One of my favorite movies of all time is The Last Picture Show, which I saw at the Curzon Cinema in Mayfair (London) in early 1972.
It was the perfect time of my life for this coming-of-age story set in a dusty North Texas town.
That’s because I would soon graduate high school, just like Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges), the film’s main male characters.
And I felt as they did: Uncertain.
This timeless masterpiece, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, evokes a sense of nostalgia for a simpler time and invites us to reflect on our own journeys and cherish the fleeting beauty of the present moment, knowing that, like the fading images of a movie, it too will soon become a memory.
Today, lonely Archer City, home to Larry McMurtry (who wrote the eponymous novel on which the movie is based) and the town in which the story is set in 1951 (called Thalia in the book, Anarene in the film) is more desolate than ever.
And why not? McMurtry’s story meant to depict a windswept town that was dying (culturally and economically) along with the fragility of human connections.
It was, of course, prophetic. Because, since then, all cross America thousands of small towns have followed suit, closing their movie houses—and dying out.
Seventy-three years on, this town’s new tag would be The Last Bookstore.
That’s because even McMurtry’s own Booked Up Inc. has permanently closed its doors.