The Great Movies III

When The Last Picture Show opened in 1971, it created a sensation. I saw it on its first engagement in New York, where audiences crowded in with the eagerness reserved, these days, for teenage action pictures. It felt new and old at the same time. Bogdanovich, a film critic and acolyte of Welles, shot in black and white, which gave the film a timelessness, then and now. He used a soundtrack entirely made up of pop songs, which was something new (Scorsese had tried it with his first film, in 1967). It was mostly Hank Williams who provided the soundtrack for these lives, and Bogdanovich used real sources in the scenes for the music-radios, jukeboxes-where "Cold, Cold Heart" and "Why Don't You Love Me (Like You Used to Do)" commented directly on the action.

We had not seen these faces before, except for Ben Johnson and a few other supporting players. Like Citizen Kane by his hero, Bogdanovich made a film introducing future stars. Cybill Shepherd was in her first film. Tim Bottoms was in his second but spent his first, Johnny Got His Gun, as a soldier who could not see, hear, or speak. Jeff Bridges had done nothing memorable, and Cloris Leachman and Ellen Burstyn caught fire with their roles here. For Leachman and Ben Johnson, who for years gave dependable support in the John Ford stock company, there were supporting-actor Oscars.

The film has an unadorned honesty that came as a jolt after the pyrotechnics of the late r96os. While the Easy Rider generation was celebrating a heedless freedom, Bogdanovich went back to the directness and simplicity of Ford, whom he admired no less than Welles. But The Last Picture Show took place long after the heroics of Red River and the other classic Westerns. It was based on the first of many novels in which Larry McMurtry (whose hometown of Archer City, Texas, supplied the location of Anarene) charted the Texans who came after the age of heroes.

Seeing the film once again, I was struck by how many of the scenes involve sex, and how little they involve eroticism. Cybill Shepherd's celebrated striptease on a diving board got a lot of attention at the time, but her character coldly uses sex as a way to get the best deal she can out of Anarene. The only real warmth comes from the Leachman character, Ruth, combing Sonny's hair while they're both fully dressed. There is simply no way in this town to touch life and glow. The last ones who knew the secret were Sam the Lion and maybe Genevieve (Eileen Brennan), the waitress at Sam's diner. Sonny and Duane, we suspect, will grow up to drink too much, work too hard, and marry desperate women-unless Duane is killed first in Korea. There is certainly no future for gentle Billy (Sam Bottoms), who always smiles but has no reason to.

The film is above all an evocation of mood. It is about a town with no reason to exist, and people with no reason to live there. The only hope is in transgression, as Ruth knows when she seduces Sonny, the boy half her age. And then he, too, falls briefly under the spell of Jacy, leading to the powerful scene where he returns to Ruth and she hurls the coffeepot against the wall and spills out her soul. (Leachman did that scene in one take, first time, no rehearsal.)

At the end, Bogdanovich shows us brief moving shots of his stars, with titles giving their names and characters. This is a reminder of Welles's credits at the end of Citizen Kane. In 1971, those played simply as effective titles. Today, seeing Bridges, Bottoms, Burstyn, Leachman, Brennan, Quaid, Johnson (who died in 1996), and the others thirty-three years later, the images in the credits have a sharp poignancy. There is a line from Citizen Kane that comes to mind: "I was there before the beginning ... and now, I'm here after the end."

Bogdanovich was there after the end, too. In 199o, he gathered most of the members of his original cast for Texasville, a sequel set in the early '8os, some thirty years after the period of the original.

eviewing Last Tango in Paris in 1972, I wrote that it was one of the great emotional experiences of our time, adding: "It's a movie that exists so resolutely on the level of emotion, indeed, that possibly only Marlon Brando, of all living actors, could have played its lead. Who else can act so brutally and imply such vulnerability and need?"