544-550 America Lost and Found: The BBS Story (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, etc.)

[beamish14]

Considering that Richard Linklater is from Texas and already made a fairly solid, long-belated sequel to a 70’s classic, I’d say he could do it, too

[jazzo]

That would be great, too, although, no matter how much I love Linkater's work, I feel like Payne and Jenkins have slightly better visual aesthetics. But "Bernie" also gives me "Duane's Depressed vibes", which is a phrase, I suspect, young people will be embracing any day now when they want to articulate their melancholy in shorthand.

[PfR73]

Reading the restoration notes in the book included in the Columbia Classics set, I learned that there are 2 versions of the Director's Cut of The Last Picture Show: the Director's Cut released in 1991 apparently altered the pool scene and the Duane/Jacy hotel room scene; while then in 1999, Bogdanovich decided to revert these scenes to the original 1971 versions, and thus what has always been released since then is the "Definitive Director's Cut". The book says the 1991 Director's Cut is what was released on the Criterion/Voyager laserdisc. Does anyone know actual specifics about the differences in the scenes?

[andyli]

I was under the impression that Criterion recycled the old BBS blu-ray disc for their 4k combo, yet upon closer inspection it appears that is not the case. A new disc is produced to allow for rearrangement of some extras (adding "The Next Picture Show" while moving "Picture This" to the Texasville disc). And this must be good because it also allows Criterion to update the blu-ray transfer to the new 4k restoration, in the meantime making the stand-alone UK blu-ray version possible.

[tenia]

The BD in the new set has The Last Picture Show at the exact same bitrate and the file is the exact same size as the previous time, down the last bytes. I'd be surprised this happened despite updating the movie to its new restoration.

[andyli]

Is that so? Then why issue a UK blu-ray and calling it a 4k restoration in the amazon specs? Weird.

EDIT: Did some further digging. It appears the stand-alone blu-ray was released by Criterion in both territories, with the US containing a second disc for Texasville. DVDcompare shows the following specs (with content different from the BBS disc in bold):

DISC ONE "The Last Picture Show"
* The Film - Director's Cut
(1) Audio Commentary by director Peter Bogdanovich and actors Cybill Shepherd, Randy Quaid, Cloris Leachman and Frank Marshall
(2) Audio Commentary by director Peter Bogdanovich
"The Last Picture Show - A Look Back" documentary (64:40)
"The Next Picture Show" featurette (16:17)
Screen Tests (2:14)
Location Footage (6:27)
"A Discussion with Filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich" featurette (12:51)
"Truffaut on the New Hollywood" featurette (4:36)
Teaser Trailer (1:28)
Theatrical Trailer (3:05)

DISC TWO "Texasville"
* The Film (Theatrical Cut)
* The Film (Director's Cut)
Introduction by Peter Bogdanovich, Sam Shepherd, and Jeff Bridges (3:47)
"Picture This" documentary (41:59)
Trailer (2:09)

whereas Chris notes in his review for the 4k combo:

The release also includes a standard dual-layer Blu-ray disc featuring a 1080p film presentation alongside all of the release’s special features. This disc replicates the 2010 disc found in the box set, which uses the older restoration, taken from a 35mm fine-grain master positive. As a bonus, the release includes another standard Blu-ray disc, which features two versions of the sequel, Texasville.

I couldn't make sense of this any more.

EDIT 2: Okay. Now I kind of get it. The so called "The Next Picture Show" featurette that runs about 17 min is actually on the Texasville disc. It is the last part of George Hickenlooper's documentary that went missing in the original "Picture This" extra. So the bonus disc for The Last Picture Show is indeed the original one from the BBS set, down to the last bit. And dvdcompare somehow mixed it all up; there wasn't any rearrangement of extras whatsoever.

