There is a scene in The Last Picture Show where Sam the Lion takes two teenage boys fishing at a tank on the edge of town. Early morning, flat Texas light, nobody saying much. Ben Johnson starts talking about a woman he loved forty years before — how they used to swim there, what it felt like, where it all went. He doesn’t perform the speech. He just says it, quietly, looking at the water. It’s one of the great moments in American cinema, and if you aren’t close to tears by the end of it you may want to check your pulse.
Peter Bogdanovich made this film in 1971 from Larry McMurtry‘s semi-autobiographical novel, set in the fictional town of Anarene, Texas — a thin disguise for Archer City, where McMurtry grew up. The story covers a year in the lives of two best friends, from senior year of high school through their first months as adults in a town with no future and no reason to stay. Oil has dried up. The picture show is about to close. The wind blows constantly.
Shooting in black and white in 1971 was a deliberate provocation — color had taken over American cinema almost entirely. Cinematographer Robert Surtees, who had shot Ben-Hur and The Graduate, stripped everything back here. Anarene looks bleached by sun and wind until almost nothing is left. The black and white doesn’t make the film look old. It makes it look true.
Bogdanovich also went against every instinct of his New Hollywood peers. While they borrowed from the French New Wave — handheld cameras, jump cuts, improvisation — he went classical. Deep focus, locked compositions, no coverage shot as insurance. He shot only what he needed, which gives the film an unusual stillness. Nothing is wasted. There is also no musical score — only music from within the world of the film itself, every song period-accurate, nothing released after October 1952.
Jeff Bridges was 21. Timothy Bottoms was 20. Cybill Shepherd had barely acted before. Randy Quaid had one credit. None of them show it. Bridges plays Duane with a loose physical confidence that looks effortless until you realize how hard that is. Bottoms carries the film’s quiet center with something close to stillness. Shepherd’s Jacy is a complicated portrait of a girl using beauty as the only currency she’s been given — you never quite like her and you never stop watching her.
The supporting performances won the Oscars. Cloris Leachman as the football coach’s neglected wife gives a performance that is physically uncomfortable in the best way. Ben Johnson’s Sam the Lion is the moral center of the film — a rodeo champion and Ford company regular giving the performance of his career. When Sam dies offscreen, between scenes, the town loses whatever was holding it together. Ellen Burstyn as Jacy’s mother is the most self-aware person in the room, dispensing hard-won advice that nobody takes.
Near the end, the picture show screens its last film — Howard Hawks’ Red River, Bogdanovich’s substitution for the Audie Murphy western in McMurtry’s novel. A movie about the end of an era, playing in a theater that is itself ending. When the projectionist turns off the light, something goes out that isn’t coming back.
