Editor’s Note: Those “Greatest Movies Ever” lists just keep a-comin’, do they not? Freeline Media critic Milan Paurich thinks most of those lists are missing a 1971 black-and-white movie that he thinks truly deserved the recognition and honor of being the Greatest American Movie. Read on!

The Last Picture Show

There’s a familiar honorific in American letters: “The Great American Novel.” It’s been attached, with varying degrees of seriousness and exhaustion, to Moby-Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath and a shelf’s worth of other books that attempted to contain the unruly, contradictory thing called America between two covers. 

But the description has always struck me as particularly apt when applied to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby because it understands something fundamental about the American character: that we’re forever trying to become something else, forever mistaking desire for destiny, forever looking backward even as we insist that the future is where we’re headed.

If there’s such a thing as a “Great American Movie,” I submit that it’s Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. Not Citizen Kane, though its ambition is grander. Not The Godfather, though its mythology is deeper. Not Nashville, though its social canvas is wider. Not even The Searchers which may be the quintessential American film in a very different sense. The Last Picture Show is something more intimate and, finally, more devastating. It doesn’t attempt to explain America, it simply puts an entire America on the screen: its dreams and disappointments, its appetites and hypocrisies, its tenderness and cruelty, and then quietly watches that America disappear.

Like Gatsby, it’s a work about the distance between the country Americans imagine and the country in which they actually live. Like Gatsby, it understands that nostalgia isn’t merely an emotion but a national disease. And like Gatsby, it knows that the past acquires its most powerful grip on us precisely when it’s no longer possible to return to it.

The genius of Bogdanovich’s movie is that he sets it in 1951 and makes you feel, almost from the first frame, that you’re watching the end of something.

Anarene, Texas, is a small town with a population dwindling toward irrelevance, and Bogdanovich photographs it in gorgeous, mournful black-and-white as though it’s already become a memory. There’s a picture house (the Royal), a cafe, a pool hall, a dusty main street and not much else. The young people dream of leaving. The older people remember when there was something to stay for.

What makes The Last Picture Show so extraordinary is the way its physical landscape becomes a map of American longing. Sonny Crawford and Duane Jackson are high-school boys growing up in a place whose horizons are both literal and psychological. They play football, chase girls, go to the movies and kill time because there’s nothing else to do. Jacy Farrow, beautiful and restless, believes that escape will come through marriage, sex, money or simply being somewhere else. Their elders have already discovered that escape isn’t quite the same thing as freedom.

Sonny, played by Timothy Bottoms with an extraordinary mixture of innocence and blankness, isn’t a traditional protagonist. He doesn’t so much drive the story as drift through it, absorbing the lessons that Anarene keeps giving him. Jeff Bridges’ Duane has more obvious ambitions, but he’s hardly equipped to make anything of them. Cybill Shepherd’s Jacy, meanwhile, possesses the terrible confidence of someone who believes the world owes her a more interesting life. She isn’t wrong; she just doesn’t know what an interesting life costs yet.

And that’s where Picture Show begins to resemble Gatsby. Both works are populated by people who believe that somewhere else–or some future version of themselves–will finally deliver the happiness the present has denied them. Gatsby reinvents himself as a millionaire in the hope that Daisy can become the missing piece of his past. Jacy reinvents herself as the sophisticated young woman she imagines the world wants. Duane dreams of leaving Anarene. Sonny simply wants to feel something that will tell him where he belongs.

Nobody gets quite what they want: that’s the American tragedy in miniature.

Yet what makes Bogdanovich’s film so moving is that it never treats these people as symbols. He doesn’t stand above them, pointing out their foolishness. He loves them too much for that. Even their worst behavior is observed with a kind of rueful generosity. Sex is everywhere in Anarene, but sex isn’t liberation. Marriage isn’t security. Money isn’t happiness. Adultery isn’t romance. Youth isn’t freedom. Adulthood isn’t wisdom.

Everybody is improvising, everybody is lonely and almost everybody is trying not to admit it.

The emotional center is Ben Johnson’s Sam the Lion who won an Oscar for a performance so understated that the award seems almost beside the point. Sam is the town’s memory. He owns the pool hall, the café and the Royal; more importantly, he possesses a knowledge of Anarene that the young people don’t yet understand they need.

When Sam tells Sonny about the secret relationship he once had with Lois Farrow, Jacy’s mother, the movie performs one of its most astonishing sleights of hand. An older man’s reminiscence about an affair might ordinarily be played for either sentiment or titillation. Johnson makes it something else: a glimpse into a private life that existed before these young people were born, before they could imagine their parents as sexual beings, before the town became the diminished place they know.

Suddenly the adults have histories. The past opens up. And the past, as Fitzgerald understood, is where the ghosts live.

