The Last Picture Show (1971)
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
High school seniors and best friends, Sonny and Duane, live in a dying Texas town. The handsome Duane is dating a local beauty, while Sonny is having an affair with the coach's wife. As graduation nears and both boys contemplate their futures, Duane eyes the army and Sonny takes over a local business. Each struggles to figure out if he can escape this dead-end town and build a better life somewhere else.
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What critics compared The Last Picture Show to
They also manage to weave their love of basketball into the drama (the film is set in the spring of 2012, drawing on an actual series of matches featuring Garnett’s Celtics team), which seems to embody their entire approach: Everything they do comes from a passion for their characters, their stories and their settings – a welcome throwback to the ’70s, when other Jewish New Yorkers like Alan J. Pakula, Jerry Schatzberg and Peter Bogdanovich were making character-driven dramas like “Klute,” “The Panic in Needle Park” and “The Last Picture Show.”
A decade earlier, Peter Bogdanovich had paid tribute to the great Western directors in The Last Picture Show by coupling the horizontal grandeur of their black and white shots with the straitening reality of small-town Texas life.
A couple of distant possibilities: Peter Bogdanovich recognized a Texas version of Daisy in Jacy in The Last Picture Show—and the poor dreamer launched himself on a Fitzgerald-like road to ruin by leaving his wife for the 21-year-old Cybill Shepherd and installing her in a mansion in Bel Air.
It's a Texan lament not heard since "The Last Picture Show."
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True, they went to the movies in “The Last Picture Show” and the heroes of “ Clerks ” worked in a video store.
"Hell or High Water" harks back to 1970s elegies for the Old West: "The Last Picture Show," "Fat City," "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot."
His book The Last Picture Show , about the slow death of the old Texas, is set there and the famous movie based on it was filmed there, in 1971.
Long before he was cast as “the Dude”, one of Jeff Bridges’ earliest roles was in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show .
In 1971, a very young Jeff Bridges starred in The Last Picture Show, a bleak portrait of small-town life in the land once associated with cowboy swagger and manifest destiny.
Or picture something desolate and emotionally desperate like Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971), an adaptation of a novel by Larry McMurtry, who collaborated on the Brokeback Mountain screenplay.
The Texan writer Larry McMurtry ( The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove) is somebody else who has kept pace with the western's changing shape, and it was he and his writing partner, Diana Ossana, who first optioned Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain for the screen.
The fine screenplay by Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry admirably fills out the middle section of Proulx's story, and the stunted lives chronicled in the film often call to mind McMurtry's superb script of "The Last Picture Show" (1971).
The Larry McMurtry-Diana Ossana screenplay, an Oscar-nomination lock, has the authentic feel of McMurtry's Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show as well as the cumulative power of his Terms of Endearment.
Both Mr. Lee and Mr. McMurtry are no strangers to lachrymose sentiment, although Mr. Lee’s The Ice Storm (1997) and Mr. McMurtry’s screenplay for Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), which was based on one of his novels, left me singularly dry-eyed—perhaps because both films tried too hard to make me cry.
Bridges has been playing older figures of authority for so long that it's easy to forget how disarming he can be with that smile and charm reminiscent of his more boyish smooth talker work from the '70s like, Lightfoot in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (Michael Cimino, 1974) or Duane in The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971).