr. Pepper machine. Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson), the pool hall’s owner, is an aging cowboy. Rundown on the outside, the cafe has a sign that does not hang straight and much of its paint is peeling off. But the interior is clean and cozy, with bright linoleum, red-leathered booths, several stools, and a shiny jukebox, which is constantly playing.
Another prevalent sight is the local Picture Show that, due to the increasing popularity of television, is losing its customers by the day. Since Sonny has missed the newsreel and the movie has already begun, Miss Mosey charges him only 30 cents. Sonny is in the movie house not so much to see the film, Father of the Bride, but to meet Charlene Duggs (Sharon Taggart), his girlfriend of one year.
One-parent families
One-parent families characterize many of the youngsters. Sam the Lion is a widower, living with Billy, his only son who is mute and retarded. “You and Duane,” says Genevieve, “both in boardinghouse, him with a mother, you with a father.” It “don’t seem right” to her, but then, on a second thought, she admits, “I’m no one to talk. I never got on with Mama–still don’t.” Bitter and frustrated, Genevieve is one of many residents for whom the town offers no future.
The town’s students are not particularly bright, lacking intellectual horizons and open-mindedness. When the English teacher wonders if they are interested in John Keats, Joe Bob remarks that, “it’s silly of all the poets to want to be somethin’ besides what the Lord made ’em,” because ‘it’s criticizing the Lord.”
The town’s stratified class structure is very visible. Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd), the prettiest and richest girl, is driving a convertible. In Jacy’s bedroom, there is a big picture of herself as a “Football Queen,” and there are stuffed animals on her bed. Jacy reads a movie magazine, the kind of escapist reading that girls her age find fascinating.
The relationship between Jacy and her mother Lois (Ellen Burstyn) is in the tradition of Peyton Place, except that here it’s more cynical. Allison MacKenzie was a likable and honest girl, whereas Jacy is mean and bitchy. Allison’s mom Constance MacKenzie was sexually repressed, but Lois is beyond that, a bitter forty-year old woman, who feels that her happy days are long gone.
There is another reversal of narrative conventions. Unlike Allison MacKenzie of Peyton Place, Jacy does not want to leave town; she just wants to go to Wichita Falls. But her mother does not give in. “Everything’s flat and empty here,” she says, “and there’s nothing to do.” Finally, she warns: “Jus’ remember, beautiful, everything gets old if you do it often enough.” Disenchanted with her own marriage, she advises her daughter: “if you want to find out about monotony real quick, marry Duane.” Lois’s view of marriage is shared by others. “Bein’ married, always so miserable” Sonny asks Sam. “Oh, not necessarily,” Sam replies, “Just about eighty percent of the time.”
In contrast to the Farrows, the Poppers live in a rundown house. The kitchen of Ruth Popper (Cloris Leachman) is small and messy; the breakfast dishes have not been washed, nor has the table been cleared in days. A plain, drab woman, Ruth is Lois’s age but she looks much older. Like Lois, however, she is trapped in a bad marriage and lacks self-worth. Ruth is the type of woman “who wasn’t brought up to leave a husband, or maybe I was just scared to.” She had married Herman because she was young and thought, by her own words, that “hairy-chested football coaches were about it.”
The film shows the ambivalent attitude that most residents feel toward their town. “I’m sick of this town,” says Duane to Sonny, “why don’t we jus’ take off an’ go someplace.” Sonny concurs, “I guess the town can get along without us till Monday.” “If I was young enough to bounce that far I’d go with you,” says Sam.
Duane later leaves town, but he does not go to a Big City, just to Odessa, another town, where “the roughnecks say you can get a job any time.” Sam is the town’s moral center; when he dies (of stroke), a whole lifestyle disappears with him. “He had his own way of doin’ things,” says Andy. “It’s a wonder somebody don’t steal the town,” says Duane, when the cafe is closed after his death. Sam owns the town’s three cultural centers (the pool hall, the cafe, and the picture show). An ex-farmer, he continued to live as a cowboy, committed to the Old West’s code of ethics. Sam is the last vestige of the cowboy-gentleman, a homespun philosopher in the mold of Will Rogers, only more handsome.
