On Screen

...Intei cut with the sequences from Ford films (to which Orson Welles' by now insufferably fruity voice appends Bogdanovich's simple, if not simplistic, narration) are interviews with three major Ford stars John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda All three talk of the master with a mixture of anecdotal jollity and sheer awe that I found quite touching, though perhaps a bit misplaced For me, Ford remains one of the most skilled commercial directors Hollywood has produced, with a range extending from hack work to extremely solid entertainments, but as different from art as the Great Plains are from the Rockies Sound commercialism is useful It pays for the art of other filmmakers But Ford is not to be venerated, or mistaken for an artist Whoever is inclined to doubt this should ponder Ford's answer to Bogdanovich's question about whethei the director did not prefer silent films, whether he really approved of sound "It's all right," Ford replies, "people expect it now " And he adds "As long as the dialogue is crisp and cryptic, and there are no great soliloquies " This makes me wonder whether he knows the meaning of the word "cryptic," never mind the meaning of art He concludes "Silent movies were hard work " Are we to gather that this new, highly evolved medium of combined image and sound is easy compared to something like Stiaight Shooting, a foolish 1917 silent that the afi keeps publicly congratulating itself for having discovered m the Czech Film Archives, and restored to a Western world starving without if...

...The Last Picture Show, is a great hit with the reviewers, less so with the audiences, and strikes me as not bad by current standards Inasmuch as Bogdano-vich is in his very early 30s, this may augur well But there is a "but" here, and quite a big, fat but it is, too The Last Picture Show takes place m the two-horse town of Anarene, Texas, in 1951, when the town's only picture show (i.e., movie theater) closed down before the onslaught of television, which brought the dream factory right into the living room Sonny Crawford, co-cap-tam of the high-school football team, is at the center of this one-year chronicle We see him go from unsatisfactory pettings with his plain but busty girlfriend in the back of the picture show or in the front seat of his pick-up truck, to an affair with Ruth Popper, the neglected middle-aged wife of the crude football coach, thence to an unconsummated affair and prompdy annulled wedding with Jacy Farrow, a classmate who is the local pretty and spoiled rich bitch Meanwhile Sonny's best friend, Duane Jackson, the backfield captain, goes from being Jacy's platonic boyfriend to becorrung, ever so fleet-mgly, her lover, thence to the Army and the Korean war Two lovable figures around town die Sam the Lion?owner of the picture show, poolroom and eatery, the three sole recreational centers of Anarene—a fine remnant of a more romantic West, and Billy, a little idiot boy whom Sam took care of and Sonny, often inadequately, protected Jacy goes from fooling around with Duane to getting herself deflowered by him merely to move in on the fast, smart set of Wichita Falls, where virginity would be held agamst her, thrown over by one of those megalopolitan rich boys, she returns to the local talent and takes on, first, Abilene, her mother's lover, then Sonny himself, only to cast him off On the sidelines, there are two women watching and commenting Genevieve, the hardy, good-natured cafe waitress, and Lois, Jacy's jaded mother, bored and exasperated by her loveless marriage to Anaiene's oil millionaire All this is framed by an opening shot of the picture show still functioning, and a closing shot of it standing there on the town's main street, deserted The former shows us a dry, windy, dusty, bleak day, and sets the climate of the film The latter is a supenimposition Sonny, who has graduated and is already a forgotten outsider at the school football games, has sneaked back to see Ruth Popper, whom he so recklessly abandoned for Jacy Ruth receives him nicely, gives him coffee, and then has her outburst Why has she always been so self-effacing, waiting on everyone, Sonny included, why has she never asserted her rights...

