THE LAST PICTURE SHOW 4K Review: Peter Bogdanovich's American Elegy

To watch The Last Picture Show in 2023 is to feel that, for America, it were ever thus: a promised transition into a time of plenty never arrived, and everyone is poor, working multiple jobs they never wanted in order to pay off hopeless debts, anaesthetising their nights with substance abuse, and going through social motions that only still exist because they always existed. 

The Last Picture Show was made in 1971 and is set in 1951, and there are ample cues that tie it to its own time and place -- immediate postwar, as the dregs of Manifest Destiny trickle out the bottom of the drain, and the last connections to the frontier myth die out. But the film feels startlingly timeless, nevertheless, as the elder characters ruminate on how things used to be, and the younger ones struggle to work out how to carry those ideas forward in a world that no longer has a meaningful place for them. 

Sonny and Duane (Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges, at the baby-faced beginnings of their careers) are coming out of high school in a sparse Texas town whose only common features seem to be local football, the annual Christmas dance, and a lonely Main Street block whose storefronts include a pool hall, a diner, and a single-screen movie theatre. They're vying for the same girl, Jacy (the screen debut of Cybil Shepherd), who is primly holding on to her virginity but wants to begin to paint outside the lines of moral decorum like her adulterous, alcoholic mother (Ellen Burstyn, absolutely delightful and wry). 

Sonny falls into a glum sexual relationship with his basketball coach's neglected wife (Cloris Leachman), who in turn begins fixing up their connubial bedroom like a kind of second home, mistaking her partner's teen ardour for something more like emotional intention. Everyone in town knows everything that everyone else is doing -- Sonny is late in realizing that he's conducted the entire affair under the fuming, helpless consent of his coach -- and the community is given the feel of a square dance where the partners occasionally switch but the finite number of combinations means that any attempt to use sex to escape boredom will only inevitably lead to more of the same. 

Every sexual encounter in the film is awkward, hard to watch; every attempt at titillation convinces no one, least of all the performer. (I watched Cybill Shepherd's strip-tease on the diving board with a hand over my eyes.)

Presiding over it all is Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), an aging dude who owns the pool hall and the cinema, and tries his best to watch out for Sonny and Duane and some of the other feckless boys in town, even though they do little to deserve it. 

Sam and Genevieve (Eileen Brennan), who runs the diner, hold whatever remains of the moral centre of the town -- and speak of things like "decency," when chastising the boys for whatever their shenanigans suggest they might lack. When Sam passes away at the movie's midpoint, the wheel of the town spins off its axle. 

The film that cemented Peter Bogdanovich among the movie brats of the 1970s and helped propel that decade's explosion of New Wave-esque American cinema, The Last Picture Show wallops the viewer with its fully-realized sense of the passing of the age, and the guileless helplessness of the young people caught within the dregs. No one ever seems to be able to leave the town, as though its event horizon inevitably bounces them back; Sonny and Duane make it to Mexico at one point, but their entire adventure takes place offscreen, and by the time they roll back up Main Street, Sam the Lion has died.

Robert Surtees' black and white photography is stunning, and in the 4K restoration presented here (with Dolby Vision high dynamic range on the 4K platter), the film retains a tactile sense of time and place, with abundant grain and deep, inky blacks under a strong contrast ratio. Audio is slightly less clear -- production recordings tend towards the muddy, particularly in the early scenes, but this is a best-case presentation of those. I reviewed the 4K version for this piece, but the Blu-ray copy of the same restoration is (almost) equally clear and enveloping.

Texasville, made 20 years later, catches up with the characters in 1984. The Criterion edition presents both the (two-hour, colour) theatrical cut and the (150-minute, black and white) director's cut (I reviewed the latter). As the director's cut was dumped to monochrome after the fact, it's a far less engaging black and white experience than the prior film; and with two versions of the feature spread across a single Blu-ray, there are noticeable compression artifacts on both versions.

The film's a hell of a lot of work, too, careening through dozens upon dozens of short, ball-busting scenes as an older Duane (the focus character here; Sonny has been relegated to a supporting role after anchoring the first film) meanders through his own mid-life crisis. Duane's oil wells are about to go broke; his passel of children have either started plying their trade in the town's endless game of sexual musical chairs or are about to (a pair of adolescent twins, heavily featured, might be a kind of Satanic dyad, for the sheer quantity of hellraising they get up to); and his marriage is threatening to finally collapse -- and Duane can't seem to work out whether that would be the best, or worst, possible outcome.

Annie Potts aces the only major new role in Texasville, as Duane's acerbic and knowing wife, who immediately befriends Jacy, when Duane's old love lands back in town after the death of her young son. The majority of the original cast returns (Ellen Burstyn is the only major absence, Jacy's mother killed offscreen in the intervening years), and scenes between Shepherd, Bridges, and Potts are the highlight of the film. Bottoms acquits himself well as Sonny disappears into a cognitive collapse, becoming a ghost of the town that once was, and (maybe) his old mentor, Sam the Lion.

The Last Picture Show was part of the Criterion Collection back in the laserdisc era and in resurrecting the title for their 4K UHD release, they've pulled every conceivable supplement and special feature for this 3-disc set. A commentary track featuring Bogdanovich and the cast from the laserdisc release is here, as is a Bogdanovich-only commentary from the 2009 DVD. 

Excerpts from George Hickenlooper's film Picture This: The Times of Peter Bogdanovich in Archer City cover the productions of The Last Picture Show and its sequel. Laurent Bouzereau's 1999 documentary about the making of The Last Picture Show is here, as is a gorgeous excerpt from the 1972 French television series Vive le cinéma, in which director François Truffaut discussed the "New Hollywood," then emerging.