[soundchaser]

Still buzzing from watching Squirrels to the Nuts last month, I finally decided to spin the new Texasville disc included here. I haven't seen the film before, so I can't say whether the color version is *better*, but I found the choice to present the director's cut only in black-and-white a frustrating one, simply because I'm not sure it did the film any favors. The cinematography here is going BIG, which fits the way the characters are living: huge personalities stuck in a tiny place, all bouncing up against each other (often literally) in ways that threaten to crack the town into splinters. I'll have to go back and watch the color version at some point to compare, because my hunch is it's the real way to see this picture.

I can't say I'm surprised that people were baffled by it -- it does rely pretty heavily on knowledge of The Last Picture Show, and the emotionally resonant parts aren't going to mean much if you're unfamiliar with these characters. Even if you are, I found parts a bit off-putting because it's so tonally...weird. Picture Show is almost unrelentingly bleak, but those moments of levity it does contain are made potent because of their contrast. Texasville swings between tonal registers with reckless abandon, to the point that I wasn't sure for about half the film what I should be feeling about something that's both funny (?) and depressing. And maybe that's part of what Bogdanovich is aiming for here: a muddling of two very different emotional states as a reflection of the characters own stuck-ness. (I haven't read the novel, so I can't say how accurate it is to the source material.) As a viewing experience, I thought it was very frustrating.

The huge saving grace is Shepherd's performance. She is electric here -- spiky, clever, world-weary, and genuine in equal parts. I disagree with the Maltin review quoted elsewhere on this forum that claims her role is "underwritten"; Jacy is so clearly the heart of the film, and I found her attempts at building a new family in this small place that she otherwise has outgrown the most compelling through-line in an otherwise structurally scattershot narrative. (I disagree with that review for a number of reasons, because I also think Shepherd looks fantastic as shot here. It helps, I guess, that all the actors are playing about ten years older than their real ages.)

Although I'm not sure that I'm compelled to watch this again any time soon, I've always been sympathetic to the slightly cracked sequel, and Texasville sits admirably in that group.

[hearthesilence]

Still buzzing from watching Squirrels to the Nuts last month, I finally decided to spin the new Texasville disc included here. I haven't seen the film before, so I can't say whether the color version is *better*, but I found the choice to present the director's cut only in black-and-white a frustrating one, simply because I'm not sure it did the film any favors. The cinematography here is going BIG, which fits the way the characters are living: huge personalities stuck in a tiny place, all bouncing up against each other (often literally) in ways that threaten to crack the town into splinters. I'll have to go back and watch the color version at some point to compare, because my hunch is it's the real way to see this picture.

Since the film takes place in the '80s, I thought color helped place it in that era, when television and new films were very rarely in black & white. During the brief moments looking back to the earlier film, it was jarring but in a good way - it made the past feel that much more distant which felt appropriate. It really nailed the feeling that you had to accept what happened before as being long gone, even if the people involved are very present in one's life.

[domino harvey]

Bogdanovich did the same trick with the director’s cut of Nickelodeon and the black and white completely changed the tone. Luckily the scenes he added back in were not anything I’d miss

[Tom Amolad]

Since it's leaving the channel, I watched The Last Picture Show last night. I'd seen it two or three times times before but not (my ledger tells me) since 2010. Three observations.

1. It's a beautiful, lovely, haunting film, with many wonderful things about it that I won't bother to enumerate, since its virtues seem widely known.

2. The sour taste I had last time I saw it didn't, unfortunately, go away. Among some lovely character portraits the portrait of Jacy seems to me marked by a deep and ugly misogyny. Not having read the novel (I'd like to), I don't know how much is carried over from McMurtry, but, especially as the character develops into a manipulative bitch, nothing feels like the sort of honest-warts-and-all portrait that's advertised. As the movie develops, whaver degree of verisimilitude had been giding the characterization loses out to a male fantasy of the siren who ruins it all. It's all the more frustrating in a film that offers so many other fine, interesting, measured, "humanistic" depictions, not least of the three other main female characters. And it's frustrating to see so many people talk about this as an era when people could finally be honest about sex (Truffaut, for instance, says this in the interview included as an extra) when "honesty" turns out to look like Jacy-the-beautiful-mankiller. It's not unique to this film, of course -- there are a lot of other films of that moment with many virtues whose misogyny gets in the way (MASH, just for an example of another such film that I really want to be able to fully love and can't). You hear it in music too -- the first moment the Beatles manage to break away from the conventional heroines of their early albums, the first thing you get is "Rubber Soul," full of brilliant songs about "more interesting" women who turn out to be maneaters, culminating in their vilest song, "Run for your Life." With time, I can forgive all this, and the Beatles, Altman and (probably) Bogdanovich do improve in this regard. But it doesn't keep the sour taste away -- nor the frustration that it's in work that's otherwise enormously exciting.

