Making Love for the Pictures

A group of teenagers come of age in a small, amoral town in 1971's The Last Picture Show. Director Peter Bogdanovich's breakout film, it was based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, who was informed by his own experience growing up in a small Texas town. It's a captivating, credible portrait of small town hypocrisy and lust in the early '50s.

Most of the story follows three characters, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), Duane (Jeff Bridges), and Jacy (Cybill Shepherd). Jacy's Duane's girlfriend though Sonny's already stealing looks at her. Sonny's own girlfriend is ornery and inured to making out with the attitude of a lunchlady serving her ten thousandth sloppy joe. The two breakup with little ceremony and only perfunctory rancor.

Jacy's mother tells her straight out she wants her daughter to have sex with Duane so she gets over the idea there's anything special about him and will go off to college. But Jacy ditches Duane to go to a skinny-dipping party where, in a memorable scene, she has to perform an impromptu strip show for the silent assembly of naked teenagers. It's supposed to be a party but there's no music. The silence and lack of chatter emphasises the awkwardness of the moment but Jacy goes through with it. She's looking for this kind of adventure. Well, such pathetic little adventures that can be scraped together in the dusty old town, and of course, most of them involve sex. But it's hard to find anyone who's not thoroughly jaded.

That's the revelation of this movie. There's a scene in which a little mob goes after a religious guy because they think he molested a little girl (amusingly, the camera angle at the end of the scene, in which the little girl trails after the departing mob, shows they don't care nearly as much about her as about punishing the possible perpetrator). But they're barely a peripheral presence in the film which mostly focuses on sex and its impact on the self-esteem of the boys. All the women and girls seem to treat it as an occasional comforting, but more often tedious, task that must be dispensed with. Even Jacy seems more interested in the idea of having had sex than in actually having it. But what else is there to talk about?

There is the movie theatre run by old Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson). We see clips from Father of the Bride and Red River, the former standing in contrast to the reality, the latter reflecting it somewhat. It reminded me of Godard, particularly the scene in Vivre sa vie in which Anna Karina watches The Passion of Joan of Arc. As ever, it's hard not to see the influence of the French New Wave on New Hollywood.

The Last Picture Show is showing on The Criterion Channel's New Hollywood playlist this month.