Films This Week 1/21/22
by Gary Palmucci | 21st January 2022 | Gary's Corner
In addition to Sidney Poitier, we lost another of our cinema heroes this month — writer/director/movie historian Peter Bogdanovich. His 1971 masterpiece The Last Picture Show was featured in one of New Plaza Cinema’s first Talk Backs, and we later heard through a friend of the director’s that he had seen and enjoyed it — the sort of encouragement that Max Alvarez and I needed in those early weeks of the pandemic.
In fact, Bogdanovich had a much longer “six degrees” connection with New Plaza — growing up on the Upper West Side he met Dan and Toby Talbot in the early 60s, writing program notes for their revival calendars at the New Yorker Theatre on Broadway at W. 88 St.
Through much of that decade he intrepidly interviewed many of his “movie gods” — Welles, Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock — before starting to forge his own, quicksilver filmmaking path.
The highly acclaimed, multi-Oscar-winning Last Picture Show, beautifully cast and adapted from Larry McMurtry’s novel was the first of three smash hits that included What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon. Then things started to go south for him, both in a series of failed pictures (many of which today seem fascinatingly ambitious) and in his personal life and public persona. He was seen as arrogant, out-of-touch and endured in his relationships both merciless tabloid teasing (Cybill Shepherd) and gut-wrenching tragedy (Dorothy Stratten).
Decades passed for Bogdanovich in which he went through bankruptcies, having to make a string of TV movies apparently to make ends meet, and gradually a re-evaluation of much of his mid-career work. Max and I have often discussed that, and we recommend taking a first or second look at films like Nickelodeon, They All Laughed, Texasville (a sort of Last Picture Show sequel), Saint Jack and even the maligned musical At Long Last Love (the latter two are screening next month at the Moving Image in Astoria).
And let’s not forget his dogged, lifelong work as chronicler and compiler of movie history, in both many books and occasional documentaries, and his success after four decades in finally getting his mentor Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind completed and screened.
I recommend two recent podcast series for their rich, diverse takes on Bogdanovich’s career and influence — TCM’s The Plot Thickens, mainly about his own life, much of it in his own words, and You Must Remember This, whose multi-part portrait of his first wife and key artistic collaborator Polly Platt is a rich, often tragic tapestry of late 20th century Hollywood.
The dreams and the often sterling work live on.
Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema