Festival Prize

By Stefan Kanfer

Festival Prize "Last year, who knew?" asks the ad for the New York Film Festival, Manhattan's annual exhibition of new cinema. Below the question is the old announcement of Five Easy Pieces, first shown at last year's fete. "This year, who knows?" continues the ad, exhibiting an array of 18 fresh announcements and obviously hoping for more Easy Pieces. Not a forlorn wish. The festival already boasts one film strong enough to be both a commercial and aesthetic hit.

The Last Picture Show seems modest to the point of extinction. Its actors are unknowns, its scene a Southwestern tank town, and its subject boredom. To make matters even less promising, it is not in color. Yet the choice of black and white, like the choice of cast and subject, is shrewdly apposite.

For Director Peter Bogdanovich has seen Anarene, Texas, in the cinematic terms of 1951--the langorous dissolves, the strong chiaroscuro, the dialogue that starts with bickering and ends at confessional. To be sure, from Summer of '42 to Carnal Knowledge, total recall gluts the screen. There is nothing very ingenious about replaying Hank Williams records or showing a kinescope of Strike It Rich. But Bogdanovich has gone far beyond simple souvenirs. His film miraculously recaptures life-styles and attitudes--sexual, social, political that have almost vanished from the national consciousness.

There are no crescendos in The Last Picture Show, adapted (as was Hud) from a novel by Larry McMurtry. The film is, essentially, a two-hour countdown to maturity. A couple of high school football players, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges), carom slowly toward responsibility in Anarene. There the primary pastime, as always, is sex. Furtive sex. Tainted sex. Hand-on-the-thigh-in-the-back-seat sex. Nice girls never let boys go "all the way," and nice boys never deflower a virgin. All the townsfolk are decent types, but the featureless landscape and the oven-like days render them insensible. Any diversion suffices; the torturing of a feeble-minded boy soon becomes no more than an evening's entertainment.

Sonny, weary of unhooking his girl friend's brassiere without being allowed further incursions, drifts to the wife of his basketball coach, and then to the high school tease, Jacy (Cibyll Shepherd). Duane, Jacy's jilted lover, swiftly belts Sonny with a beer bottle, impairing his sight but, oddly, not their friendship. The night of Duane's departure for Army service in Korea, the youths attend the town's last picture show. Anarene's only theater is shutting down; Sam, its owner, has died--almost because there is nothing else to do. On the final bill is Red River, the definitive John Wayne Texas epic. Outside, the real Texas waits in the dark, choked with weeds and dust, cramped in spirit and dimension, the butt end of the Old West.

All the performers--pickup cheerleaders from Texas high schools or TV veterans like Clu Gulager (The Virginian)--are perfect to the final, insecure strut and mush-mouthed diphthong. Although the story focuses on youth, it gives equal time to its elders. As Sam, veteran Western Actor Ben Johnson (Shane, The Wild Bunch) is a fine amalgam of grit and pathos, a burnt-out case, American style. As the football coach's wife, Cloris Leachman could have been another long-clawed devil in the flesh; instead, she is resolutely unglamorous, the screen's most subdued adulteress, shyer even than her adolescent seducer.

But the importance of The Last Picture Show is not its cast. With his second feature (the first was Boris Karloff's final horror movie Targets), Director Bogdanovich, 31, has achieved a tactile sense of time and place. More, he has performed that most difficult of all cinematic feats: he has made ennui fascinating. Together, that is enough to herald him as possibly the most exciting new director in America today, and The Last Picture Show as the happiest news of the 1971 New York Film Festival.

. Stefan Kanfer

Most young film makers struggle to pace themselves by contemporary themes and styles. Peter Bogdanovich measures himself against the cadences of the past. "I don't feel rapport with the new moviemakers--I don't mean personally but on the screen. I think the medium is being misused when it becomes obscure and self-conscious," he says. Bogdanovich's mentors are John Ford and Howard Hawks, and What's Up Doc?, his film currently in production, will include several homages to Ernst Lubitsch, the '30s master of elegant comedy. "Why is it funny when a door closes in Lubitsch's films and not in anyone else's?" asks Bogdanovich admiringly.

Although his birth certificate says he was born in Kingston, N.Y., of Serbian parents, Bogdanovich is a self-confessed child of the cinema. He wrote a column of film reviews for his Manhattan private-school paper, then tried acting and directing off-Broadway. Even the plays he chose to present (Clifford Odets' The Big Knife, Kaufman and Hart's Once in a Lifetime) were about Hollywood. Still in his early 20s, Bogdanovich began to have his writings on film published by both Esquire and Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. "I was just sort of vamping though," he confesses now. "I really wanted to direct." In Hollywood, he stumbled into the benevolent clutches of Roger Corman, a cult hero for a series of rococo horror films (The Masque of the Red Death) who likes to hire bright young men cheap and work them hard.

Virtuoso Shootout. Bogdanovich labored for almost six months on Gorman's gritty motorcycle flick The Wild Angels, rewriting the script, scouting locations, casting ("Peter Fonda was sort of my idea"). Gorman, impressed with both Bogdanovich's energy and his results, agreed to put up the money for his first feature. There were a couple of strings. Bogdanovich had to use Boris Karloff, who owed producer Gorman two days' work on an old contract, and a certain amount of unused footage from an old Gorman opus entitled The Terror. The finished film, Targets, contained a virtuoso Shootout scene at a drive-in theater. Said Director Howard Hawks: "That stuff's good and it's hard to do." Says Bogdanovich: "To me, that was the ultimate compliment."

Pleased now with the acclaim that is greeting The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich denies that he was trying to say something about American apathy and brutality. "I don't make movies to say anything," he insists. "I make them because I enjoy making that kind of picture, showing a specific emotion on the screen." Bogdanovich not only enjoys making movies, he virtually lives them. His face has the occupational pallor of long days spent on sound stages; a typical conversational aside begins "Wasn't it Orson who said . . . ?" and a favorite Bogdanovich recreation at parties is doing imitations of Jimmy Stewart and Gary Grant. He disagrees with friends who think that What's Up Doc?, a frenetic, '30s-style farce starring Barbra Streisand, may be a project too frivolous for his talents. Says he: "I want to make movies like the ones I used to like."

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