Delayed Reaction: The Last Picture Show

The Pitch: Life's pretty boring in a small Texas town. But at least there's sex.

I guess I'm becoming a Peter Bogdanovich fan. I loved Paper Moon several weeks ago. I followed that up with The Last Picture Show a couple weeks later. That was not at all what I was expecting. I think the title gave me the wrong impression. This was good too.

I was surprised how modern this movie felt in a lot of ways. Not the setting - that was intentionally rustic - but the storytelling. There's a frankness to the dialogue and the sex that I don't associate with films from almost 50 years ago. I suppose that's "New Hollywood" for you. I haven't gotten very deep into that era. I can easily see how this is part of the same movement as The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy.

What I really wasn't expecting was the humor to the movie. I love the running joke about how bad the boys' team is at football, especially because they never bother to show them playing. I couldn't help but laugh at how transparently fickle Cybil Sherpard's character was. When the film starts, she seems pretty level-headed, but as she get boreder and boreder, she starts making trouble just to make things interesting. By the end, she's comically over the top.

Speaking of Shepard, this cast is crazy good and young. Jeff Bridges, Cybill Sheperd, and Randy Quaid were babies. I didn't realize that Cloris Leachman ever looked that young (and she was already in her mid-40s by then). Ellen Burstyn, Eilleen Brennan, Ben Johnson. And I haven't even gotten to Timothy Bottoms, technically the star of the movie. He's fine. This was definitely the high point of his career. If I was a more curious person, I'd look into why that is. I don't think he would've been typecast, so I have to assume he just made some bad film choices.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend