Freeview film of the day : tuesday 7th of June

The Last Picture Show (1971 114min.) [Film4 1.05am wednesday & +1]

Drama starring Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd.
1951: Sonny Crawford and his pal Duane Jackson are teenagers growing up in a small Texas town, dividing their time between local girls, the pool hall and most importantly, the neighbourhood cinema. The movie palace is about to close, the last picture show signalling the end of an era, a loss of innocence.

Writer/director Peter Bogdanovich came from the same Californian film school/university background as his contemporaries George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppolla and John Millius.
His early work suggested that he had the talent and vision to surpass all of them and yet he managed to throw away all of his early promise and spend two decades lost to the mainstream before slowly beginning to claw his way back in the early years of this century.

After making a huge impression with his debut feature, the stunning low budget thriller Targets (1968) Paramount Pictures were happy to give him a larger budget and a cast of emerging actors to make an adaptation of Larry McMurty's semi-autobiographical best selling novel.

The film he turned in is a beautifully constructed work shot in luminous black and white and with eye catching performances by all of his young cast (in addition to the three leads look out for Ben Johnson, Eileen Brennan, Ellen Burstyn, Cloris Leachman, Clu Gulager, Randy Quaid and John Hillerman.)

The commercial and critical success of the film (eight Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best Direction) led to more big budget, big grossing mainstream hits (What's Up Doc with Barbara Streisand and Paper Moon (1973).

But The Last Picture Show is probably his best and most personal work of the time and it's a film which deserves re-viewing and re-evaluation as it has much to offer.


(If you want to read about the bad decisions and self-destructive behaviour of Bogdanovich and his wife Polly Pratt that led to his decline to the point where he had to take bit-part acting jobs on the likes of The Sopranos to stay afloat they feature very heavily in the central section of Julia Phillips' cause celebre Hollywood insider expose You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again).