The Melbourne Cinémathèque & ACMI present
The Last Picture Show
When
Wed 21 Jun 2023
Arguably his masterpiece, Bogdanovich’s second feature adapts Larry McMurtry’s coming-of-age story set in a dust-blown 1950s Texas town. Featuring a sensitive ensemble cast (many in breakthrough roles), this tender elegy was nominated for eight Oscars and won two (for Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson). While acknowledging its homages to Hawks, Ford and Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, David Thomson argues that the film’s real flavour is French; he compares its warmth for “so many clearly defined characters” to the work of Jean Renoir. With Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Ellen Burstyn and Cybill Shepherd.
Also screening on Wed 21 June
Program
Everyone has their reasons: The films of Peter Bogdanovich
Targets (1968) – Wed 21 Jun, 7pm
The Last Picture Show (1971) – Wed 21 Jun, 8.50pm
What's Up, Doc? (1972) – Wed 28 Jun, 7pm
Squirrels to the Nuts (2014/2022) – Wed 28 Jun, 8.50pm
Saint Jack (1979) – Wed 5 Jul, 7pm
At Long Last Love (1975) – Wed 5 Jul, 9.05pm
About the program
Born in upstate New York to immigrants who had fled the Nazis, Peter Bogdanovich (1939–2022) will always be remembered as the notable American auteur who took the French path from criticism to filmmaking. An obsessive filmgoer and sometime stage actor who, as a teenager, had studied with Stella Adler, he wrote monographs on Welles, Hawks, Ford and Hitchcock and also mounted a series of influential retrospectives at MoMA in the 1960s...
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About Melbourne Cinémathèque
Australia's longest-running film society, Melbourne Cinémathèque screens significant works of international cinema in the medium they were created, the way they would have originally screened.
Melbourne Cinémathèque is self-administered, volunteer-run, not-for-profit and membership-driven.
