The Last Picture Show (1971)

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Truly Dreadful Film

The acting in this movie is really good.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Greetings from Lithuania."The Last Picture Show" (1971) is a good coming of age story set in a gods forgotten place. The place itself is like a character in this movie - it is a dying, dusty little town with no hope. And then there are people, living in it, or should i say surviving in there, as there isn't really much of a hope to look forward to in that place. And still they want to love, have sex, to cared about, no matter the age or social difference.I loved the performances in "The Last Picture Show". There are some many great performances here: Ben Johnson as "Sam the Lion", who won Oscar for his performance. One of my all time favorite Ellen Burstyn gave a great performance as well, much more complex then it appears at the beginning. Then there is Cloris Leachman who also won Academy award. The national treasure Jeff Bridges - great performance as well. I also loved Eileen Brennan (Genevieve) acting, every time she appeared on a screen i could take my eyes of her. And Randy Quaid should have stayed on the screen longer. Timothy Bottoms and well, everyone - this is a one terrifically acted movie. Script was also good as well as solid directing.Overall, "The Last Picture Show" is a terrifically acted coming of age story in a goods forgotten place. This is a very atmospheric movie, which looks so fragile at the times, like life in that place itself. Good movie all around.

This is a great picture based upon a great book.The title of both gets immediately to the heart of things.The book establishes the probability that after Sam the lion & Lois Farrow, Sonny Crawford, of the following generation, is the most intelligent person in Anarene, the fictional Texas small town.For me, the premise of author Larry McMurtry's novel is the source of the greatness of this coming-of-age story. As everyone knows, the title refers to the closing of The Royal, the movie house in downtown Anarene. The location is becoming a ghost town as Mrs. Mosey, the theater's operator, reveals to best buddies Sonny & Duane her intention to shutter the place after one last unspooling of "Red River." It's the night before Duane goes off to fight in Korea.The deeper, subtler meaning of the title refers to the process of growing up mentally, which means seeing beyond Hollywood-fueled fantasies about what life is supposed to be in favor of clear-eyed visions of what is your own real life in actuality.At the center of the story is the trio of Sonny, Duane & Jacy, the girl. There's a late-blooming triangle of competition between the two boys seeking the love of Jacy, their (and everyone else's) dream girl in the flesh. Duane gives everything he's got to the winning of Jacy, whereas Sonny, who never expected to get his chance with her, finally does, but only after falling in love with Ruth Popper, the forty-year-old abandoned wife of the macho but gay high school physical education teacher.Jacy is the villain of the story because she's a very smart schemer who tries, almost diabolically, to realize in the flesh the dreamy scenarios that fill her head in the wake of countless trips to the matinée. Her real life is her enemy because it keeps refusing to conform itself to her Hollywood-laced mental picture of how things are supposed to be. She's the most beautiful girl in town and she's a seductress and yet, actually, she doesn't even like sex, that is, not real sex as sharply distinguished from what she's seen in the movies.Duane, a mostly good-natured guy with strength & athletic prowess, in accordance with the standard movie scenario, figures to be the best match for Jacy. Throughout most of the story, he's got a white-knuckle grip on this dream & his insane jealousy where Jacy's concerned turns him into a violent loose cannon who almost wrecks his bff connection to Sonny.Sonny cherishes the same sort of dreams that animate Jacy & Duane, except that his sharp mind makes him too observant of what's in front of him to be as completely enchanted (and distracted) as the other two. This openness to immediate reality over celluloid dreams delivers him into a real life love relationship with Ruth Popper, a good & vital woman who outperforms Jacy in every important category of womanhood.Picture Jacy & Duane facing the prospect of an unfashionable lover more than twenty years their senior. Neither would consider saying yes because the reality is too far removed from what they've seen on screen. Sonny almost makes the same mistake with Jacy until he sees that her marriage proposal was just a temporary movie scenario playing in her head. Awakened from the picture show in his head, Sonny returns to his lover in real life, Ruth Popper.

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW is a moving snapshot of Times Past, faithfully recreated and honestly portrayed. There are none of the over-the-top performances that often mar this kind of movie; the characterizations are low-key and down-to-earth and ring true. Likewise, the filmmaking itself: the camera is an unflinching observer, recording for posterity the life and loves of all the characters involved in an almost documentary style. That it's done in black and white is yet another plus: this was how the world WAS before Color came along. Timothy Bottoms as Sonny is Everyguy, a boy entering young Manhood and hoping and wanting something BETTER out of Life. His final scene, which dissolves oh-so-slowly into a shot of the dust-choked main street of town, where the camera pans to a last, lingering shot of the Royal (the town theater, now closed due to the death of owner Ben Johnson), is quite beautiful.

A dark tale about man's struggle to find an emotional home for himself, even as life erodes and can cease at any instant.The setting is a wind- and tumbleweed-swept Wichita Falls, TX, in the early Fifties, and we experience this allegory through the peregrinations of high school seniors and the adults who try to influence, manipulate, or just plain control them.Man is portrayed as scarcely more than an animal here -- a creature who prowls, stalks, and ruts, and whose copulations are almost entirely bereft of genuine feeling or depth.At the center of the tale is the aimless local boy Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms). When he meets a depressed woman 20 years his senior (Cloris Leachman) who is just as starved for affection, they have intercourse. For a while they find distraction from their despair.The performances in this film are uniformly strong, however, I think too much time is given to the comings and goings of vapid teenagers in heat. I'd have liked to see and learn a little more about the intriguing father figure Joe the Lion (the craggily handsome Ben Johnson). But then again, one of the lessons here is that the good things in life are fleeting. Enjoy -- and more, appreciate -- while you can!I also think there's a take-home message in Sonny. In the course of the film he does manage to grow. Starting out as fickle and unreflective, he evolves into someone who can tolerate the emotional pain of another -- Joe the Lion, and later Mrs. Popper -- without taking the easier route of running away. Definitely a role model for us all!