The Most Quintessential Texas Movie is…

Without a doubt, the most quintessentially Texas movie in all of cinema is also a film that helped blow the hell out of the production code  and usher in an era of innovation in motion pictures which will never be equaled: the 1970s.

There can't be any other movie I'm talking about than Peter Bogdanvich's  The Last Picture Show. What an ensemble cast cast: Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepard, Timothy Bottoms, Cloris Leachman, Ben Johnson, Ellen Burstyn,Randy Quaid, Clu Gulager, and the town of Archer City.

No car chases. No CGI. Hell, the damn thing's not even in color and still it's a perfect portrait of Anytown, USA, or more specifically Anywhere, Texas.

I watched the behind-the-scenes documentary made around 2000 which now comes on the DVD. In the interviews, It was admitted by actress Ellen Burstyn, who played Cybill Shepard's slutty mama, that the people in the town depicted in the movie were not happy to see their  dirty laundry on the big screen even in black-and-white and the names changed to protect the innocent. They wanted to know why they'd been chosen, singled out to be the town profiled when everyone knows this kind of stuff goes on in every town (not to mention the Sodom and Gomorrah-level depravity which goes on in big cities like Dallas, where Satan himself must live there's so much sin.)  The reason is, it just so happens author Larry McMurtry came from there.  And he was one hell of a writer. The book was steamy but the movie was somehing else.

This film was made in the time after World War II, after the Kennedy assassination, in the middle of the sexual revolution and Vietnam in which America was coming to terms with its own coming-of-age. Ten years earlier, you couldn't even say damn in a movie without making a very good point. Now we're supposed to expect full frontal nudity, adultery, teenagers engaging in lascivious behavior with both each other and people old enough to be their parents.  This movie depicted life 20 years before its release. Help, I feel faint!

As Miss Burstyn put it,  people just didn't talk about things like that back then. They sure as hell did them, though. Sure the frank depiction of boy/.girl stuff was shocking, but even more striking than that is how these people didn't die of sheer boredom in a small town where everybody was in everybody else's business.  A 17-year-old can't even walk down the street without having to atone for his football team's performance the night before (some things never change.)

Notice I haven't said much about plot. Well, I don't want to cast aspersions on this film, but the plot isn't what it's all about.  It's about character and mood, the way many coming-of-age stories are.  A lot of folks find that hard to digest, they want their films to be about something tangible, like what Hitchcock called "the MacGuffin."  (Think the Maltese Falcon where everyone was after a statue, or Octopussy where James Bond in the Russians are both after a Faberge egg,  for reasons which escape most moviegoers after a few minutes. The statue and the egg are MacGuffin's.) Hitch knew that the MacGuffin was just an excuse to move the action of the film along, a motivation for the characters while we study them and their neuroses in a particular situation. In The Last Picture Show, there's no need for a MacGuffin because life is going to move whether we like it or not.

It's this emphasis on character which most critics and film fans found amazingly refreshing.

The late Gene Siskel and the late Roger Ebert had their own take.  And 20 years ago they thought the movie would have a hell of a time being made.  I think that's even more of the case now.

In the end, The Last Picture Show is a Time Machine, a mood piece which transports  The moviegoer to another space in time. Isn't that what the best movies are supposed to do? In 1971, it was still a radical objective.