Line #5 Film/TheLastPictureShow


1	%%
2	%%
3	%% Administrivia/ZeroContextExample entries are not allowed on wiki pages. All such entries have been commented out. Add context to the entries before uncommenting them.
4	%%
5	%%
6	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/the_last_picture_show.jpg]]
7
8	''The Last Picture Show'' is a 1971 American drama film directed by Creator/PeterBogdanovich, adapted from a semi-autobiographical 1966 novel of the same name by Larry [=McMurtry=] (with a screenplay by [=McMurtry=] and Bogdanovich).
9
10	The film is set in Anarene, a tiny town on the north Texas plains, between November 1951 and October 1952 (the town is called Thalia in the novel). Sonny Crawford (Creator/TimothyBottoms) is a high school senior, and leads a typical life for a teenage boy in his town: he plays on the school football team, goes to movies at the town's only theater, which, along with the town pool hall, is run by Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson), and pursues relationships with girls, accompanied by his best friend Duane Jackson (Creator/JeffBridges), the charismatic captain of the football team. Duane is currently dating Jacy Farrow (Creator/CybillShepherd in her film debut), the school's homecoming queen, who is fiercely protected by her mother Lois (Creator/EllenBurstyn) as she grooms her for adulthood.
11
12	But as Anarene's young people get ready to become adults, the town's adults lead unhappy lives, filled with bad marriages and affairs. Sonny gets drawn into this when he falls in love with Ruth Popper (Creator/ClorisLeachman), the shy wife of the school's athletic coach. Meanwhile, the Jacy[=/=]Duane relationship gets strained and Jacy and Sonny start seeing each other, which naturally puts a wedge between Sonny and Duane. But as life goes on the people of Anarene must learn to cope with unexpected losses and sweeping changes to their world.
13
14	With a stellar cast that also included Creator/EileenBrennan, Clu Gulager, Creator/RandyQuaid (in his film debut), and John Hillerman, [[DeliberatelyMonochrome it was shot in black and white for aesthetic and technical reasons]], which was unusual for its time.
15
16	The film was nominated for eight UsefulNotes/{{Academy Award}}s, including Best Picture, Best Director, and four nominations for acting: Ben Johnson and Jeff Bridges for Best Supporting Actor, and Ellen Burstyn and Cloris Leachman for Best Supporting Actress. It won two: Johnson and Leachman.
17
18	Bogdanovich and most of the cast reunited for the sequel ''Film/{{Texasville}}'' in 1990.
19
20	----
21	!!This film provides examples of:
22
23	* TheFifties: Small-town Texas in the early 1950s where the teenagers listen to pop and country (Rock and Roll wasn't yet mainstream) and where the teenagers watch ''Film/FatherOfTheBride1950'' starring Creator/ElizabethTaylor.
24	* AdaptationNameChange: The novel's Duane Moore becomes Duane Jackson.
25	* AffectionateGestureToTheHead: Sonny often shows his affection towards Billy by taking his cap off and putting it back on.
26	* AwfulWeddedLife: A huge theme of the story.
27	-->'''Sonny''': Is being married always so miserable?\
28	'''Sam the Lion''': Not really. About eighty percent of the time, I guess.
29	* BettyAndVeronica:
30	** For Sonny, Charlene Duggs is Betty and Jacy Farrow is Veronica, but after he breaks up with Charlene, he admits that they didn't really like each other anyway.
31	** At first blush, it seems like Jacy has a male version with Sonny as Betty and Duane as Veronica, but her Veronica ends up being Bobby Sheen, the handsome rich kid who holds the swim parties, but who rejects her because [[VirginShaming she's a virgin]].
32	* BittersweetEnding: Sonny loses Jacy, who honestly was really not that interested in the first place and used him as a tool to piss off her parents. Duane leaves for the army. The DyingTown gets that much closer to dead as the movie theater closes. And poor Billy is struck and killed in the street by a truck. The only thing that leavens the ending somewhat is the reconciliation between Sonny and Ruth at the end, with her taking his hand and saying "Never you mind."
33	* BookEnds: The film closes with a reverse of the pan shot seen in the opening.
