Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Tayloriona Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

The_Boxing_Cat This movie is amazing. I will not go over the plot, since many reviewers here has already covered it. I may add that the Sam character is someone who every woman wants and every boy wants to be like. As for me, I would like to have this cowboy for many reasons...but I won't go into that now. I highly recommend this film- a slice of Americana to the bone.Ben Johnson's tour de force performance won him a much deserved Oscar. Z3

grantss Good examination of 50s rural America, and the death thereof. Interesting character- and relationship-based plot. Direction by Peter Bogdanovich is solid. The black & white cinematography is irritating at first, as you feel that the main characters, in the primes of their lives, deserve colour. However, the B&W becomes more relevant the further into the movie you go.Great performances, from then-unknown actors in their earliest roles: Jeff Bridges, Cybil Shepherd (debut role), Timothy Bottoms (2nd movie). The veterans - Ellen Burstyn, Ben Johnson, Eileen Brennan, Cloris Leachman - are superb too.Only negatives are that the movie drifts a bit in the middle, and it is only the very powerful ending that makes it great. This, and the soundtrack - every song seems to be by Hank Williams. Didn't they have anything else on the radio in 1950s Texas?

Gideon24 Director Peter Bogdanovich scored a bullseye with The Last Picture Show, a lilting and atmospheric coming-of-age drama that follows several disparate characters in a tiny hamlet in Texas during the 1950's that is so small that the town only has one movie theater and it shows the same movie for months on end.Larry McMurtry's eloquent screenplay's primary focus is on a pair of high school buddies, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges) who find their relationship coming to a fork as they prepare to graduate from high school and both have feelings for the town tramp, Jacy (Cybill Shepherd). Jacy eventually chooses Duane and Sonny then actually drifts into an affair with the lonely wife of his football coach (Cloris Leachman).Filmed in beautiful black and white, this movie evokes a period feeling and teenage sexual awakenings better than just about any film that came out of the 70's. Bogdanovich pulled rich performances from his cast with Bottoms giving a star-making performance as Sonny, Ben Johnson won a Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance as Sam the Lion, the local businessman who pretty much runs the town and Leachman won supporting actress, though, personally, I think that award should have gone to Ellen Burstyn, who is just luminous as Jacy's mother.A beautiful and lovely drama that will entertain and haunt.

evening1 A dark tale about man's struggle to find an emotional home for himself, even as life erodes and can cease at any instant.The setting is a wind- and tumbleweed-swept Wichita Falls, TX, in the early Fifties, and we experience this allegory through the peregrinations of high school seniors and the adults who try to influence, manipulate, or just plain control them.Man is portrayed as scarcely more than an animal here -- a creature who prowls, stalks, and ruts, and whose copulations are almost entirely bereft of genuine feeling or depth.At the center of the tale is the aimless local boy Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms). When he meets a depressed woman 20 years his senior (Cloris Leachman) who is just as starved for affection, they have intercourse. For a while they find distraction from their despair.The performances in this film are uniformly strong, however, I think too much time is given to the comings and goings of vapid teenagers in heat. I'd have liked to see and learn a little more about the intriguing father figure Joe the Lion (the craggily handsome Ben Johnson). But then again, one of the lessons here is that the good things in life are fleeting. Enjoy -- and more, appreciate -- while you can!I also think there's a take-home message in Sonny. In the course of the film he does manage to grow. Starting out as fickle and unreflective, he evolves into someone who can tolerate the emotional pain of another -- Joe the Lion, and later Mrs. Popper -- without taking the easier route of running away. Definitely a role model for us all!