Back To School #11: The Last Picture Show (dir by Peter Bogdanovich)

Posted on August 24, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Monday is the first day of school down here in Dallas so it seems only appropriate that this latest entry in our Back to School series should be a look at one of those most quintessential Texas films ever made, the 1971 best picture nominee, The Last Picture Show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YQomR5xJ_Y

Directed by Peter Bogdanovich and based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show takes place in 1951 and tells the story of two high school seniors, best friends Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges, reminding us once again why everbody loves him). Sonny and Duane live in the rural town of Anarene, Texas. With little to look forward to in the future, beyond perhaps getting a job working in the oil fields, Sonny and Duane are both intent on enjoying their final year of high school. Sometimes, that means driving down to Mexico for the weekend. Sometimes, it means going to the only theater in town and seeing a movie. Most of the time, however, it means hanging out in a pool hall owned by the strict but fatherly Sam (Oscar winner Ben Johnson). Often times they are accompanied by the intellectually disabled Billy (Sam Bottoms), who responds to everything with a blank smile and spends most of his spare time wandering around with a broom, futilely trying to sweep the dusty streets.

The charismatic and impetuous Sonny is dating the beautiful and self-centered Jacy Farrow (Cybil Shepherd), who is the daughter of the wealthiest woman in town. Jacy knows that her cynical mother (Ellen Burstyn) is having an affair with an oil worker named Abilene (Clu Gulager) but she’s more concerned with her own future. Even though she’s dating Sonny, Jacy still accepts an invitation from the awkward Lester Marlow (played by a memorably goofy Randy Quaid) to attend a naked indoor pool party. At the party, she meets Bobby Sheen (Gary Brockette), who is rich and will be able to provide her with the future that Duane never will. However, Bobby tells Jacy that he isn’t interested in her because she’s a virgin. If nothing else, this gives Jacy a reason to stay with Duane, at least until after they have sex.

Meanwhile, the far more sensitive Sonny ends up having an affair with Ruth Popper (Cloris Leachman, who won an Oscar for her performance in this film), the wife of the high school football coach. It appears that Sonny truly cares about Ruth but then he finds himself being tempted by none other than his best friend’s girlfriend…

At heart, The Last Picture Show really is basically a small town soap opera, a Texas version of Peyton Place. The difference between the two films — beyond the fact that The Last Picture Show just happens to be a 1oo times better than Peyton Place — is that The Last Picture Show doesn’t take place in a beautiful, idealized small town. Instead, the town of Anarene is a believably bleak location, one that will be familiar to anyone who, like me, grew up in the American southwest. A good deal of the success of The Last Picture Show is due to the fact that it was actually filmed on location in Archer City, Texas.

(Nothing annoys me more than when I see the mountains of California in the background of a movie that’s supposed to be taking place in North Texas. We don’t have mountains up here. For the most part, we don’t even have hills. The land is flat. You can see forever, if you know where to look.)

Of course, you can’t talk about The Last Picture Show without talking about Robert Surtees’s stunning black-and-white cinematography. Not only does the black-and-white remind us that this is a film about a fading way of life but it drives home the fact that Sonny and Duane don’t have much to look forward to. Growing up in Anarene means they are destined for lives without color or excitement. In the end, can you really blame them for occasionally acting before they think?

Ultimately, the success of The Last Picture Show is due to a lot of things. This was Peter Bogdanovich’s second film as a director and he did such an excellent job here that he’s basically spent the rest of his career trying to live up to this one film. (That said, Bodganovich also left his wife for Cybill Shepherd — despite the fact that his wife was the one who suggested that he make this film and cast Cybill in the first place! Don’t worry though — Polly Platt got her revenge by having a far more successful career than her ex-husband and she even produced Say Anything, a film that we will soon be looking at.) The screenplay, by McMurtry and Bogdanovich, is full of sharp dialogue and memorable characters. As for the performers, this is probably one of the best acted films ever made. Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms play off each other well, Cybill Shepherd is the epitome of casual destructiveness, and Ben Johnson is brilliantly cast as the film’s moral center. My favorite performance comes from Ellen Burstyn, who delivers every line with just the right combination of contempt and ennui.

