Life through the eyes of three aimless teenagers in small-town Texas during the 1950s. Unable to make decisions about the future, they continue drifting between boyhood and adulthood as the end of high school approaches.
“On a l'impression d’avoir affaire à des remakes parfaits, à des montages extraordinaires qui relèvent davantage d’une culture combinatoire (ou mosaïque au sens macluhanesque), à de grandes machines de photo, kino, historiosynthèse, etc., plutôt qu’à de véritables films. Entendons-nous : leur qualité n’est pas en cause. Le problème est plutôt qu’ils nous laissent quelque part totalement indifférents. Prenez Last Picture Show : il faut comme moi être assez distrait pour l'avoir vu comme production originale des années 50 : le très bon film de moeurs et d'ambiance dans la petite ville américaine, etc. Juste un léger soupçon : il était un peu trop bon, mieux ajusté, meilleur que les autres, sans les bavures psychologiques, morales et sentimentales des films de l’époque. Ahurissement quand on découvre que c'est un film des années 70, parfait rétro, expurgé, nickel, restitution hyperréaliste des films des années 50.”
Jean Baudrillard
“The Last Picture Show contrives to be both elegiac and brutally realistic. The deaths of Sam and Billy, Jacy’s inconstancy (sickening to both Duane and Sonny), and the recognition that Sonny and Ruth will be unable to reignite their affair are as chilling as the northers that sweep through Anarene. All that can be cherished are those fleeting moments of happiness contained in small intimacies.”
Graham Fuller
“Perhaps people have discovered something that I’ve suspected for a while, which is that the future’s rather bleak and the present is not terribly pleasant. So where else can we look but to the past? It interests me. I think one learns from the past. It inspires me. The main reason I wanted to do The Last Picture Show was because the novel is set back in the 1950s. The book was rather more amorphous than the movie is: it wasn’t specifically 1951 and 1952 in the book, and when we started to do the movie we fixed that specific period rather than just the fifties as a whole.”
Peter Bogdanovich
