The Last Picture Show is a favorite among movie aficionados — not because it’s about the cinema (it isn’t, despite the title), but for other reasons. Let’s strip off our clothes, hop into the swimming pool, and investigate.

The praise: Jeff Bridges and Ben Johnson were both nominated for a supporting actor Oscar, and Ellen Burstyn and Cloris Leachman got nods in the supporting actress category. The trophies went to Johnson (who also won a Golden Globe) and Leachman, the only two wins for The Last Picture Show. It was also nominated for Academy Awards for best picture, director, cinematography, and adapted screenplay, but lost cinematography to Fiddler on the Roof and the other three to The French Connection. Though omitted from the American Film Institute’s 1998 list of the best movies of all time, it managed to squeeze in to 95th place on the 2007 revised list.

The context: The “New Hollywood” that emerged in the late 1960s was defined by its rebellion against classic styles. As old-timey musicals and historical epics fell out of favor, youth-oriented pictures like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider — with their European aesthetics and frank depictions of violence and sex — became the new thing.

The rising generation of directors had a reputation for being as freewheeling as their movies, and Hollywood in the late ’60s and early ’70s was indeed a wild place. Yet one of the most successful of these “modern” movies was made by one of the most straitlaced and old-fashioned guys in town. He was Peter Bogdanovich, and the movie was The Last Picture Show.

Bogdanovich was what modern observers would call a movie nerd. He wrote about movies before he made them: as a critic and feature-writer for Esquire and other magazines, and in monographs about legends such as Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. When he became a filmmaker himself, he emulated the style and technique of these old-school directors, not his fast-and-loose contemporaries, and he admired old Hollywood over, say, the French New Wave. He and his wife, Polly Platt — a hardcore movie geek in her own right and a major creative influence — were squares who didn’t drink or take drugs, though plenty of people in their Hollywood social circles did.

Which isn’t to say Bogdanovich was a fuddy-duddy. The Last Picture Show is full of sex and nudity, far more than most mainstream pictures at the time were showing. What was old-fashioned about it was the way he shot it: in black-and-white, with long takes and slow pans, in the style of Orson Welles rather than Francois Truffaut. Off the screen, while he avoided the hard-partying lifestyle of Hollywood, he had trouble resisting the charms of Picture Show star Cybill Shepherd, and their affair ended his marriage.

Shepherd and most of her castmates weren’t particularly well-known yet. Bogdanovich figured it would make the small, dying Texas town seem more realistic if it wasn’t populated with recognizable movie stars. One notable exception was Ben Johnson, a familiar Western actor who had frequently worked with John Wayne and director John Ford. Johnson represented old Hollywood while his character, Sam, represented the town’s last vestiges of pride and dignity, its one remaining link to the past.

The Last Picture Show was based on Larry McMurtry’s semi-autobiographical 1966 novel. McMurtry would go on to write the books Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment, The Evening Star, and Texasville, to name just a few that were turned into movies. He later won an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain.

The movie: Between November 1951 and October 1952 — the end of one high school football season to the beginning of the next — the young people in a tiny Texas town try to figure out what the heck they’re gonna do next. In the meantime, they fool around in their cars, eat cheeseburgers at the diner, and listen to Hank Williams on the radio.

What it influenced: Bogdanovich was a young director (31 when he shot The Last Picture Show) who had youthful ideas for content and theme, old-fashioned ideas for form. The Last Picture Show has plenty of nudity (like a European art film), but it’s filmed in the classic Hollywood style instead of with choppy editing or hand-held cameras. If the actors were wearing bathing suits instead of nothing, you could believe it had been shot in the ’40s.

This blending of old and new was to be one of the hallmarks of 1970s cinema. Throughout the decade, classic types were re-imagined or given a modern, more grown-up spin. The Godfather took the familiar gangster story and gave it depth. Jaws was essentially an old B-movie — a “creature feature” — told with A-movie skill and showmanship. The Exorcist was likewise a matinee horror at its roots, but with gravitas that made it respectable for sensible adults to indulge in it, too. Chinatown was ’40s-style film noir, yet glossier and more thoughtful. You get the idea. The Last Picture Show was an early prime example of what the ’70s were all about.

It was also an example of 1950s nostalgia, which became huge in the ’70s.

Cast members Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Timothy Bottoms, Ellen Burstyn, Eileen Brennan, John Hillerman, and Randy Quaid were all at or near the beginnings of their film careers when The Last Picture Show came out, and those careers proved to be long and fruitful. Bogdanovich directed a handful of successful films after this one — What’s Up, Doc? (1972), Paper Moon (1973), Mask (1985) — but suffered a lot of flops, too (including the 1990 Last Picture Show sequel, Texasville). In a lot of ways, his career has resembled that of his idol, Orson Welles. To date, his only Oscar nominations are for directing and co-writing Last Picture Show. He’s most recently been famous as an actor: He played Tony’s psychiatrist’s psychiatrist on The Sopranos.

What to look for: Shooting the tiny Texas town in black-and-white helps make it look desolate, but that’s not the only trick. Almost every scene that’s set outdoors is small — two or three characters at the most — which contrasts with the hugeness of their surroundings. The buildings are big, boxy, and blank. The wind is always blowing. This place is dead.

But it wasn’t always like this. That’s crucial. It’s not the town’s smallness and hopelessness that’s sad; it’s the fact that it used to be different. The very first thing we hear is the lonely wind, followed by a car trying to start but not being able to, followed by Hank Williams on the radio: “Why don’t you love me like you used to do?” The film’s first line of dialogue (after the radio) is, “You ain’t gonna amount to nothin’.”

The contrast between what the town apparently used to be and what it is now gives the film its melancholy tone. The parents in town know their kids will have to leave if they want to do anything. Ellen Burstyn, playing Cybill Shepherd’s mother, exemplifies this. So does Cloris Leachman, as the high school football coach’s sad, neglected wife, but she’s trapped here. The idea of leaving doesn’t even occur to her.

Note also that the only music in the film comes from internal sources: record players, radios, jukeboxes, and the like. Most of what they listen to is either Hank Williams or Hank Williams-esque. It’s simple, forlorn music.

Fans of Orson Welles who notice this sort of thing might notice a couple “deep focus” shots, tight close-ups on someone with everything in the background also in focus. Bogdanovich was a Welles admirer, and in fact was friends with the old director by now. There’s no question those shots were inspired by Welles’ famous use of them in Citizen Kane.

What’s the big deal: Like many Big Deals, The Last Picture Show didn’t necessarily do anything that hadn’t been done before. But it uses the assemblage of previously used techniques and characters to tell a story that’s interesting enough to be entertaining fiction but common enough to feel familiar, comfortably so.

The movie is 40 years old. The people who saw the film in 1971 and could relate because they, too, were young adults, are in their 60s now. Yet the movie captures something about the boredom of adolescence that might feel even more poignant the further behind you your own adolescence is. The film trades in nostalgia, which is something everyone can relate to.

Further reading: You can tell by Vincent Canby’s, Stefan Kanfer’s and Roger Ebert’s reviews from 1971 that the film earned critical respect right out of the gate.

For a thorough, almost scene-by-scene analysis, read Tim Dirks’ article at Filmsite.

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Eric D. Snider (website) has a thing for the coach’s wife.

Tags: big deal, eric d. snider, last picture show