Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [111]
In October, Columbia released a film made under the aegis of BBS Productions, one of the most enterprising constellations of New Hollywood talent and the company responsible for Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. The Last Picture Show was not part of the ’70s New Wave, however. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich, it was a piece of traditional narrative about a group of frustrated, confused people—both young and middle-aged—in a dying West Texas town in the early 1950s. It was based on a book by Larry McMurtry, whose fictional Anarene had been inspired by his hometown of Archer City, where the picture was shot. Bogdanovich had definite ideas about the Texas he wanted to depict onscreen. McMurtry was also the author of Hud, and Bogdanovich was concerned that there not be a strong visual link between the two films. He objected to Hud’s “bland, barren, gray look which is the cliché version of Texas: a big, empty country. That’s not what it is at all—Texas is tortured, savage, cruel and broken.”
Bogdanovich made the decision to shoot The Last Picture Show in black and white—the first major production since 1967’s In Cold Blood not to be filmed in color. “It’s a dismal town,” said Bogdanovich, “but I know damn well that in color it would look pretty, no matter how dismal.” The film avoided the distracting attitude and pose of hyperrealism—yet it offered an achingly recognizable and resonant slice of life, thanks in large part to Bogdanovich’s superb instinct for casting.
Although he had initially toyed with using old-time stars such as James Stewart and Dorothy Malone, he opted for less familiar faces as a means of achieving authenticity: Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges as the high school seniors Sonny and Duane, best friends who end a losing football season with the painful awareness that there will never be another one; Cybill Shepherd in her screen debut as Jacy, the teenaged tease who works her wiles on both boys; Ellen Burstyn as Lois, Jacy’s restless, still-beautiful mother; Ben Johnson as Sam the Lion, the town’s respected elder statesman; and Cloris Leachman as Ruth, the football coach’s depressed and lonely wife. Only Eileen Brennan, as Genevieve, the good-hearted waitress at Sam’s café, seemed a bit actressy, as if she’d seen too many Claire Trevor movies.
The Last Picture Show received some of the year’s most extraordinary press. Andrew Sarris, still smarting over the damage that “Raising Kane” had done to Welles, wrote: “I have visions of Pauline Kael in the year 2001 setting out to prove that Bogdanovich was not the actual auteur of The Last Picture Show, but was in fact deeply indebted to Larry McMurtry’s novel and to an entire school of Texas novelists.”
Pauline’s own review of The Last Picture Show was positive, yet oddly measured, with more than a suggestion of the backhanded compliment. She was skittish about the possibility that the film—which she correctly predicted would be both a popular and critical success—would play into the hands of conservative filmgoers: that its traditional storytelling style would “turn into a bludgeon to beat other filmmakers with.” She praised the film for not taking the direction of “worked-up, raunchy melodrama about tangled lives but, rather, of something closer to common experience.” The movie never was “exploitative of human passions and miseries