Ellen Burstyn in The Last Picture Show

If you’re a Texan, The Last Picture Show is one of those films that you simply have to see. And if you don’t enjoy it and if you don’t relate to at least a few of the characters (I related to Jacy, though I like to think that I’m a lot nicer in the way I treat people), then you’re not a real Texan.

It’s as simple as that.

Embracing the Melodrama #29: The Other Side of Midnight (dir by Charles Jarrott)

Posted on July 6, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1977, The Other Side of Midnight is one of those film that literally seems to have everything a viewer could want: sex, love, betrayal, sex, war, melodrama, intrigue, sex, expensive clothes, private island, see-through nightgowns, sex, hurricanes, murder, a surprise twist ending that involves a convent, and sex. Did I mention that this film has sex in it, because it so does.

The film opens in Paris during the years leading up to World War II. Beautiful Noelle (Marie-France Pisier) meets Larry Douglas (John Beck), a handsome American who is serving with the Canadian Air Force. Noelle agrees to go out on a date with Larry and they get to have the of the movie’s many falling-in-love montages. Fortunately, they’re in Paris which has a lot of great scenery in front of which they can pose. Unfortunately, Larry is ordered back to the United States. He promises Noelle that he’ll return but he never does. What Larry doesn’t realize is that Noelle’s pregnant — or at least she is until a harrowing scene where she climbs into a bathtub with a wire hanger.

Montage!

This is followed by another montage. Call this the “Out-of-Love-And-Growing-Bitter” montage. Noelle survives the German occupation by seducing and using every powerful man that she meets. Along the way, she becomes one of the most glamorous and famous film stars in all of Europe. Finally, she becomes the mistress of the wealthy and somewhat shady Constantin Demaris (Raf Vallone, doing his best Anthony Quinn impersonation).

Meanwhile, Larry is back in America and, after going through another falling-in-love montage, has ended up married to innocent Catherine Alexander (Susan Sarandon). What Larry doesn’t realize is that Noelle has hired a detective to keep track of him. After the war, Larry gets a job as a commercial airline pilot but Noelle secretly arranges for him to lose that job. Unemployed and desperate, Larry accepts a job to work as the private pilot for Demaris and his mistress.

Montage!

Though it takes him a while to recognize her, Larry eventually does realize that his new boss is his former lover, Noelle. As Larry starts to truly fall in love with Noelle all over again, Noelle starts to pressure him to do something about his new wife. As is the case with several Hollywood melodramas, it all ends in a courtroom. The courtroom scenes may not be exactly exciting but they do feature my favorite image from the entire film: at one point, we see that literally every single character who has appeared in the movie up to this point is sitting in that courtroom, all lined up like a bunch of disparate figures in an Edward Hopper painting.

The Other Side of Midnight is one of those big films where a lot of stuff happens but very little of it really seems to add up to anything. It has a nearly 3 hour running time but it’s story could have just as easily been told in 90 minutes. Instead, director Charles Jarrott pads out the running time with endless falling-in-love and falling-out-of-love montages. This is the type of film that never says anything once that it can say an extra three times.

Montage!

Susan Sarandon and Marie-France Pisier both give good performances. Susan Sarandon is likable, even if her character is unbelievably naive while Marie-France Pisier gives a performance worthy of any good film noir but neither one of them has much chemistry with John Beck. Fortunately, some of the supporting players — like Raf Vallone and Christian Marquand — take full advantage of every chance that they get to chew every piece of scenery that’s available. Clu Gulager, the father of horror director John Gulager, pops up as well, playing perhaps the only good male in the entire film.

In the end, The Other Side of Midnight (and what the Hell does that title mean anyway?) is a rather silly movie about a bunch of shallow characters wearing beautiful clothes and wandering through wonderfully baroque locations. Fortunately, I love elaborately decorated locations and glamorous outfits so I enjoyed The Other Side of Midnight despite myself.

Montage!

One final thing about The Other Side of Midnight: 20th Century Fox was so sure that The Other Side of Midnight would be a huge success that they used it to blackmail theater owners into agreeing to show an obscure science fiction film called Star Wars. Theaters would only be allowed to show The Other Side of Midnight if they also agreed to show Star Wars during the week before Midnight opened.

