THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

The setting for this film, directed and cowritten by Peter Bogdanovich, is a small oil town in Texas in 1951.  As one of the characters says, the place is ‘flat and empty’, a description that equally well applies to life there.  So it’s not surprising that most of the characters spend a lot of time hankering after sex even if in virtually all cases the reality is sterile and unsatisfactory. It’s perhaps appropriate that Hank Williams’ ‘Cold Cold Heart’ is heard playing in the background at least a couple of times.

The only sexual liaison we see that has some genuine warmth and affection to it is an affair between young Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and middle-aged sad Ruth (an Oscar-winning performance by Cloris Leachman) who is trapped in an unhappy marriage. 

Indeed all of the marriages we see are unhappy.  As one of the characters observes, “80% of married life is misery.”

The main object of lust among the young folk is Jacy (a perfectly cast Cybill Shepherd making her film debut).  When I first saw this film I thought that Jacy undressing at the swimming pool was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.  Given that I was then at roughly the same age as Sonny and his friend Duane (Jeff Bridges) I could well believe that hey would both fall for her even if we the audience can clearly see that she is just manipulating them to please her own ego.

Jacy's mum, Lois (Ellen Burstyn) married young and unhappily, and now spends her time flirting (and maybe more) with one of her husband's employees Abilene, and reflecting wistfully on an affair she had back in the day with Sam (Ben Johnson, also winning an Oscar).

I had forgotten that it is Sonny rather than Duane who is the main character; he has the most screen time and is in most, if not all, of the best scenes, whether listening to Sam reminiscing about his affair with Lois, or listening to Lois recalling that affair, or being distraught when his young friend Billy is knocked down by a truck and killed, or running for comfort to Ruth.

This picture is one of those rare things, a perfect evocation of time and place, helped in no small measure by the black-and-white cinematography by Robert Surtees, who won three Oscars, including for 'Ben Hur', a film as different from this small-scale classic as it is possible to imagine.