The Last Picture Show (1971 Peter Bogdanovich & prod)

First saw this film one Saturday night on TV - the 21st January 1978 - and remember everyone talking about it at (boys') school the next week - being 14 we were of course all delighted with the nudity and sex scenes. Though for me the sense of time and place - and particularly the quiet, remote, run-down (and black-and white) location - was as equally memorable, and even then I realised the acting was good, and in my film filing card I see now that all the actors - Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cloris Leachman (AA), Ben Johnson (AA), Cybill Shepherd, Ellen Burstyn - were underlined in red, signifying notable performances - how could the kid be so smart?

Love most of Robert Surtees photography though did (and still) think that the lighting in some of the interiors is ugly. No composed music score, all diagetic, making the sense of time and place even more pronounced - closure of cinema all the more significant for this film lover / historian who became the wunderkind director - notably, Hawks' Red River is the last film played there. Considering it was only his second film, PB directs with great maturity and sensitivity: particularly loved the scene where Ben Johnson talks about his past, and camera very gently moves in, then out (like in Blimp) - the same shot works for Eileen Brennan's waitress (she's also fantastic; I forget to mention her when I was a teenager); the jump cut to the broom when Bottoms realises it's his 'brother'; editing of fight between Bridges and Bottoms*. The love-making scenes between Bottoms and Leachman (their faces) and Shepherd and Clu Gulager (on the pool table) are both extraordinary.

I was thinking as I watched it that Bogdanovich is a director who doesn't make me cry ... then he did... Like Truffaut, he fell in love with his leading lady.. He adapted Larry McMurtry's (Brokeback Mountain / Hud  - that's why the scenes with the waitress seem somehow familiar!) novel with the author - I'd call it a Masterpiece of Melancholy (so then is Daisy Miller.. interesting).

I'm going to tell Mr B that his next book - about his own career - should be called 'What the Fuck Happened?'  I guess it was his own experience as an actor (under Stella Adler) that enabled him to get such fabulous performances.

*I read afterwards that this fight was well rehearsed and then broken down and filmed in shots, so that it was in a sense edited in the camera - no additional material was shot that wasn't used. It's quite a remarkable talent in one so young and new.