The Last Picture Show (1971)
directed by Peter Bogdanovich
It’s amazing that in 1971, a film could be handled with such class and still deal with issues of sex in small-town America, all the while avoiding cliché and sensationalism. For this reason, Bogdanovich is the man. He started out early on in the Golden era of American Cinema in the 1970’s, and made a film that had feeling and intent to deal with themes in depth, that were only glazed over in mainstream cinema.
Spanning a longer time frame without signaling the passage of time, Bogdanivich moves the film right along from scene to scene, letting his themes come through as naturally as life itself. Through this approach, the film is able to be critical of ritualistic practices, and deals admirable with sex as one of these day-to-day life occurrences, as opposed to over-dramatic, or melodramatic scenes.
Producing some of the most iconic images of early American pop-cinema history, Bogdanivich is able to craft these pictures without explosions and highly produced glam. This is not to say that this film was not expensive for its time, or that movies back then were generally more dull anyway, but my point is that this film does what American cinema can not accomplish anymore; and that is make a movie on the picture itself.
Shot in black and white and using the Texas landscape as a way to comment on town life, the simplicity in full-shot framing gives the film a minimalist tone. Not trying to hard to make the scenes tell the viewer about the problems, but attempting to show through gesture just how powerful the human rapport is, power struggles in sexual relationships is mostly the dominant theme.
Our main character, Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms), is a local boy in Texas whom the audience is aligned with. The film follows him through the narrative arc and growing pains of a young man in a small town. Dealing with everything from death, to sex, to war, the film spans a couple years and does not hold the viewers hand to tell them whether or not a month, week, or a day has passed. Spanning such a long period of time also allows Bogdanovich to cordially deal with the issues he sees as relevant and mostly marginalized in mainstream.
In this sense, Bogdanovich’s American classic still holds cultural relevance, and it is this timelessness that demarcates it as such, a real classic.