The Last Picture Show

The Last Picture Show was nominated for some eight Oscars and won two for Best Supporting Role; an overwhelming success for the filmmaker’s early work.

As the setting for his third feature film, Bogdanovich selected a dusty town in the heart of Texas. The young people are bored, the older folks nostalgically hanker for the ‘good old days’, the cinema owner closes the joint because everyone has started watching TV and there isn’t much else to interest adolescents. They seek each other out and become embroiled in affairs, arguments or sign up with the military to join the Korean war effort.

Behind the facade

Along with others of his generation including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Terence Malick, Bogdanovich opted to film in a way far removed from the Hollywood studio productions: unadorned, realistic and with the emphasis on real emotions i.e. everything behind the facade of the American Dream.

Peter Bogdanovich died in January 2022. He was one of the generation of American maverick directors who broke through in the 1970s, yet were inspired by John Ford, Howard Hawks and William Wyler’s classics. After its premiere, The Last Picture Show was described as: ‘the most impressive performance by a young American director since Citizen Kane’.