I’ve watched the film, The Last Picture Show more times than I can remember, so it’s no surprise that it ranks among my favourites. The film boasts an extraordinary cast including Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Cybill Shepherd, Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn, Eileen Brennan, and Ben Johnson. The film was both a commercial and artistic success making 29 million at the box office in 1971 and winning an Oscar for Cloris Leachman as Best Supporting Actress and an Oscar for Ben Johnson as Best Supporting Actor. Nominated for Best Picture along with A Clockwork Orange, Fiddler on the Roof, and Nicholas and Alexandra it lost out to The French Connection.
The novel was adapted for the screen by Peter Bogdanovich and Larry McMurtry and also received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay but once again lost out to The French Connection. Even so not a bad film for first-time director Bogdanovich who was at that time working with Orson Welles on The Other Side of the Wind. A film left unfinished at the time of Welles’s death in 1985 and only completed in 2018 by Netflix almost fifty years after it began production with Bogdanovich keeping a promise to his friend and mentor Welles to finish the film. Bogdanovich died in 2022 at the age of 82 and Larry McMurtry died in 2021 at the age of 84.
McMurtry had an extraordinary career winning the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Lonesome Dove which spawned a series of books and highly successful television adaptations. Besides The Last Picture Show other successful novels of his that made their way to the big screen include Terms of Endearment and Hud based on his novel Horseman, Pass By. McMurtry received an Oscar along with Diana Ossana for their adaptation of Brokeback Mountain based on the short story of the same name by Annie Proulx. McMurtry has left behind an extraordinary collection of work including novels, screenplays, and nonfiction.
Let’s just say he was a prolific man of talent.
The Last Picture Show is the only novel I’ve read of his and I came to it because of the movie. I was curious to know how the novel compared to the movie and I’m glad to say that the movie is a faithful adaptation of the book. In fact, the book reads very much like a treatment for a movie. Much of the dialogue in the film is to be found in the book and the parts of the book not seen in the movie were good choices to cut in my opinion. The movie is a tighter story. It’s more focused. And yet both the book and the movie feel very much the same. This is a small town in Texas where our characters try to find meaning often through romantic entanglements in a bleak landscape. It is a landscape where Estragon and Vladimir from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot would feel right at home.
But of course, one of the interesting things that happens when you read the novel after you’ve seen the movie is that in my mind at least while reading the book I see the actors who portrayed those characters. And the movie has done an amazing job of casting. Jeff Bridges is Duane. Timothy Bottoms is Sonny. Cybill Shepherd is Jacy. Cloris Leachman is Ruth. Ben Johnson is Sam.
The story takes place in 1951, with the Korean War lurking in the background, and with best friends Sonny and Duane finishing up their last year of high school. Duane is dating Jacy the prettiest and richest girl in town and Sonny finds himself stumbling into a relationship with Ruth the wife of the High School Football and Basketball coach. The boys come from broken backgrounds and find some comfort and guidance from Sam who runs the local pool hall, diner, and movie theatre.
This is a bleak book and movie and yet like other bleak takes on life there is plenty here that resonates about life and about how people in spite of everything go on stumbling into the future and that happiness is both difficult to find and when found tends not to last. I’m not sure I’ll read the novel again, but I am sure I will watch the movie. It’s a movie I’m drawn to when I find myself in a melancholy mood and I find it a refreshing movie to watch these days because it is focused on story and character and life and not on special effects. And that seems to give it a human intensity that reaches me on a deeper and more satisfying level than a lot of contemporary films. Terrific book. Amazing film.
