The “coming of age” film genre is now debased, a lot of the blame going to John Hughes for his dumb hits in the 1980s, but it wasn’t always so. The first I saw was 1971’s Summer of ’42, an R-movie that a friend and I snuck into, and though it was a box-office success, aside from Jennifer O’Neill’s starring role, we both thought it was disappointing. Perhaps we let our hubba-hubba imaginations run wild, so it didn’t live up to the hype.
Not so with Peter Bogdanovich’s breathtaking The Last Picture Show, which remains, 53 years later, in my Top Five list of films. It was released in the fall of 1971, first at the New York Film Festival and then for selected theaters in New York City and Los Angeles, and didn’t come to the Century Shore theater in my hometown of Huntington, New York until the spring of ’72, when I was 16.
It was a Saturday afternoon and my compatriots were occupied, so I went solo (which was rare), spurred on by reviews in The Village Voice and New York Times. It was nearly two hours, shot in black and white—“daring” at that time—and I was captivated for every single minute. It was (mostly) a “coming of age” film, based on Larry McMurtry’s novel, and though I was the perfect age to see such a moving, depressing, kids-going-nowhere story that centered on youths in the one-stop oil town of Anarene, Texas, unlike celebrated successors like American Graffiti and the abominable Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, it wasn’t silly, didn’t have vulgar wink-nudge moments, and also included the drab stories of many weathered and resigned adults.
I left the theater in a daze, blown away by the tumbleweeds, country music, the unfathomable beauty of Cybill Shepherd, and the mystery of what might become of protagonist Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms in his signature role, one that he’d never match in a subsequently spotty career). I walked around Huntington for 90 minutes, barely able to speak at Jim’s Stationery Store when buying a couple of newspapers and was uncharacteristically unable to articulate the film to my mom, who was nominally interested in my afternoon.
Set in 1951-52, just 20 years before its release, Sonny’s a sympathetic and honest character who can’t escape, in his own mind, the certainty of a waiting-for-the-finish-line adult life. He doesn’t laugh much, save for a road trip to Mexico, drinking tequila with best friend Duane (Jeff Bridges, whose acting wasn’t sharp), but carries a burden that, despite his lack of book-smarts, evinces the wisdom, and melancholy, of a person twice his age. Even near the start of the film, when Sonny’s fooling around with girlfriend-by-default Charlene in his truck, engaging in rote fondling, he breaks up with her when she won’t allow him to go further. It’s not mean, really, as both of them know the “relationship” is one of convenience.
It’s possible that my reaction was—aside from the stellar performances by Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn, Eileen Brennan, Clu Gulager, and Bottoms—caused by the exotica of a dying podunk Texas town and Bogdanovich’s direction, whose shots of light and dark, dusty, windy streets and the desultory café, failing movie theater and pool hall were mesmerizing. At that point, aside from a brief trip to see an older brother in Chicago in ’69, I’d never been anywhere but the East Coast. The Anarene of 1951-52 was like a brief visit to another planet.
I went to a party that night, smoking joints and drinking beer with a lot of friends, and recommended that they, many of whom were regular cinema companions, immediately see The Last Picture Show. Nothing doing. “Who the fuck wants to see a movie about a bunch of losers in Texas,” one buddy said, and that was a representative comment. It wasn’t snobbery, per se, as I grew up in a middle-class suburb and never knew any rich kids until I went to college in the fall of 1973. (By contrast, my freshman roommate at Johns Hopkins was from Houston—with cowboy boots, Willie Nelson and Doug Sahm t-shirts, and an acoustic guitar—and The Last Picture show was already legendary for him and his Jesuit high school cohorts.) I’d bet 50 bucks that my adolescent pals, now nearing 70, would swear they saw the film the day it came out.
It drives younger people crazy when Baby Boomers (including me) speak in movie-shorthand, conducting entire conversations with quotes from, say, The Godfather. My fellow Red Sox devotee Rick and I can text for two hours about a ballgame, exclusively using lines from Brando, Pacino, and De Niro. It’s a fair criticism, although every generation has its annoying tics.
I never hear people evoking lines from The Last Picture Show, even though some scenes are recognizable to anyone who’s at least half-serious about film. For example, Ben Johnson (as Sam “The Lion”) dressing down of several teens—including a reluctant Sonny—after they’d had sport hooking up a younger, and mentally-disabled, boy with a hideous hooker, with disastrous results, was jaw-dropping when I first saw it, and it’s still jarring, not unlike Gregory Peck’s brief soliloquies in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Sam, Anarene’s “conscience,” says: “You boys can get on out of here, I don't want to have no more to do with you. Scaring a poor, unfortunate creature like Billy just so's you could have a few laughs. I've been around that trashy behavior all my life, I'm gettin' tired of putting up with it. Now you can stay out of this pool hall, out of my cafe, and my picture show too. I don't want no more of your business.”
Sam dies soon after, but he and Sonny reconcile before that occurs, as the older man recognizes the teen’s inherent decency. In his will, Sam leaves the pool hall to Sonny, a well-meant, but cursed inheritance. There were a lot of movies from my youth that stand out—Patton, Easy Rider, A Clockwork Orange, for example—but nothing packs the punch of The Last Picture Show, two hours of brilliance that, although highly regarded, is still underrated.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023