Ellen Burstyn’s Lois is equally astonishing. Burstyn gives the character a brittle, aching intelligence; she understands that her marriage has become a prison but also understands that leaving it won’t magically turn her into someone else. 

Cloris Leachman’s Ruth Popper is even more heartbreaking: sexually and emotionally starved, married to a closeted football coach, she finds in Sonny an awkward, tender connection that’s simultaneously touching and profoundly sad.

The film refuses to make Ruth ridiculous. It refuses to make Lois a cliché. It refuses to make Jacy a villain. This is perhaps the most adult thing about The Last Picture Show: it recognizes that people can hurt one another without being monsters. 

Sometimes they’re merely desperate. Sometimes they’re lonely. Sometimes they’re young. Sometimes they’re old enough to know better and do it anyway.

And all of them are trapped inside a social order that’s itself changing.

Which brings us to the movie theater.

The Royal isn’t merely a location, it’s the film’s beating heart. Bogdanovich, after all, was one of the great movie obsessives of his generation: a critic, historian and cinephile who spent years thinking about Hollywood’s past. He interviewed directors, wrote about them, programmed films and absorbed the language of classical American cinema so completely that The Last Picture Show can sometimes feel like a movie made by someone who knows that the thing he loves is disappearing.

Someone once described it as “The French New Wave film John Ford never directed.” It’s hard to imagine a better capsule description of Bogdanovich’s achievement. It has Ford’s small-town America, his sense of community and ritual, his affection for ordinary people and his melancholy awareness that the world they inhabit is passing away. But Bogdanovich brings to that Fordian landscape the freedom and modernity of the New Wave: the sexual frankness, the emotional ambiguity, the restless intimacy, the refusal to turn the past into a museum piece. It’s as if the young cinephile who knew classical Hollywood by heart had gone back in time to find John Ford and asked him to make one last movie about America.

There’s a beautiful irony here. Bogdanovich was a young filmmaker making a movie about teenagers living in a dying town, and he was doing it in the cinematic language of an older America. Robert Surtees’ black-and-white photography doesn’t simply make 1951 look authentic. It turns 1951 into something elegiac. The film looks like a memory before the characters have even had the chance to remember it. That’s its miracle.

The Last Picture Show isn’t a period movie in the conventional sense. It’s not interested in making 1951 look quaint. There are no reassuring sepia tones, no cozy nostalgia, no sense that the past was better simply because it was past. Bogdanovich’s America is dirty, horny, bored, cruel, funny and heartbreakingly alive.

And then, gradually, the things that have seemed permanent begin to vanish.

Sam dies. The Royal closes. The town empties. Duane leaves. Sonny is left behind.

The title, of course, tells us what’s coming. The last picture show isn’t merely the last movie screening at the Royal. It’s the “last picture show” in a larger cultural sense: the end of a way of seeing America, of gathering together, of telling stories, of believing that the movies might provide a shared mythology large enough to contain everyone.

The closing sequence is almost unbearably beautiful because Bogdanovich doesn’t underline its sadness. The Royal is gone, the town’s future is no more certain than its past, and yet the film doesn’t end in despair, it ends in recognition. That distinction matters.

The young people will survive; they may even escape. They’ll make mistakes somewhere else, grow older, become the adults they once watched without understanding. The cycle will continue, but they’ll never get this particular America back. Neither will we.

That may be why The Last Picture Show has become, for me, the leading candidate for the title of “Great American Movie.” 

Its greatness isn’t reducible to craftsmanship, though the craftsmanship is nearly perfect. It isn’t simply the performances, though the cast is beyond reproach. It isn’t the screenplay, adapted by Bogdanovich and Larry McMurtry from McMurtry’s novel, though the writing has a preternatural understanding of how people reveal themselves.

It’s the film’s capacity to make one small Texas town feel like a country.  America is Anarene. It’s the place where the young want to leave and the old want to remember. It’s the place where people confuse possession with love and escape with happiness. It’s the place where the movies promise glamour and the real world supplies disappointment. It’s the place where everybody believes somebody else has figured out how to live. It’s also a place of astonishing tenderness.

That tenderness is what distinguishes The Last Picture Show from a merely great piece of social observation. Bogdanovich’s eye can be pitiless, but his heart isn’t. He sees the ridiculousness of these people and understands that their ridiculousness is ours. He sees the sexual frustration, the small-town gossip, the drinking, the infidelities, the cruelty of teenagers and the disappointments of adults and he doesn’t sneer. He mourns.

Perhaps that’s why the movie can be watched again and again without becoming smaller. Some films reveal their secrets then leave you with nothing else to discover. The Last Picture Show does the opposite. The more familiar it becomes, the more mysterious it seems. On one viewing, it’s a coming-of-age story. On another, it’s a portrait of a dying town. Then it becomes a movie about sexual loneliness. Then a movie about fathers and sons, or mothers and daughters. Then a movie about the movies. Then a movie about time.

