The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)
The Top 100 is a funny thing. Everyone's list contains films that I have been meaning to watch, ones that are on my List of Shame, ones that I can't believe I haven't seen yet. Last month it was
The King of Comedy, and this month, it's
The Last Picture Show. It has a lot of live up to...so many years of hearing how groundbreaking it was, and how it still is today. Can a film about a small Texas town in the early 1950s really live up to that? Yes, yes it can. I watched this film about 5 days ago, and I've been struggling with what I should write about it ever since. For me, it is harder to write about a film that has made an impact on me more than one that hasn't.
There are many things that jump out at me. The way that the only music you hear is through radios or from bands playing at dances. The silence has a way of emphasizing what is happening on screen, especially during the sexual encounters. I don't think there has been a film that has more accurately displayed the awkwardness and impersonal nature of particular sexual encounters, so much that when we see Cloris Leachman's Ruth start to cry in the middle of one, it has real meaning. We aren't meant to feel that meaning by it being accented by a score. It's uncomfortable and sad. She is so good here, the last scene she share with Timothy Bottoms' Sonny, ugh, it breaks your heart. Between her and Ben Johnson's Sam, you can see why they won supporting Oscars for their respective roles. When Ben takes Sonny and Billy fishing down to pond that has nothing but turtles, he tells a story about the time he spent with a married girl that he loved. It's wistful and just another piece of the story of this dying town. I can't imagine this film not being in black it white, it was the perfect choice. You can feel the bleakness of the town, the dust, the grease in the diner, it's all there.
I loved this film, and so did my husband, we can't stop discussing it. Thank you, Jeff, for finally knocking this off my List of Shame and giving me what will most likely be a new entry into my Top 100.