The 1971 movie Jeff Bridges said is in a league of its own: “Sits there by itself”
Why does nobody take comedy seriously? Why does everybody think it’s all such a joke?
In the annals of history, 1971 stands out as a particularly revered year in cinema history with releases like A Clockwork Orange, The French Connection, Walkabout, and Get Carter all drawing plaudits. But comedy often isn’t met with reverence.
As an adoring audience, we’re all more than happy to accept that comedy is a drug that takes great skill to administer effectively. However, whether it be Randy Newman’s brilliant satirical songs failing to capture the same esteem as Bob Dylan’s rather more obtrusively political verse or the Oscars continually denying joyous performances adored by millions, even a nomination nod alongside more typically poignant portrayals: comedy is always the silly younger sibling of the reverential deities in the gilded Parthenon of culture.
Jeff Bridges knows this all too well. He has delivered iconic performances as the likes of The Dude in The Big Lebowski, but ‘iconic’ and ‘acclaimed’ are not often the same. Attuned to this reality, Bridges himself takes a more open-eyed approach to art worthy of praise, and that certainly applies to the ‘71 film that he is still proud of to this day.
The heartening coming-of-age classic The Last Picture Show defied the usual odds. Often, films that focus on high schoolers are overlooked by the so-called esteemed film community, but this Peter Bogdanovich-directed classic bucked that trend. The movie was a box office triumph, scoring around $31million in return from a one-million-dollar budget, but it also swept up eight Academy Award nominations.
As the lead alongside Timothy Bottoms and Ellen Burstyn, it remains a movie that delights beloved Bridges. “For me, that’s a movie that is kind of like no other movie, and no other movie is like it,” the star said of the film. “It just kind of sits there by itself.”
Based on Larry McNulty’s 1966 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, the monochrome movie does a stunning job of showcasing how the rather trivial-seeming lives of teenagers can actually say a lot about society. As the official synopsis hints, “In 1951, a group of high schoolers come of age in a bleak, isolated, atrophied North Texas town that is slowly dying, both culturally and economically.”
Rarely has a film focused on the importance of youth culture in this way, and that means that the movie has remained a stunning artefact to this day. Sadly, as Bridges’ appraisal proclaims, it still lingers in a league of its own.
Filled with coming-of-age heart, tragedy, and subtle social commentary, The Last Picture Show is a classic worthy of Bridges’ pride. A time and place is perfectly captured as well as the pivotal transition we experience in all of our live. And it has the good grace to throw the odd laugh in, too.
McNulty’s prose might have wearily surmised, “Do you know what it means to be heartbroken? It means your heart isn’t whole, so you can’t really do anything wholeheartedly.” But the film defies that to such an extent, taking everything to the nth, that there’s not really been anything like it since.