3. In reading a selection of reviews, both contemoraneous and more recent, I can't help being baffled at the number of critiics who describe the film (and particularly it's b&w cinematography) as an exercise in mimicing an older, more classical, perhaps Fordian look, with only the dirty words and nudity maring a difference. To my eye, the b&w of this film looks vastly different -- differently lit, differently textured, not to mention differently framed -- from the b&w of the 50s. Both are beautiful, and part of the beauty in Bogdanovich's film is in how different it looks from what came before. The editing too, while sometimes quite classical, is also sometimes clearly marked by the influnce of the New Wave. I think of some of the quick edits associated with anxious characters -- in the swimming pool scene, for instance, and at the end, where the two quick shots of Billy's broom could be straight out of Truffaut. Can critics really not tell the difference between this and Ford's visual style? Or is it me underappreciating the amount of visual continuity?

[olmo]

Are you as offended by the depiction of Sonny's & Ruth's relationship where Sonny is far more manipulative & deceitful than Jacy ever was?

[Tom Amolad]

I’m not offended but what either character does. I’m offended by the way the film judges them. If Jacey got the same “humanistic” treatment Sonny does for making a mistake of that sort, that’d better great — and there are hints of that humanism, like I say, but as the film goes on and she keep doing it, they get buried under layers of “girls are like that” misogyny. It’s a pretty clear contrast with Sonny, who is allowed to be a decent fellow who makes a mistake.

[olmo]

Jacy is portrayed as a troubled young girl who is afforded next to no love from her Mother and seeks affection from wherever she can find it, whether it be Sonny, Duane. Even her Mother's boyfriend.

Incidentally, I'm interested in your interpretation of the seduction scene with Abilene. Male predation of a vulnerable young girl or Jacy's manipulation?

[The Curious Sofa]

Can critics really not tell the difference between this and Ford's visual style? Or is it me underappreciating the amount of visual continuity?

Comparisons to Gregg Toland's cinematography for The Grapes of Wrath are not far off. Apparently, it was Welles who convinced Bogdanovich to shoot the film in black and white, so it's not hard to imagine what Bogdanovich was after.

[Tom Amolad]

Ah, you're undoubtedly right about Grapes of Wrath, which I'm ashamed to say I haven't seen since the VHS era (which probably also means I didn't see a particularly accurate rendering of it even then). But looking at screen captures, it does look a lot closer to what Surtees did on LPS than does the more classical lighting of a lot of Ford's later b&w films. I still think the difference in film stock and widescreen composition (as well as editing) marks the film's style out as post-classical, but it's clear there's a lot of Toland haunting the picture.

As for the other question, I don't think the Jacy/Abeliene scene is uncomplicated, but I do think Jacy is portrayed as a mainpulator in that sequence. In the aftermath, for instance, Abeliene is allowed to feel (disgust, self-loathing, etc); whereas Jacy is only allowed to play-act ("Oh, momma, isn't he AWFUL?!?!?", or whatever the line is). Maybe you can say the film is showing her being pushed into a cage of acting, but that's still all the film ever gives her access to, and that matters, I think. The film's humanism reaches him but never quite reaches her. (Or, I would add, Sonny's first girlfriend, or the sex worker inflicted on Billy.) One thing I haven't thought about is whether the difference between the two cuts is important here -- I believe the pool hall scene itself didn't appear in the original version, though I assume the lead-up and aftermath did? I don't think I've ever seen the original cut.