a deep insecurity in their chests as they reach the end of adolescence.
No matter what the post-war
America of the 1950s propaganda tries to tell you, the family unit was not stronger, a popular parenting pattern of ignorance and avoidance built up resentment between the parents and their children. Each one of the trio is striving for a feeling of reassurance and acknowledgement they know they will not get at home. The movie opens the day after the local high school football team has lost, both Sonny and Duane are blamed by the town’s elders, constantly being reminded of the shame and disappointment they are to the community. Meanwhile, Jacy’s entire homelife is basically being told she’ll never amount to anything other than a poor man’s wife by her mother. She is then peer pressured into stripping to be ogled at before skinny dipping into a pool with a bunch of strangers. All three are pushed away from Anarene emotionally. Sonny confides in a romantic affair with his gym teacher’s middle aged wife, Duane attempts to win back the approval of Jacy, Jacy is out seeking the admiration of a boy in a neighboring town instead of the resentment of her own.
The young aren’t the only ones
left behind by Anarene, the unfulfilled elders of Ruth (Cloris Leachman), Lois (Ellen Burstyn), and Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson) round out the cast that bring into question that this angst is not generational but cyclical in nature. The town’s cruelty weighs on the shoul4
ders of every citizen that walks among them, stuck in a depression that has clung on like a cancer. Ruth’s face shows clear evidence of years of marital neglect, a permanent frown wrinkles on her lips as she always sounds like she’s choking on the verge of tears. A brittle weakness she couldn’t even begin to hide, yet everyone pretends to not see this struggle. Lois having a very obvious and public affair with a domineering oil driller that everyone in town seems to know about, yet everyone turns a blind eye. Sam the Lion acts as the Anarene’s heart and soul, a rancher who used to own a large portion of land where the town now sits on, reminisces to the boys about a short-lived but passionate affair he had with a woman hestill longed for but left long ago, wondering if she still thinks of him. Feeling as though true love passed by his fingertips. Sam’s monologue feels almost like a eulogy for the town itself as he sighs and stares off into the now permanently changed landscape. A sternfaced yet romantically poetic cowboy, the last of his breed. Sam then dies offscreen, unceremoniously.
I always found it interesting and
slightly ironic Bogdanovich called The Last Picture Show his Ford picture. While it shares the Western vistas and the black and white celluloid that would end up in John Ford’s classic genre films, the film is thematically anti-Ford, anti-Classic Hollywood. A rejection of the celebration of the Good Guys will prevail and ride off into the sunset that major studios wanted pushed during the 1950s. Ultimately, this small Texas town’s innocence isn’t saved or preserved during the movie’s titular final showing of Red River, it’s called into
