Fifty years ago, it was shown in American cinemas by Peter Bogdanovich The last movie performance on the eve of the Korean War, a bitter story of growing up in a small Texas town.
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“After the gold rush, cinema was the last big adventure,” says Peter Bogdanovich, a filmmaker who has bid farewell to this last great adventure in his first two films. In the debut directing, the Targetsin (1968) the threads run together in a car cinema: here the former horror star (Boris Karloff) greets the audience, who is taken to a final audience meeting by an emerging director (played by Bogdanovich himself), and here the amok-running serial killer seeks new victims. Two worldviews are at odds with each other, and while the film’s once-admired star of old-fashioned cinema ultimately disarmes the realist-nihilistic monster of new times, there’s no question of winning the world of illusions because the horror of vacated reality demands space in cinema.
The title of Bogdanovich’s second feature film promises to say goodbye: The last movie performance takes place in a dusty, declining Texas small town in the early fifties, its heroes are graduating high school students, looking for a place in the world, constantly losing their dreams and innocence, and by the end of the film the only cinema in the area closes inexorably, unhappy parents.
Bogdanovich’s eight Oscar-nominated two-Academy Awards (Cloris Leachman for Best Actress and Ben Johnson for Best Actress as a Supporting Actor) , but captures the hopelessness, adolescence, belief in human relationships, and with it the death of the American dream, by powerfully portraying the medium, contrasting the still sincere youth and hypocritical adults, and then in full resemblance.
The brittle black-and-white images (cinematographer: Robert Surtees) radiate emptiness from the outset, the depressing monotony of insufficient life emanating from every frame – the shops look even worse, the streets even dustier, the faces even more tormented. Boredom and pervasive slow destruction (morally, spiritually and physically) – young people would crave (one of them also appears in the Korean War), but in such a place there are mostly two alternatives to escapism: sex and cinema.
The film’s final movie performance features a handful of viewers, including two good friends, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges), before the latter set out for the Korean War. The film, which is set in a closed-door cinema in the small town, is a western classic by Howard Hawks, Red river (1948) in which a family conflict unfolds between John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, resolved by a woman (Joanne Dru) – The last movie performance young man’s friendship is poisoned by the town’s teenage femme fatale (Cybill Shepherd).
A Red riverin the woman’s pure, fearful love appeases the quarrelsome, The last movie performance his bored Jacy uses men to get rid of boredom and break away from his surroundings. But it’s not interesting because of the female roles The last movie performance and the Red river juxtaposition of the latter, and the classical western generally proclaims the traditional values that contributed to the rise of a nation, the golden age films of the Wild West genre depict the conquest of the fringes when man creates civilized conditions in all respects in the wild despite all the vicissitudes.
Bogdanovich’s film takes place in that real Anarene that was already a real ghost town in the decade before filming. Founded in 1908 in connection with nearby coal mining, the town became uninhabitable just at the time of the film’s action: the nearby coal mine was closed in 1942, the town’s railway station (which may have been due to coal transport) closed for ten years, and the post office in 1955. closed, in the absence of opportunities Anarene was largely depopulated.
Of course, the American revisionist western has questioned the romantic adventure of the classic Wild West film and the moral purity of its heroes – but Bogdanovich shows (also) what became the mental and physical heritage of the young people of the once mushroom-growing towns: morally and materially inanimate , which their predecessors left to them.
If you like, The last movie performance a melancholy elegy about the American dream, a showdown with national self-mythology built on small towns like Anarene, with streets of church and cinema, family restaurants and tiny offices, and home to a busy and courteous community of well-known and supportive neighbors. This myth was reinforced by even the most American film genre, western, and it is with this myth that Bogdanovich contrasts the unpleasant small-town reality of the 1950s – The last movie performance like a black and white tombstone: here rests the American dream.
Bogdanovich’s adult heroes take a final farewell not only from the classic, ideal-promoting, escapist cinema, but also from the innocence of their adolescence, ideas and illusions – ultimately from the great American dream, whose main advertiser was Hollywood cinema.
A Targetsin one of the biggest stars of the classic horror film, Boris Karloff remarkes bitterly that the horror he once represented is no longer frightening because reality has created much more terrifying monsters. In Bogdanovich’s second film, the realistic zombie film is born in reality, The last movie performance for the discouragement of the adult population of his ghost town no longer indicates not only hopelessness but also a state of loss of life. And cinema no longer provides a refuge from reality – because instead of colorful dreams, black-and-white reality has won there.
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