...And how can we take him seriously if he is so stupid that, when Genevieve observes the town is so small that no one can sneeze in it without other people holding out a handkerchief, he asks, "What do you mean'" INDEED, almost all of these people are cloddish The fact that Anarene is a cultural backwater may explain this, but does not necessarily reconcile us to spending two hours with its essentially dreary denizens True artists, of course, can illumine the simplest people—m both senses ot the verb—and can make plain words take on great resonance Though McMurtry and Bogdanovich succeed once or twice, that is hardly enough to rouse one's sympathy from its sleep Potentially most gripping are those unfulfilled older women Ruth, Genevieve, Lois Farrow But none ot them quite makes it Ellen Bur-styn is very competent as Lois, yet the part is too skimpy and burdened with dnppy Imes like "Nothing has really been right since Sam the Lion died " Eileen Brennan's Genevieve captures the essence of the likable tough broad of the old movies, but they, rather than life, seem to be the unfortunate source of the character As Ruth, Clons Leachman gives a poor performance Her weeping comes out comic, her shy love for a very young boy lacks genuine warmth and seems almost calculating, her face is usually a rather unattractive blank She seems to be all nose and sharp bones, even a boy like Sonny might have found her no sexier than a Gillette razor blade Above all, Bogdanovich's direction is sheer denvativeness To put it bluntly, it is cinematheque direction A John Ford shot is followed by a George Stevens one, a Welles shot by one out of Raoul Walsh Even if every sequence is not as patently copied as the funeral is from Shane, the feeling is unmistakable that one is watchmg a film directed not by a young director in 1971, but by a conclave of the bigger Hollywood directors circa 1941 This may give the film visual authenticity, but of what kind...

...On Screen BOGDANOVICH RAMPANT BY JOHN SIMON PETER BOGDANOVICH is America's answer to the Cahieis phenomenon of film critic turned filmmaker, yet behind every answer there is a question In this case, how good was he as a critic in the first place' The answer is that he was never a serious critic, only an au-teunst hero-worshiper And how is he as a filmmaker' His first film, Targets, handled a valid subject in a trashy way, his new one...

...Sonny is remorseful, Ruth's moment of rebellion passes Now they sit there, dejected, no longer lovers and not yet friends, holding hands unhopefully as their image dissolves into that of the abandoned movie theater of a godforsaken town Though schematic, this doesn't sound half bad But look at the film more closely The locale is captured accurately by Robert Surtees' black-and-white cinematography, and the time seems indeed to be 1951, as we are told it is Told9 Clobbered with it Just about every hit song of the period manages to hit us from radios or jukeboxes, every major television program of the time seems to be watched by someone in the film at some point or other Yet this is fairly easy The lay of the land has not changed much since Larry McMurtry wrote or lived the autobiographical novel on which he and Bogdanovich based this screenplay I got my Air Force basic trainmg near Wichita Falls in 1944, and I can vouch for the area's being of the sort that a decade or two can barely make a dent in The monochromatic photography is quite good, but m an era when almost everything is filmed in color, you can score easy points just by clinging to black-and-white—whether it is finally called honesty, nostalgia, or an hommage to your favorite directors ot the period And, certainly, the general oudme of the film convmces McMurtry lived it, wrote it almost without sentimentality or anger, and Bogdanovich approaches the material reverently—all too reverently, in fact McMurtry, who also wrote the novel on which Hud was based, considers himself a minor regional novelist, and at a symposium engagingly mentioned that m working on the script of The Last Picture Show he discovered how much better a novel could have been made from the material—and, by implication, how much better a film, had Bogdanovich not been so enamored of the published text But as both Pauline Kael and Andrew Sams (who have, unlike me, read the novel) pomted out, there were some mmor yet not wholly msigmficant changes made, adding up to a certain romanticizing of the matter Thus the movies the kids see in the film are better than the ones m the novel (Bogdanovich even anachromstically drags in Red Rivet, as a tribute to one of his auteur-heroes, Howard Hawks), Lois is not allowed, m the film, to have sex with Sonny, whom her daughter has just betrayed, Jacy's crude sexual bout with her mother's lover on a pool table, and the young bloods havmg intercourse with a blind heifer are also excised What is kept is not always particularly persuasive, either I cannot believe the scene where all their classmates watch Jacy's and Duane's sexual initiation from cars parked outside the motel, I do not see the need to make Lester, a two-bit operator (Randy Quaid), seem more idiotic than Billy, the real halfwit I think it is a bad boiling down of the novel that introduces Sonny's father out of nowhere as an outcast, drops him immediately, and never tells us anything about Sonny's home life, the same goes for Duane and his family, with a mother making a belated, almost subliminal appearance The character of Abilene, the town stud, is woefully underdeveloped, Sam the Lion is so idealized that we see him only m scenes where he can deploy generosity, righteous indignation, gracious forgiveness, or noble, homespun philosophizing His basic, quotidian relationship to Genevieve and Billy is left completely unexammed The whole last part of the film proceeds by jerky, disparate lurches that do not blend mto a balanced narrative, and the conclusion is so ambiguous (my interpretation, given above, is perforce quite arbitrary) as to be close to a mere effect Worst of all, Sonny is unconvincing?whether m the writing, acting or directing, or in all three, hardly matters We are supposedly looking, for the most part, through his eyes, and he is meant to be a reasonable enough young fellow in the process of coming of age Yet what has he really learned, or taught us, in the end...

