mido505

I switched off Paper Moon. I didn't laugh once during What's Up Doc?. I abandoned The Last Picture Show around the time Sam the Lion croaked. Why bother?

Has there ever been a more overrated director than Peter Bogdanovich? The above pictures are his acknowledged classics, films that swept both box office and Oscars in the early seventies, making Bogdanovich's name, and all three are tedious. Last Picture Show may be the most tedious all.

Take away the wide-screen and Robert Surtees's competent but inexpressive b&w photography and Last Picture Show exhibits all the style of an ABC Movie of the Week, circa 1968. John Ford, Howard Hawks, or Orson Welles this is not. Bogdanovich has no sense of camera placement, blocking, or spacial dynamics within a shot, and his cutting wouldn't pass muster in a Hal Roach short circa 1921. Horrible "big head of Pola" reaction shots are cut into every scene for no apparent reason, other than to get Bogdanovich out of the master. Cybill Shepard's big strip scene at the pool party is a prime example of directorial ineptitude: Bogdanovich seems to have had one or two shots of Shepard, a couple of badly posed reaction shots of the nude skinny-dippers watching her remove her clothing, and a medium-close shot of Shepard fumbling with her bra clasp. This paltry footage is then cut together with no sense of drama, suspense, anticipation, eroticism, or any thing else for that matter, and goes on forever. I ended up laughing far harder at this sequence than at anything in What's Up Doc?. Hitch and Ford could get away with shooting cleanly, simply, and with little coverage because they knew what they were doing, and how to get maximum expressiveness out of minimal footage; Bogdanovich, clearly, does not.

Most of the acting is good, and some of it is terrific: the Bottoms brothers, Ben Johnson, just about all of the women. Johnson, giving an excellent performance is, unfortunately, not helped by Bogdanovich and writer Larry McMurtry's penchant for hanging a figurative "vote for me" sign around his neck during his big dramatic "scenes", which had the effect of taking me right out of the movie.

Cybill Shepard is, of course, a stump.

There is lots of nudity and sex, but no eroticism; all the sex is bad sex, and bad bad sex at that. The sex scenes play like a virgin's idea of what bad teen sex would be like, if you understand my meaning.

Typically, once he found success, Bogdanovich dumped his incredibly talented wife, Polly Platt, who later worked successfully with Robert Altman, James Brooks, Louis Malle and others, for the sublimely untalented Shepard. Fittingly, his career then nosedived after a string of cinematic atrocities such as Daisy Miller and At Long Last Love.

It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

The Last Picture Show is proof that there never was much talent there to begin with.

Legend has it that Roger Corman filmed The Terror over a frantic four-day period; the truth is rather more interesting, as it undoubtedly contributed to the film's remarkable, incomparable, mesmerizing texture. After production wrapped on The Raven, Corman had Karloff, Nicholson, and the Raven's sets for four remaining days, so he hurriedly shot what he could before the walls came down and his stars departed. He then dispatched various acolytes, including Francis Coppola, Dennis Jakoub, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill, and Nicholson himself to produce enough footage to make The Terror into a complete feature. The result is a unique, fascinating, intensely visual and cinematic experiment that makes Corman's previous Poe adaptations look overly literary, plot-laden, and dialog-bound. The Terror may not be very logical, and its story will not withstand much scrutiny, but the film succeeds as a feverish nightmare of obsession and mad love. The photography, especially of the Big Sur locations, and of the fog bound studio cemetery sets, has an intense eerie romantic beauty, and Ronald Stein's remarkable score underscores The Terror's uncanny equation of desire and death. Is it cheap? Yes. Are there mistakes and screw ups? Sure. Does the continuity falter? Absolutely. None of this matters. The Terror is extraordinary in its palpable dream-like intensity. Oh, and by the way: an elderly, sick, practically crippled Boris Karloff, who could have easily tossed this off as an imposition, is terrific as always and a wonder to behold.