elder statesman; and Cloris Leachman as Ruth, the football coach’s depressed and lonely wife. Only Eileen Brennan, as Genevieve, the good-hearted waitress at Sam’s café, seemed a bit actressy, as if she’d seen too many Claire Trevor movies.
The Last Picture Show received some of the year’s most extraordinary press. Andrew Sarris, still smarting over the damage that “Raising Kane” had done to Welles, wrote: “I have visions of Pauline Kael in the year 2001 setting out to prove that Bogdanovich was not the actual auteur of The Last Picture Show, but was in fact deeply indebted to Larry McMurtry’s novel and to an entire school of Texas novelists.”
Pauline’s own review of The Last Picture Show was positive, yet oddly measured, with more than a suggestion of the backhanded compliment. She was skittish about the possibility that the film—which she correctly predicted would be both a popular and critical success—would play into the hands of conservative filmgoers: that its traditional storytelling style would “turn into a bludgeon to beat other filmmakers with.” She praised the film for not taking the direction of “worked-up, raunchy melodrama about tangled lives but, rather, of something closer to common experience.” The movie never was “exploitative of human passions and miseries”; instead, it was “a lovingly exact history of American small-town life.” She said that the story, with what she took to be its resonances of the Peyton Place TV series, was “perhaps what TV soap opera would be if it were more honest—if it looked at ordinary experience in a non-exploitative way, if it had observation and humor. It is perhaps an ideal TV show.”
She had reservations about the way movies were used in the picture-show sequences. Bogdanovich had used Father of the Bride, starring the ravishing young Elizabeth Taylor, for an early sequence that showed Sonny’s dissatisfaction with his ill-tempered girlfriend (marvelously played by Sharon Taggart). For the end, when the picture show closes, Bogdanovich chose a clip from a film by one of his idols, Howard Hawks—Red River. It was the final “yee-haw” cattle-drive sequence, and he selected it to contrast the mythic lives of the cowboys with the small, aimless lives of those few in the audience on the picture show’s closing night.
Pauline found the contrast too obvious and broad. She could remember the endless run-of-the-mill product ground out by the studios in the late ’40s and early ’50s—films barely more satisfying than a cheap TV episode—and pointed out that even these dismal movies provided bored people with a form of escapism. “For several decades,” she wrote, “the generally tawdry films we saw week after week contributed to our national identity—such as it was.” Seeing bad movies week in and week out and “still feeling that they represented something preferable to your own existence” was “part of the truth of American experience.” She had a point: It wasn’t first-class films such as Father of the Bride and Red River that were representative of the weekly moviegoing experience as much as it was forgettable B pictures.
Bogdanovich, however, felt that Pauline’s idea couldn’t possibly work in cinematic terms. “Pauline misses the point,” he said nearly forty years after her review of The Last Picture Show appeared. “We used Red River because of the cattle drive—it shows you that the days of that kind of adventure and exuberance and excitement are gone—compared to what we’ve been seeing from the movie.” (It’s worth noting that in McMurtry’s novel, the movie was The Kid from Texas, a B picture with Audie Murphy and Gale Storm. Sonny and Duane, remembering all their date nights at the picture show, are bored with it and walk out on it. McMurtry wrote, “It would have taken Winchester ’73 or Red River or some big movie to have crowded out the memories the boys kept having.”)
In the same column in which she reviewed The Last Picture Show, Pauline covered Dennis Hopper’s new work with a perilously similar title: The Last Movie, which investigated the impact of a film crew on a band of natives in the Peruvian Andes. She admitted it was a sloppy mess, but she couldn’t help observing, “If Bogdanovich replaces Hopper as the hero of the industry—if, to the industry, he becomes the new hot director that everyone should imitate—the most talented moviemakers may be in trouble. Even Nixon could like The Last Picture Show.” (Sometime later, when Bogdanovich met Richard Nixon, “I told him that Pauline had said it was a picture that even Richard Nixon would like.