34	* CelebrityParadox: A poster for the film ''Wagon Master'', which starred Ben Johnson, is seen at the theatre. Johnson also worked as a stuntman on ''Film/RedRiver'', which ends up being the actual "last picture show."
35	* ComingOfAgeStory: Sonny leaving childish things behind, as he and the other kids graduate from high school and have to start the adult world.
36	* CoolOldGuy: Sam the Lion, who acts a mentor to the boys and doesn't talk down to them.
37	* CoolShades: Lois wears them. Abilene's aviator shades are also worth mentioning, though for a Texas oil driller they're more functional than a fashion choice.
38	* CreatorCameo: That's Peter Bodganovich's voice as the radio DJ.
39	* CurbStompBattle: The football game played the night before the story starts was a hugely humiliating loss for the Anarene team. The basketball team doesn't fare much better, losing one game by a score of 121-14!
40	* DeadpanSnarker: Sam the Lion, and Genevieve the waitress.
41	* DeliberatelyMonochrome: It was something of a TropeMaker for the artistic use of this after color finally became the Hollywood default. Upon selecting the town of Archer City, Texas, as a filming location, production designer Polly Platt and Bogdanovich decided that the town should have a bleak, colorless look about it. After considering several options, such as painting all the buildings gray, Platt and Bogdanovich consulted close friend Creator/OrsonWelles about the viability of shooting the film in black and white. Welles simply said, "Of COURSE you'll shoot it in black and white!"
42	* DidIMentionItsChristmas: A major set piece early in the film takes place at a big community Christmas party.
43	* DyingTown: Anarene, Texas; changed from Thalia, Texas in the novel.
44	* FilleFatale: Jacy, "the only pretty girl in town" according to Genevieve, is no stranger to using her looks to manipulate the males in her life.
45	* FourthDateMarriage: Almost the case with Jacy and Sonny. Seemed to be the right thing to do in TheFifties.
46	* GlassEye: Sonny ends up with one after Duane hits him with a beer bottle in a fight
47	* HangoverSensitivity: Duane comes back in rough shape after he and Sonny went on a spree in Mexico.
48	* HookerWithAHeartOfGold: Averted. Jimmie Sue, the drive-in restaurant owner who moonlights as the town hooker, is probably the single most loathsome character, for her downright rude treatment of Billy.
49	* IncurableCoughOfDeath: [[spoiler:Sam]] coughs a bit [[spoiler:in the opening scene, then later dies from a stroke]].
50	* ItAlwaysRainsAtFunerals: It takes place on the dusty Texas plains, so this gets averted.
51	* TheLastTitle: It's called ''The Last Picture Show'' because the movie theater is forced to close due to lack of business [[spoiler:after Sam dies]].
52	* TheLoinsSleepTonight: Happens to Duane when he first tries to deflower Jacy.
53	* LoveDodecahedron: There's the core triangle of Duane/Jacy/Sonny, then things branch far and wide from there.
54	* MakingLoveInAllTheWrongPlaces: Abilene and Jacy, on a snooker table.
55	* {{Melodrama}}: In a lot of ways, the film is a {{Deconstruction}} of the classic melodramas of TheFifties. The ingredients are all there -- sexual shenanigans in a small town, a love triangle, a married woman engages in a forbidden romance, more than one tragic death -- but it's all played in a very naturalistic, non-sensational way. And in contrast to the Technicolor cinematography of the classic melodramas, this is done in stark monochrome.
56	* MrsRobinson: Sonny starts a relationship with Ruth Popper, the 40-year-old wife of the high school football/basketball coach. It's also implied that Jacy's mother Lois might be attracted to him (in the novel [[spoiler:they do in fact have a sexual encounter on the way back from Oklahoma]]).
57	* NewOldWest: Though the film doesn't deal with a lot of the classic themes and plot elements of TheWestern, it was clearly influenced by the films of Creator/HowardHawks and Creator/JohnFord. Having familiar Western character actors in the cast like Ben Johnson (Sam) and Clu Gulager (Abilene) also adds to this feel.
58	* NoCommunitiesWereHarmed: [=McMurtry=] was very upfront that Thalia (in the novel)/Anarene (in the film) is a fictionalized version of his hometown Archer City, which is also where the film was made.
