Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show

According to Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a former Esquire reporter’s book on New Hollywood, Peter Bogdanovich, renowned lover of Classical Hollywood, considered his debut film, The Last Picture Show, to be his “John Ford picture.” The film deals with a love triangle among high school seniors in a 1950s Texas small town, with an excellent performance by Ford regular Ben Johnson as the owner of the town’s movie theatre and pool hall hangout, and luxuriant black and white cinematography by Robert Surtees, who also lensed The Graduate and Mutiny on the Bounty.

Although Last Picture Show does accurately capture the elegiac tone of Ford’s late Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, I would argue that it actually has more in common with the early films of the French New Wave, from Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad to Truffaut’s 400 Blows and Shoot the Piano Player. Bogdanovich’s Last Picture Show shares with early Truffaut a frankness about sexual matters (the movie has several very stylish, sexy sequences with young Cybill Shepard that are as formally playful as anything in Shoot the Piano Player), a picaresque narrative, and a feeling that the director is concerned with being socially responsible and non-exploitative. When I mention Last Year at Marienbad in relation to Last Picture Show, I’m primarily thinking of the cinematography, definitely not the Marienbad’s experimental narrative. The final shot of Marienbad—where Delphine Seyrig and the Man are walking away from the hotel into the dark, with the lights of the hotel glimmering and one is overwhelmed by the feeling that she should not leave—is echoed in a shot in Picture Show where Sonny, played by Timothy Bottoms, looks out over the town with a bottle of whiskey and Hank Williams playing on his car radio. The major difference is that Resnais allows the shot to linger, letting the shot move beyond the realm of simple representation into higher reaches of metaphor, while Bogdanovich cuts away quickly to Bottoms’ pouting face and holds there. That is, succinctly, the difference between a very good Hollywood film and art.