Barnes & Noble

Peter Bogdanovich's meditative masterpiece The Last Picture Show remains a visually gripping experience, just as it was in 1971 when it was greeted with critical acclaim and eight Academy Award nominations. Based on a novel by Larry McMurtry (adapted for the screen by Bogdanovich and McMurtry), it brilliantly captures the rhythms of life in an isolated, windblown West Texas town during the early 1950s. The coming-of-age story follows a group of local teenagers and adults as they search for meaning and adventure in their sleepy little village. The sublime ensemble cast features Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Ellen Burstyn, and Cybill Shepherd in her film debut. Ben Johnson, as the town's aging patriarch, and Cloris Leachman, as a lonely housewife, turn in superb Oscar-winning supporting performances. Bogdanovich pays homage to Hollywood's golden age with stunning black-and-white cinematography that recalls the work of classic directors such as John Ford. (It also earned cinematographer Robert Surtees the 10th of his eventual 15 Academy Award nominations.) Mournful in tone, The Last Picture Show is a sustained mood piece, a subtle fugue that marries rich character studies with an unforgettable sense of time and place. Monica McIntyre

All Movie Guide

Produced by Hollywood iconoclast BBS Productions, film critic-turned-director Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 film pays homage to Hollywood's classical age as it chronicles generational rites of passage in Anarene, a fictional one-horse Texas town. In 1951, high school seniors Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges) play football, go to the movies at the Royal Theater, hang out at the pool hall owned by local elder statesman Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson), and lust after rich tease Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd in her film debut). As the year passes, Sonny learns about the pitfalls and compromises of adulthood through an affair with his coach's wife Ruth (Cloris Leachman) and a thwarted elopement with Jacy after she dumps Duane. Following two tragic deaths, and with Duane gone to Korea and Jacy packed off to college in Dallas, Sonny is left behind in Anarene, wise enough to absorb the life lessons of Sam the Lion and Jacy's mother Lois (Ellen Burstyn). He is determined to honor Sam's legacy as the town's conscience, despite a telling sign of incipient communal disintegration: the closing of the Royal Theater after a final showing of Howard Hawks's Red River. Paying tribute to classical Hollywood directors like Hawks and John Ford, Bogdanovich used old-time cinematographer Robert Surtees and shot The Last Picture Show in crisp black-and-white, with a restrained style devoid of the kind of "new wave" techniques (jump cuts, zooms, and jittery hand-held camerawork) used by such contemporaries as Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, Mike Nichols, and Martin Scorsese. As in such Ford films as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Bogdanovich relies on careful visual composition in deep focus to help communicate the regret over the passing of an era. Hailed as one of the best films by a young director since Citizen Kane (1941), The Last Picture Show premiered at the New York Film Festival and went on to become a hit. It was also nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay for Larry McMurtry's and Bogdanovich's adaptation of McMurtry's novel. John Ford stalwart Johnson won Supporting Actor and Leachman won Supporting Actress, beating out their cohorts Bridges and Burstyn. For an audience steeped in movie history and caught up in the chaotic 1971 present, The Last Picture Show presented a nostalgic look backward that was not so much an escape from the present as a coming to terms with what the present had lost. Its 1990 sequel Texasville, in which Bridges and Shepherd played later incarnations of their original characters, was not as successful. Lucia Bozzola

Product Details

• UPC: 043396504295
• Source: SONY PICTURES
• Region Code: 1
• Aspect Ratio: Theatre Wide-Screen (1.85.1)
• Presentation: B&W, Wide Screen
• Sound: Dolby Digital, monaural
• Language: English
• Subtitles: English, Español, Portugais, Korean, Thai
• Time: 2:05:00
• Sales Rank: 6,982

This DVD is also available as part of a box set:

• Last Picture Show/Nickelodeon

Features:

DVD MENU