And eventually it becomes something stranger: a movie about the fact that we don’t know we’re living through the moments we will one day miss.

That may be its deepest connection to The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald’s famous final image — the struggle to move forward while being pulled backward by the past — isn’t merely Gatsby’s problem, it’s America’s. We’re a country built on reinvention and haunted by memory. We’re perpetually announcing the new while romanticizing the old. We demolish the theater and then spend the rest of our lives remembering the movies we saw there.

Bogdanovich understood that instinctively.

He was making a movie about 1951 in 1971, but he was also making a movie about 1971 without setting it there. The Vietnam era, the collapse of old institutions, the sexual revolution, the generation gap, the death of the classical studio system, the disappearance of the neighborhood movie house. All of that hangs over The Last Picture Show without being explicitly mentioned.

It’s a film about one America while another America is being born. That’s why it feels both so old and so contemporary. And perhaps that’s also why it remains so personal.

A great American work should be large enough to encompass the country and intimate enough to make us feel that it belongs to us. Gatsby does that through Nick Carraway’s act of remembrance. The Last Picture Show does it through Bogdanovich’s camera. Both works understand that memory is an imperfect form of love: we preserve what we’ve lost by telling ourselves stories about it.

But Bogdanovich’s movie has one advantage over Fitzgerald’s novel:  we can actually see the lost world. We see the Royal. We see the empty streets. We see the football field. We see Sam at the pool hall. We see Jacy flirting. We see Ruth trying to make herself desirable to a world that’s forgotten her. We see Sonny sitting beside the older woman who has temporarily made him feel less alone. We see Duane looking toward a future he can’t imagine.

And finally, we see Anarene without Sam, without the Royal, without the illusion that anything lasts.

The last picture show is over, the lights come up and everybody goes home.

There are movies I admire more intellectually. 

There are movies that may be more formally radical. 

There are movies that have had a greater influence, movies that changed the language of cinema, movies that are more dazzling, more ambitious, more conventionally “important.”

But The Last Picture Show does something I value even more. It makes me feel that I have lived somewhere I’ve never been. It makes me nostalgic for a childhood that wasn’t mine. It makes me mourn a town that never existed exactly as Bogdanovich presents it.

And it makes me understand something about America that I  could probably spend the rest of my life trying to articulate.

That’s what “The Great American Novel” is supposed to do.

So why shouldn’t “The Great American Movie” do it, too?

If “The Great Gatsby” is America’s great novel of longing, The Last Picture Show is America’s great movie of loss.

And if Gatsby spends his life reaching toward a green light that’s always just beyond his grasp, Bogdanovich gives us something even sadder: a movie theater whose lights go out while the people inside are still young enough to believe they have plenty of time.

They don’t.

Neither did America. 

And neither, finally, do we.

Movie-crazy from an early age, Milan Paurich grew up in Northeastern Ohio at the tail end of theMovie-crazy from an early age, Milan Paurich grew up in Northeastern Ohio at the tail end of the Movie Palace era. Some of his earliest memories involve sitting in the balconies of downtown “Cathedrals of Cinema” and watching “Mary Poppins,” “In Search of the Castaways” and “The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze” for the first time. Milan  ultimately took his incipient cinephilia to N.Y.U. where he graduated with a double major in Cinema Studies and Journalism. Milan has been reviewing films professionally for decades:  at daily newspapers, alt-weeklies and on local television stations where his reviews appeared three times every Friday–on two separate channels!–for more than a dozen years. Since 2001, Milan has been a voting member of the Critics Choice Association (Film Branch), and won three individual S.P.J. (Society of Professional Journalists) awards as “Best Critic in Ohio.” Updated weekly, his film/home video reviews currently appear online at: https://movieswithmilanmix989.com/ Movie Palace era. Some of his earliest memories involve sitting in the balconies of downtown “Cathedrals of Cinema” and watching “Mary Poppins,” “In Search of the Castaways” and “The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze” for the first time. Milan  ultimately took his incipient cinephilia to N.Y.U. where he graduated with a double major in Cinema Studies and Journalism. Milan has been reviewing films professionally for decades:  at daily newspapers, alt-weeklies and on local television stations where his reviews appeared three times every Friday–on two separate channels!–for more than a dozen years. Since 2001, Milan has been a voting member of the Critics Choice Association (Film Branch), and won three individual S.P.J. (Society of Professional Journalists) awards as “Best Critic in Ohio.” Updated weekly, his film/home video reviews currently appear online at: https://movieswithmilanmix989.com/