Goodbye to All That

The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) begins and ends in the same place. A wailing wind blows dust and tumbleweeds through the main street of a dying Texan town, the fictional Anarene. The focus of the first and final shots is the building that gives the 1971 film its suggestive title: the Royal cinema, the town’s sole ‘picture show’. In the opening scene, the camera frames the Royal – at this moment, still in operation and advertising its current feature, Father of the Bride (Vincente Minnelli, 1950) – then pans away horizontally to take in the rest of the street and its dilapidated buildings, including the Texas Moon Cafe and the pool hall, which will also feature prominently in the film’s action.

In The Last Picture Show’s final scene, we return to the empty street. This time, the camera travels towards the Royal, which has ceased operations by now. This loss, expected yet muted in its arrival, functions as a symbol of the end of a way of life. For much of The Last Picture Show, we have watched the world of the main protagonist, Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms), crumbling around him, bit by bit. While the Royal’s exterior remains intact, what the building stood for within the community is now irrevocably altered. With this knowledge, the final shot is a poignant farewell to all that has come before it.

In his review of , the late film critic Roger Ebert describes the film as ‘above all an evocation of mood’. That mood emerges from the sense that something has been lost. Bogdanovich allows us to feel this absence from the film’s very first frame. Anarene – standing in for the town of Thalia in Larry McMurtry’s 1966 novel of the