#95 ‘The Last Picture Show’

Desire, Dust, and the American Male Melancholia Industrial Complex

The Last Picture Show (1971) is a black-and-white elegy for a town, a time, and a testosterone-soaked idea of America that can’t stop crying into its whiskey glass about the end of an era it never questioned to begin with. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich with aching nostalgia and just enough nihilism to pass for honesty, the film floats through a dying Texas town in the early ’50s, cataloging the loneliness of men, the availability of women, and the slow, erotic decay of the postwar American dream.

At the center are two high school boys: Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), who is so passive he could be mistaken for a plot device in jeans, and Duane (Jeff Bridges), who at least has the decency to punch things. They drift from football fields to diner booths to backseats, all while the town’s movie theater—the titular Picture Show—flickers toward oblivion, much like the illusions of masculinity and small-town virtue the film seems to mourn but never interrogates.

And then there are the women—each one brighter, bolder, and infinitely more punished.

Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd, radiant and weaponized) is the town beauty who learns early that her sexuality is the only form of power she has—so she uses it, strategically, messily, and never without cost. She’s labeled manipulative, but she’s just playing a rigged game where every outcome ends in judgment or abandonment. Her desire is pathologized. Her virginity is a transaction. Her autonomy? Threatening.

Cloris Leachman, in a heartbreaking Oscar-winning performance, plays Ruth Popper, the coach’s wife who begins an affair with Sonny, not because it’s sexy, but because it’s something. Their relationship is not scandalous so much as deeply sad—an intergenerational transaction born of mutual desperation in a town that’s emotionally malnourished. Ruth is lonely, kind, and ultimately discarded when Sonny decides he’d rather feel less guilty.

Ellen Burstyn rounds out the holy trinity of women-who-deserve-better as Jacy’s mother, who’s resigned to the knowledge that men disappoint and women survive—if they’re lucky.

Bogdanovich’s direction is restrained and reverent, and the black-and-white cinematography by Robert Surtees gives every dusty street and empty swimming pool the tragic beauty of a faded photograph. But make no mistake: this isn’t realism. It’s romanticism—with just enough cynicism to pass as critique. The film mourns a vanishing world, but it never asks whether that world deserved to survive.

It’s a movie obsessed with longing—especially male longing. For youth. For sex. For simpler times that were only “simple” if you were white, male, and emotionally underdeveloped. Everyone else? They were just background characters in someone else's slow descent into nostalgia.

4 out of 5 broken windshields
(One for Leachman’s devastation. One for Shepherd’s brittle brilliance. One for the cinematography that makes decay look like art. One for capturing the ache of a dying town. The missing star? Swallowed by the film’s refusal to admit that sometimes the past deserves to die—and that women aren’t just there to cry while it happens.)