The Great Movies III

L.A. Confidential is described as film noir, and so it is, but it is more: unusually for a crime film, it deals with the psychology of the characters, for example in the interplay between the two men who are both in love with Basinger's hooker. It contains all the elements of police action, but in a sharply clipped, more economical style; the action exists not for itself but to provide an arena for the personalities. The dialogue is lovely; not the semiparody of a lot of film noir, but the words of serious people trying to reveal or conceal themselves. And when all of the threads are pulled together at the end, you really have to marvel at the way there was a plot after all, and it all makes sense, and it was all right there waiting for someone to discover it.

he best scene in The Last Picture Show takes place outside town at the "tank," an unlovely pond that briefly breaks the monotony of the flat Texas prairie. Sam the Lion has taken Sonny and the retarded boy Billy fishing there, even though, as Sonny observes, there ain't nothing in the tank but turtles. That's all right with Sam: he doesn't like fish, doesn't like to clean them, doesn't like to smell them. He goes fishing for the scenery.

"Try one?" he says, offering Sonny the makings of a hand-rolled cigarette. And then he begins a wistful monologue, about a time twenty years ago when he brought a girl out to the tank and they swam in it and rode their horses across it and were in love on its banks.' he girl had life and fire, but she was already married, and Sam even then was no longer young. As he tells the story, we realize we are listening to the sustaining myth of Sam's life, the vision of beauty that keeps him going in the dying town of Anarene, Texas.' he scene has a direct inspiration, I believe, for the writerdirector Peter Bogdanovich. I'm sure he was thinking of the monologue in Citizen Kane where old Mr. Bernstein remembers a girl with a parasol who he saw once, fifty years ago, and still cherishes in his memory as a beacon of what could have been.

Sam, played by the veteran Western actor Ben Johnson, is the soul of Anarene. He owns the diner, the pool hall, and the Royal theater, and without those three places, there is no place to go in Anarene except to bed, which explains the desperate and lonely adulteries and teenage fum-blings that pass for sex. Among those who treasure Sam the Lion are Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges), cocaptains of the local football team, which is so bad the local men look at them in disgust and shake their heads.

Bogdanovich's 1971 film, based on the novel by Larry McMurtry, opens on Saturday, November 12, 1951-the eve of the Korean War, and the beginning of the end for movie houses like the Royal, where Sonny grapples in the back row with his plump girlfriend, Charlene (Sharon Taggart), while enviously watching Duane kiss the town beauty, Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd). On the screen are classics like Red River and Wag-onmaster, which speak to the legends of this land, but already the ugly little blackand-white sets in local living rooms are hypnotizing the locals with Strike It Rich! and other banal trivialities that have nothing to do with their lives, or anyone's lives.

It always seems too hot or too cold in Anarene. A wind blows down the deserted main street and in through the door of the pool hall. Sam the Lion hunches his shoulders into his sheepskin jacket. Bogdanovich and his cinematographer, Robert Surtees, use a lot of horizontal pans to show the town hunkered down flat against the land; we have the feeling that emptiness surrounds these weathered buildings.

Duane and Sonny presumably have homes to go to, but their lives center around their cars-Sonny's old pickup and Duane's like-new Mercury. In high school, a valiant English teacher (John Hillerman) reads from Keats that truth is beauty and beauty is truth, but truth and beauty seem remote from their lives, and the most wonderful thing that happens to Sonny is that Ruth (Cloris Leachman), the fortyish wife of the football coach, takes him to her bed and treats him fondly. Duane, meanwhile, is toyed with by Jacy, who has her eyes on a rich kid in a nearby city and isn't above getting an invitation to his pool party by leading on the local goofball, Lester (Randy Quaid).

Jacy's parents are what pass for rich in the town, and her mother, Lois (Ellen Burstyn), is still pretty, although she spends too much time drinking on the sofa next to her TV-mesmerized husband. Lois is at least a realist, advising her daughter to sleep with Duane so she'll find out it's not as great as she thinks it is. Lois sometimes sleeps with one of her husband's oil hands, but like Ruth, she places no great faith in sex and yearns instead for tenderness and conversation and someone who has not been defeated by life.