The Last Picture Show draws no explicit comparisons between the small town and the Big City. Still, Lester Marlow, who invites Jacy to a midnight swimming party in the nude, lives in Wichita Falls, and he is a little more sophisticated than the youngsters of Anarene. Jacy and Duane also go to the Wichita Falls Motel to consummate their relationship, but, under pressure, Duane, the macho boy, cannot perform. “I might have known you couldn’t do it,” says the merciless Jacy, “Now I’ll never get not to be a virgin.”
The alternative to living in Anarene is going to the Army; it is 1951 and the Korean War is on, though the war is not a big issue. “You wanna go over to Korea and get yourself killed,” says Genevieve. She thinks he is “a lot better off stayin’ with Ruth Popper.” Shocked, Sonny asks, “Does everybody know about that” Almost everybody: Their illicit affair has become public knowledge. “Hadn’t you heard about them” Lois asks Jacy, “Been goin’ on about six months.” In the film’s last scene, Sonny visits Ruth. No longer involved, they sit in the kitchen, holding hands with a sad expression on their faces. This image dissolves and is superimposed on a tracking shot of the deserted town.
Symmetry
The Last Picture Show ends just as it began, only more depressingly, a result of what the viewers have learned about the town. Main Street is empty, and so is the Square; only the stark telephone poles are there. The wind blows, raising the dust, and the picture show is closed.
In adapting McMurtry’s book to the screen, Bogdanovich changed the two movies screened at the picture show. In the book, it’s The Kid from Texas, an Audie Murphy vehicle, which Duane watches the night before going to Korea. In the movie, it is Howard Hawks’s epic Western, Red River. The charismatic figure of John Wayne, who was then at the height of his popularity, dwarfs the lives of Sonny and Duane even more. Since the movie was made in 1948, it’s not clear whether Red River is playing in Anarene for the first time, or whether it’s a rerun.
The second movie used is Vincente Minnelli’s Father of the Bride (1950), instead of Storm Warning (also made in 1950), a melodrama about an oversexed Ku Klux Klan killer in the South, starring Doris Day and Ronald Reagan. Charlene may fantasize about Elizabeth Taylor in Father of the Bride, while carrying on with Sonny, and the contrast between the world’s most beautiful woman and Charlene is ironic and bitter.
In similar vein to many small-town works, situated around the 1900s, to explore the impact of technological change (the automobile) on the town’s life, Bogdanovich strategically located his narrative in 1951, when television was beginning to spread in America, on the verge of becoming the most popular form of entertainment.
As an innovation, TV was more important than the invention of the automobile, because it brought “the outside reality” into the living rooms of the average American, thus changing leisure activities from a collective to a more privatized experience.
Due to TV, Americans went less to the movies and the collective aspect of movie-going, sitting in the dark surrounded by large and anonymous public, was lost. But TV also exposed an extremely diverse population to the same” contents, thus serving as a homogenizing experience, at least superficially. The result was that small communities began to lose their distinctive lifestyles and became increasingly more and more similar.
The Last Picture Show shows the gradual decay and death of community life (what the sociologist Toennis described as Gemmeinshaft), lamenting the loss of intimacy and the declining integration of individuals into a more communal life. It presents a gloomy portrait of small-town life during the early advent of television.
Few people could have anticipated the critical and commercial success of The Last Picture Show. The film was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar and won acting accolades for two of its distinguished performers: Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson, both in the supporting categories. Ellen Burstyn was singled out by the New York Film Critics Circle with a supporting citation, and also nominated for an Oscar.
Cast
Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms)
Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges)
Jacy Farrow (Cybil Shepherd)
Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson)
Ruth Popper (Cloris Leachman)
Lois Farrow (Ellen Burstyn)
Billy (Sam Bottoms)
Charlene Duggs (Sharon Taggart)
Credits
Black-and-white
Running time: 118 Minutes
