Movie Review - The Last Picture Show

This 1971 film  received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, but didn't make it.  Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman won oscars as best supporting actor and actress respectively.

The film is set in 1951, and features some very young actors who went on to become quite well known. Timothy Bottoms; Jeff Bridges; and Randy Quaid, all of whom were aged 19 to 21 when the film was made.  Timothy Bottoms' younger brother Sammy gives good account of a retarded teenager.  This was Cybil Shepherds' first movie.  The former model did a credible job as a young rich teenager.

Other treats were a rather young Ellen Burstyn, who, along with Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, and Eileen Brennan played the adult members of the cast.

The story is set in a dreary, dying Texas town.

Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges

This is a stunning film, and one that probably couldn't be made today.  That being said, it is well worth the price of the DVD version.

Roger Ebert had this to say about the film in 2004:

Seeing the film once again, I was struck by how many of the scenes involve sex, and how little they involve eroticism. Cybill Shepherd's celebrated striptease on a diving board got a lot of attention at the time, but her character coldly uses sex as a way to get the best deal she can out of Anarene. The only real warmth comes from the Leachman character, Ruth, combing Sonny's hair while they're both fully dressed.

There is simply no way in this town to touch life and glow. The last ones who knew the secret were Sam the Lion and maybe Genevieve (Eileen Brennan), the waitress at Sam's diner. Sonny and Duane, we suspect, will grow up to drink too much, work too hard and marry desperate women -- unless Duane is killed first in Korea. There is certainly no future for gentle Billy (Sam Bottoms), who always smiles but has no reason to.

The film is above all an evocation of mood. It is about a town with no reason to exist, and people with no reason to live there. The only hope is in transgression, as Ruth knows when she seduces Sonny, the boy half her age. And then he, too, falls briefly under the spell of Jacy, leading to the powerful scene where he returns to Ruth and she hurls the coffeepot against the wall and spills out her soul. (Leachman did that scene in one take, first time, no rehearsal.)