The Last Picture Show

I have previously mentioned that I'm watching old movies to help me while away the miles on the treadmill. Since I get them from the public library, there has been an odd assortment of films - The Gods Must be Crazy I & II, Zanuck's The Longest Day, Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, Mr Roberts, and Day of The Jackal, to mention a few. Most recently I watched The Last Picture Show, based on Larry McMurtry's book of the same name.

The movie has garnered a number of accolades. It won Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress; and was nominated for awards in six other categories. In 1998, The Last Picture Show was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. It also ranked number 19 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the 50 Best High School Movies. In 2007, the film was ranked #95 on the American Film Institute's 10th Anniversary Edition of the 100 greatest American films of all time.

It also ran afoul of a number of court cases until a Federal case ruled in favor of it. Let's just say it was ahead of it's time.

McMurtry is a native of Archer City, a community just over an hour's drive from my hometown, and the similarities, not unexpectedly, are legion. Archer City is actually seeing better days currently than it was in 1971 when the movie was filmed there (thanks in part to McMurtry's legendary multi-building bookstore "Booked Up"). Set in 1951 and filmed in black-and-white, the movie depicts a bleak, barren place, where mesquite trees rule and the oil patch provides a hard scrabble existence for all but a lucky few. To say that this movie resonated with me is an understatement.

I had seen it before - about 10 years after it was released - and I had read McMurtry's book, as well as his sequel, Texasville, but I don't remember feeling so strongly empathetic to the locale and the circumstances of the story as I did this time around. It was a real "Wow" moment for me - so much so, while watching I walked significantly further on the treadmill than I usually do, and limped around for a couple of days to pay for it!

The last picture show is literally that - the Royal Theater - the movie house in Archer City/Thalia (the book name)/Anarene (the movie name)/Breckenridge (my hometown) is no longer economically viable and with a meager group in attendance, shows its last feature and closes. The characters, for the most part go separate ways, as is so often the case with small, dying towns and young people. A few stick around and become the next generation of locals trapped in a desolate place.

The characters, the forlorn frame houses, the over-bearing court house, the shabby high school gym, the Christmas decorations, the dirt roads, the pump jacks - all could have been from my home town.
And they say you can't go home again.