59	* NothingButHits: This was a TropeMaker for using hit songs as a way to establish a period feel in a film, but there's an admirably eclectic choice of pop and CountryMusic hits from the early 1950s, ranging from ballads to uptempo numbers to novelty songs.
60	* TheOneThatGotAway: When he goes fishing with Sonny, Sam the Lion reminisces about an old lover, who he used to go skinny-dipping with, regretting that they couldn't stay together because they were both married. [[spoiler:Later, comments made by Lois to Sonny reveal that ''she'' was the woman, and that she gave him the nickname "the Lion"]].
61	* RealityHasNoSoundtrack: The film has no score, but lots of songs from TheFifties played on radios and record players, with Music/HankWilliams as the dominant artist.
62	* TheReasonYouSuckSpeech: Ruth gives one of these to Sonny at the end.
63	* ReCut: Columbia Pictures mandated that the film had to be under two hours in its original release (it ended up as 118 minutes). In TheNineties Peter Bogdanovich did a director's cut with eight additional minutes, which is the version that currently circulates
64	* RunningGag: The townsfolk ribbing the guys for their inability to tackle during football games.
65	* {{Sequel}}: ''Film/{{Texasville}}'', [=McMurtry=]'s sequel to the original novel, was itself adapted for the screen by Bogdanovich in 1990. Bridges, Shepherd, Leachman, Bottoms, Quaid, and Brennan all reprised their roles.
66	* SeriousBusiness: Pool, for the men in town, but especially Abilene, who has his own custom-made cue.
67	* SexIsLiberation: Heavily {{deconstructed}}. Almost all the film's sexual pairings end up complicating things for the people involved, though Ruth, who's very shy and uptight before her affair with Sonny, is close to a straight example.
68	* ShoutOut:
69	** The two main characters watch ''Film/RedRiver'' during the titular "last picture show" at the town's soon-to-be-closing cinema.
70	** Another film advertised earlier on the cinema marquee is ''Film/Winchester73'', starring Creator/JamesStewart, who, as noted on the Trivia page, was Bogdanovich's first choice to play Sam the Lion.
71	** Opening the film with a silent white-on-black title card was a nod to ''Film/CitizenKane'', as was the frequent use of deep focus shots.
72	* SignatureMove: For Sam the Lion, rolling cigarettes.
73	* SlidingScaleOfAdaptationModification: On the border of 3 and 4. The main characters and storylines all unfold largely the same way in the both the novel and the film, but the film was forced to allude to a lot of things about the characters that the novel spells out in more detail. The major scene in the novel that didn't make the film is the class going on a senior trip to San Francisco, although the attempts of Duane and Jacy to have sex on the trip did make it into the film in a different context. The novel also has a long sequence depicting the misadventures of Sonny and Duane in Mexico.
74	* SmallTownBoredom: Anarene has a little over 1,000 people, and the only real economy in town is the dying oil industry. The teens and the adults live restless lives. As summed up by Creator/RogerEbert, it's a story "about a town with no reason to exist, and people with no reason to live there. The only hope is in transgression."
75	* SoundtrackDissonance: The intense final scene with Sonny and Ruth has the goofy comedy record [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poCWRJTgMQU "It's in the Book"]] playing in the background.
76	* SuddenlyShouting: Used to devastating effect toward the end, with Sonny exploding over how callous people are acting about [[spoiler:Billy's death]], then in the final scene where [[spoiler:Ruth lets her frustration with Sonny boil over]].
77	* UpperClassTwit: Lester Marlow is a self-absorbed rich kid from Wichita Falls who hangs out in Anarene mainly to pursue Jacy.
78	* VideoCredits: All main characters are shown with face and name in the closing credits.
79	* VirginShaming: Jacy and Billy are both recipients of this.
80	* WhatTheHellHero: Ruth lets Sonny have an earful of rage after he'd abandoned her for months. At the end, she realizes he's at his DespairEventHorizon too and lets him off the hook, saying, "Never you mind, honey, never you mind."
81	* TheVoiceless: Billy never says a word throughout the film.
82

Context Film / TheLastPictureShow