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Drama, Romance 119 min R
Rotten Tomatoes98%Metacritic93IMDb
Anarene, Texas, 1951. Nothing much has changed…
High school seniors and best friends, Sonny and Duane, live in a dying Texas town. The handsome Duane is dating a local beauty, while Sonny is having an affair with the coach's wife. As graduation nears and both boys contemplate their futures, Duane eyes the army and Sonny takes over a local business. Each struggles to figure out if he can escape this dead-end town and build a better life somewhere else.
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Contemplative, prestige, character-led and nostalgic.
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Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Taste Buds's numbers.
"Sonny" (Timothy Bottoms) and "Duane" (Jeff Bridges) are best pals in a remote Texan town that offers them little by way of prospects. They both vie for the love interest of "Jacy" (Cybill Shepherd) although she is supposed to be dating "Duane". She comes from the family that passes for wealth in "Anarene" and her mother (Ellen Burstyn) has essentially told her to keep her options open and see which, from an extremely limited gene pool, might offer her the best prospects. For most of their lives, "Sam" (Ben Johnson), himself a symbol of a bygone era, was a sort of father figure and his death leaves them in charge of the town's entertainment - a dilapidated bar/pool hall/cinema that's just about as run down as the town itself. Do they stay and run it together? Will one or both decide that the future lies elsewhere? With their graduation and the draft looming, their collective hormones racing and rivalries becoming rife, the whole town starts to feel the strains of their predicament. I kept expecting Marlon Brando to appear here as the monochrome photography and the 1950s style of the production deliver quite a potent coming-of-age drama that's distinctly lacking in sentiment. It's a
Read the whole review on TMDBI must have watched this movie a few years after it came out, but I had no specific memory of it, no feeling of deja vu of having seen a scene before. It is a good film in many ways, certainly achieving its apparent goal of portraying a bleak landscape of a dying town. The dialogue, which I notice since I write novels that feature a lot of dialogue, is excellent, just what you expect from Larry McMurtry. The acting is solid, though a little dreamy and perhaps overdone in places. I like how the camera focuses on faces at times even when nothing is being said. Because there are so many young men and women characters, there is a lot of sex and obsession about sex. That is the intended audience, I imagine, the young and young at heart. I liked the imagery I saw in the life blood of a town symbolically blowing away gradually in the ever-present wind. For that reason I wish there had been a tad less sex and more of a focus on the social aspects of a town fading away, taking the dreams of the young with it. But I suppose that would be a different film aimed at a different audience.
Read the whole review on TMDB***Bleak, trashy B&W drama of life in a fading Texas town in the early 50s with several strong points*** Released in 1971, “The Last Picture Show” is a B&W drama of several teens and adults in a dying Texas town on the windy plains in 1951. Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd play the main high shoolers while Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman and Ellen Burstyn appear as the adults. Randy Quaid and Clu Gulager have peripheral roles. Sam the Lion (Johnson) is the minor mogul of the town, the father figure of several of the boys, who are fatherless in practice, if not reality. Despite wallowing in a dreary pall (which ties-in to the theme), the movie conveys many insights about real life and has some genuine warmth. A couple good examples are when Sam looks at Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Bridges) before they leave for a wild weekend in Mexico or the final scene between Sonny and the coach’s wife (Leachman); Sam’s reflections at “the tank” is another. Furthermore, I respect a movie that has the confidence to take its time without feeling the need to rush to the thrills and titillations. “The Last Picture Show” is slightly infamous for its sleaze quotient, but it’s inter
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