Customer Reviews

The Last Picture Show

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

i'm on the fence with this film.i definitely didn't hate it.but i didn't love it either. thought
it was well made and the performances were really good.i liked the look
the film.filming it in black and white definitely added to the
authenticity if the time period(1952).i didn't find it boring Per SE.in
fact it was quite compelling.it's basically the story of life in small
town Texas and everything that entails.the characters each have their
eccentricities and are interesting enough.the dialogue is economical
and well written.obviously this is a character study more than
anything.this time the character is the town as much as its
inhabitants.having said all that,i wouldn't call this a seminal film.it
is a very good film though,and well worth watching.for me,The Last
Picture Show is a 3/5

In the dried-up old town of Anarene, Texas, there's not much for boys to do but chase girls and play pool. High school seniors Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), his best friend Duane (Jeff Bridges), and Jacey, the prettiest girl in town (Cybil Shepherd), start to grow up and make some decisions about their future.

I absolutely loved this movie. The windy, dusty town felt familiar and even cozy by the end of the movie, and the good ol' folks living in it seemed like neighbors. Bottoms, Bridges, and Shepherd are wonderful (and young!) as the kids, all of them giving sympathetic, memorable performances. Ben Johnson plays the nicest man in town and Cloris Leachman is a lonely married woman; they both won Best Supporting Oscars playing very real and vulnerable characters.

The movie is directed at a leisurely pace so we can absorb the small-town atmosphere; Anarene became full of interesting people with hopes and dreams. This is indeed a timeless classic that will appeal to those who like character-driven stories about ordinary people. Highly recommended.

This flick is overrated. But you've got to give the filmmakers credit for going with black- and- white, for shooting it in Texas (where the story takes place) and for not trying to squeeze in too many characters into the "plot."
The Chase, starring Marlon Brando, that also takes place in Texas, might have received all the praise heaped on the Last Picture Show flick had they gone the black -and- white route and stayed away from the Universal back lot.

Hud, also shot in Texas, was a better film than this. It seems to me, a good rule of thumb to doing pictures in Texas is to go with black-and-white photography. Don't know why, could be the automatic, built-in authenticity factor one gets with B & W. Color very often means Hollywood glitz, and doesn't seem to work well with this type of tale.

Anyway, it's not the worst flick ever made. Ben Johnson does a nice job, so does Ellen Burstyn. The latter two deserve four stars for their work here. Sybil Shephard was drop-dead gorgeous at the time.

This film captures life in small town Texas vividly. It was shot in black and white but color film would not have changed the appearance one bit.

Some of the scenes were shot where I delivered newspapers as a kid. I thought I had been transported back in time when I first saw the film. The characters and dialog are magnificent and the situations reminiscent of life as it was then.

It is a beautiful and touching film, one to watch over and over.

An amazing movie. Frankly, I agree with the glowing reviews of the film and I have nothing to add to them. However, concerning the quality of the restoration to DVD I must say that it appears that the widescreen formatting was done incorrectly. If you compare the image of the film's opening with that in the documentary(disregarding the full frame), you will notice that the area below the steps of the moviehouse, in the documentary, reveals the begining of the street. In the film itself, this has been cut off. You can also compare the image of Cybill Shepherd on the back of the DVD cover that shows her feet as she steps out of her car. In the film, this is also cut off.

'The Last Picture Show' was an okay film. I got annoyed by the camera zooming in and then zooming away from the characters' faces. Well acted though.

Set in rural West Texas, but reflects life of American teenagers in the fifties more generally. See also American Graffitti. If you grew up in the fifties, then you may see yourself in these films!

(A Kentuckian)

Ben Johnson earns one of the stars here given; Polly Platt, the de facto co-director, earns the other. Platt, Boggy's girl until he dumped her for the mindless Sheperd, was responsible for what [little] merit looney Peter's films ever had.

One can look at the film and pick out the Ford-homage (i.e., ripoff), the Hawks-homage and the Welles-homage (even to a scene cut from "The Magnificent Ambersons"!).
This is filmmaking by the film-nerd numbers.

The acting by all concerned save Johnson is deficient in one way or another.
Bottoms is a cypher.
Sheperd an incompetent in the 'Tippi' Hedren mold.
Burstyn and Brennan combine in highly unlikely spasm of omniscience.
Gulager is all goggle-eyed wardrobe creepiness.
Bridges a one-note brute.
Quaid a goofball.
Leachman the benificary of an over-wrought desperate Oscar-begging scene.

Upon first viewing, one can see why the film garnered attention.
However, decades and multiple viewings later, this stunt-film collapses, its Ford/Hawks/Welles bag of tricks emptied and exposed as the derivative hodgepodge it is.

The plot of the movie has been explained over and over on these pages so just let me say that I saw it upon its original theatrical release and was simply blown away. I have seen it many times since and it still leaves me in awe. The movie is one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen. The ensemble acting is unbeatable and veteran western character actor Ben Johnson and veteran actress Cloris Leachman steal the movie. Both are absolutely phenomenal. This is a movie for the ages, though younger people of today might not fully grasp its importance. This is an incredible movie. See it.

For me there are two kinds of depressing movies, there are the kind that make you want to go out and kill yourself, and then there are the kind that just kind of numb you into beleiving that in your life you will never find meaning or fulfillment. This film falls squarely in the latter category. This film, along with Pekinpah's "The Wild Bunch" and Leone's "Once upon a time in the West" make up the core cannon of the death of the west movies yet they view it from very different angles. This film focus's on the death of the innocence of small town middle America as those few rugged individuals who had the courage to seek some sort of answer and fulfilment to their lives who were once thought to populate the west are dying off and leaving behind a dissalusioned populace without compassion, decency, and being slaves to their passions and not masters of their fates.

Set in a small town in Texas and loosely following the odyssey of one young man (Sonny) and his interaction with his fellow man (and most importantly woman) over the course of one year in 1951. Sonny isn't anything real special, just a mediocre high school football co-captain with a girlfriend he doesn't really like and who is about to graduate and likely work for the local oil drillers. Some notable traits do immediately become apparent in Sonny however, namely his apparent compassion and comoradery for an outcast mentally retarded boy, and the shine which a strong likeable old cowboy type (Sam) has taken to him. Sonny is at that terrifying stage in life where a person just begins to realize what an awful place the world really is and how awful most people in it really are. We see his flounderings through his reach towards maturity by means of his affair with his coach's wife, his indiscretions with his best friends ex, and his contemplation on the words of the old timer Sam.
There are other characters given almost as much screentime as Sam leading to multiple subplots, this movie follows the "Winesberg Ohio" model of painting smalltown life thorugh the rich tapestry of the individuals that compose it.

Thematically this movie is all about the loss of innocence, of the west certainly, but also of man in general. One of the most painful aspects of growing up is realizing that hardly anyone is truly what they seem. The movie seems to look most favorably on the outlooks of those who least try to conceal what they are and simply deal with themselves and their fellowman honestly, and this is certainly not a bad view to take; to view yourself and the world around you as it really is without a lense. And yet, the movie shows the barreness of such a view, ultimately leaving itself relatively unresolved. The movie behaves exactly as it should, and as a result is a joy to watch. Still, you do leave feeling as though you've just run a marathon through a murky swamp believing nothing and no one to be innocent. This might be true, but even if no one is innocent (which seems likely) hopefully we won't fall into mere mediocrity and keep striving for some kind of innocence.

A must see for any lovers of existentialist philosophy and lovers of beautifully depressing cinema.