...Ford bellows, "Cut...

...Imagine a present-day composer writing like Haydn, a painter working in the exact style of Vermeer At best such men are epigones, at worst, forgers At its most successful, The Last Picture Show rises to the heights of pastiche There are also serious mmor problems, the most bothersome of them being unsubdety When Sonny and Ruth make love for the first time, the springs of the bed do not just squeak, they ululate If this were intended as deliberate heightening from a subjective point of view, it would have to occur throughout the him, which it doesn't Sonny has a way ot fondly turning around the baseball cap on Billy's head, so that the visor faces backward He does this some half-dozen tunes in the film, and when he doesn't do it, Duane does It becomes grating in its predictability Or take Billy s death, the boy is run over by a truck The scene is staged stiffly and ploddmgly, and the gloom-inducmg devices run amuck Never, on those other windy days, has a shutter been banging in the poolroom, now there is one beating the Devil's tattoo Never before has a single tumbleweed tumbled down the streets of Anarene, now there is a bunch of them domg enough tumbling for the main ring at Barnum & Bailey's At other times, instead of hitting us over the head, Bogdanovich does not make a pomt at all When Sonny, after Billy's death, gets into his truck and drives off to leave this horrible town forever, we follow him along the empty road across scarcely less empty country until suddenly, for no visible reason, he makes a U-turn and capitulates A reliable filmmaker would have taken us inside Sonny as the resolution to escape peters out, if nothing else, he would have found an objective correlative, the tiny external factor that undermines the boy's resolve Instead, like so many things m the film, the change of mind has to be taken simply on faith The acting is far from consistently good Aside from Clons Leach-man's and Randy Quaid's unpleasant work, there are CluGu-lager's Abilene, Timothy and Sam Bottoms' Sonny and Billy, and Cy-bill Shepherd's Jacy to leave one unmoved Miss Shepherd is a model (though how, with that dubious figure, I can't imagine) whose face Bogdanovich found on a teen-age magazine cover Although her face is absolutely right for Jacy, nothing else is Ben Johnson does nicely by Sam the Lion, however, and Jeff Bridges is convincingly oxhke as Duane ANOTHER FILM of Bogdan-ovich's was shown at the Ninth New York Film Festival, just concluded (previously only Godard and Skoli-mowski got such double exposure) This year's festival was smaller and more smoothly run, yet along with efficiency came drabness, an absence of the hysteria that can at least impersonate excitement The films were on the whole even weaker than usual, but there was less unmitigated garbage—except for shorts by Robert Breer and Hollis Frampton and features by Werner Herzog and Henry Jaglom that could match the worst of any year's offerings Directed by John Ford, Bogdano-vich's rapturous auteunst tribute to a director enshrined in every auteur critic's Pantheon, is a feature-length documentary shuttling between various inter views and scenes from 27 of Ford's close to 200 films These scenes lead up to a lengthy segment arranged chronologically, not by the dates of the films from which the excerpts come, but by the years of American history they are supposed to mirror The implication, despite a limp disclaimer in The American Film Institute's program note to the film (produced by afi), is that the director's enormous, heterogeneous, highly uneven output (about three or four Edsels to one Ford) constitutes a unified body of historical thought, and comprises a personal, histonographic as well as artistic, vision of the American past This is auteunsm on the rampage, and is amusingly deflated by Ford himself in the film In an almost grotesquely reverential scene, Bogdanovich interviews Ford in Monument Valley, known to film buffs as Ford Country There, in his director's chair, sits the burly, purblmd old man, as sharp and ornery as they come, with all the wonders of the West as his backdrop, or, perhaps more accurately, private backyard In deferential tones, Bogdanovich mquires whether Ford's view ot the West hasn't in fact progressively darkened between such films (I cite from memory) as Fott Apache or Wagonmaster and The Horse Soldiers and Cheyenne Autumn Without hesitation, Ford emits the loudest, curtest "No1" ever heard in Monument Valley When Bogdanovich tries to rephrase the question...