The end result, of course, is that The Other Side of Midnight was a bomb at the box office and Star Wars is still making money.

Below is a behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of The Other Side of Midnight.

Quickie Review: Return of the Living Dead (dir. by Dan O’Bannon)

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Arleigh

Return of the Living Dead has to go down as one of the funniest and inventive take on the zombie subgenre that began after the release of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Due to a dispute between Romero and John Russo (co-producer of the original NOTLD), the sequels to Night of the Living Dead that were produced and directed by Romero dropped the “Living Dead” part in their titles. Russo retained the rights to create sequels using those words while Romero just kept the word “Dead” in the follow-up films to Night. It took Russo awhile, but he finally got to use those naming rights with 1985’s Return of the Living Dead.

Even though there were some acrimony between Romero and Russo, the screenplay for Return of the Living Dead makes several complimentary nods to Night of the Living Dead. The film’s premise was what if Romero’s first film was actually based on a true event and that the government and the military covered it up before people got a wind of it. The film takes that simple premise and creates an action-packed horror-comedy that still stands the test of time.

Unlike Romero’s films, Return of the Living Dead actually gives an explanation as to what causes the dead to return to life with a singular purpose of attacking the living. The cause of all this undead mayhem was due to a bioweapon nerve toxin called 2-4-5 Trioxin which was originally designed by the military to defoliate marijuana crops. To say that the side-effects of the gas had some interesting effects was an understatement. The zombies created by Trioxin do attack the living but they’re also much more livelier and smarter (retaining agility, strength and mental capacity of their previous life) than the traditional Romero-zombies. They also do not feed on just humans. They also feed on other animals. The last major difference between the Romero-zombies and the Trioxin-zombies was that the latter only wanted to feed on live brains to end the pain of being dead. These differences made for a much faster-paced horror movie. As much as I consider the Romero zombie films as the best out there, I hold a special place in my horror-fan heart for these Trioxin dudes.

The story by John Russo would be turned into a screenplay and directed by Dan O’Bannon also made Return of the Living Dead behave more as a horror-comedy than just a straight-up horror. The dialogue between the characters were full of great one-liners that would’ve sounded cheesy if not for the great and game performances from the cast. Clu Gulager as Burt Wilson (owner of the medical supplies warehouse where the lost canister of Trioxin was being stored in) did a great job being incredulous at the events happening around him. His back and forth with his friend Ernie (played with Peter Lorre eyes by Don Calfa), the local mortuary’s gun-toting mortician, keep the film lively and hilarious in-between scenes of horror.

The scene stealers in the film must go to a bumbling pair of Burt’s employees who inadvertently release the toxic and reanimating gas from the warehouse’s inventory of Trioxin canister. James Karen as the worldly and cynical Frank was a riot from start to end. His over-the-top performance had me in stitches. He played Frank with such a manic, panicky style that it was difficult not to get caught up in his hysterics. To balance out Frank’s Hardy with his more subdued, but no less panicked Laurel, was Thom Mathews as Freddy. Mathews would later appear in other horror movies in the decade and even reprise a similar role in this film’s sequel. His performance as the straight man to Karen’s fool was also very good. His slow decline into becoming one of the zombies after the initial inhalation of the Trioxin gas in the film’s introduction was funny and sad. Of all the zombies in the film he gets the brunt of the slapstick sequences, especially once he starts hunting his girlfriend for her brains. His professing of his love for her and at the same time wanting her to give up her brain was hilarious, if not creepy as well.

Another thing that Return of the Living Dead had that made it different from Romero’s zombie movies were the scenes of gratuitious nudity throughout the film. A majority of the nude scenes were courtesy of scream queen Linnea Quigley as the punk rock Trash whose morbid obsession with all things death made her an early victim for the zombies and later on as one of their leaders. I know that kids my age at that time replayed over and over the scene of her strip-tease down to nothing atop a graveyard headstone. Even now many fans of the film consider that sequence as one of their favorite.

Return of the Living Dead still counts as one of the best zombie movies out there and preceded the UK’s Shaun of the Dead by two decades as a great horror-comedy. There was a sequel a few years later to capitalize on the popularity of the first film. It tried to capture the hilarity and horror of the first one but did not measure up in the end.