texasville (peter bogdanovich, 1990)

1990 was a big year in American movies for people trying to use their past to bolster their present. Sixteen years after The Godfather Part II, Francis Ford Coppola finally gave in and made a third film in the series, one that is forever doomed to be remembered as the one that wasn't as good as the others. Another sequel to a film from 1974 was The Two Jakes, which followed up on the classic Chinatown. Jack Nicholson returned as Jake Gittes ... he even ended up directing this time ... it flopped.

And then there was Texasville. When The Last Picture Show came out in 1971, Peter Bogdanovich was on a roll. He got two Oscar nominations for that film, and he followed it up with What's Up, Doc? and Paper Moon, both of which were popular and critical successes. After that, he made films, but mostly they lacked the cultural impact of his earlier work. There was some logic to making a sequel to The Last Picture Show ... the author of that novel, Larry McMurtry, had written a sequel just a few years earlier, and most of the cast of the original film was still around. And so Bogdanovich, like Nicholson and Coppola, tried to recapture the magic.

Like the films of those others, Bogdanovich is working under a quandary: the first film was a classic, which meant a sequel was perhaps inevitable, but the standard established by the first would be hard to replicate. (This, among many things, is why The Godfather Part II is so remarkable.) Texasville is nowhere near as good a movie as is The Last Picture Show. That leaves plenty of room for a fine film ... there's no shame in being less of a classic then the classic. But Texasville never really establishes a reason for existing, beyond catching us up on characters that once fascinated us.

And so they are back, Duane and Sonny, Jacy and Ruth, played again by Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Cybill Shepherd, and Cloris Leachman (along with other returnees like Randy Quaid and Eileen Brennan). And it was nice to see where they had all ended up, but they weren't as interesting as they once seemed, and the town of Anarene is still dismal, so we're watching people and places that were once part of something classic and it's not classic anymore. And sure, that's part of what the film is saying, that lives in stagnant towns are likely to remain stagnant, but it's a bit much to wade through 2 1/2 hours of stagnant.

Texasville isn't worthless. The acting is generally good. Duane and Jacy were pretty unlikable in the earlier film, but now you can at least see that they are more self-reflective than they might have been in high school. Duane is particularly tricky. In 1971, Jeff Bridges was mostly unknown. By 1990, he had become one of our most respected and loved actors, and Duane benefits from this. The character is marginally more likable than in The Last Picture Show, but we root for Duane because we know Jeff Bridges now and we want to root for him.

Meanwhile, Texasville also gives us Annie Potts as Duane's wife, and she is arguably the best thing about the movie. So yeah, Texasville is worth watching, but if you've seen The Last Picture Show you will be disappointed, and if you haven't seen The Last Picture Show, you'll wonder who these people are and why you should care?

One last note. Apparently, the studio messed with the film, but now we have a director's cut, and without having seen the original, I'll guess that this version is an improvement. What's odd is that Texasville was originally in color, but Criterion offers the director's cut in a black-and-white version, which matches The Last Picture Show. That's the one I watched, and I don't think it mattered, but here is someone who thinks otherwise: