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Our Cheatin’ Hearts
The Last Picture Show at 51
Somehow, some way, someone let me into Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 debut film, The Last Picture Show. I was only fifteen, had never heard of Bogdanovich, nor did I know that he was a disciple of Orson Welles, and as long as I’m admitting foul shreds of my own ignorance, I had not yet heard of, much less seen, Welles’s Citizen Kane. It’s fun to look back and see what all was in store for the boy I was then — what he had to look forward to that he didn’t even know about. The people he’d meet; the students he’d one day teach and show such films to.
So, however I got into this R rated film, likely with my good friend Jimbo who was even younger than I, I will confess that, knowing nothing about the story — or that incredible soundtrack, though at least I had heard of Hank Williams but considered him some old country yokel — my one goal was to see the nudity surrounding Cybill Shepherd.
Yeah, I know that is so shallow of me, but fifteen is fifteen and Cybill Was Cybill. Except, and this was a lesson I would need to learn, her nude scene was anything but erotic, and when the film finally got there, I wondered what it was all about, and you can fill in the blank about the vague pronoun in question.
Fortunately, as I would learn many more times over my life and love affair with the picture shows…