Cherry Red Records The Last Picture Show

Released in 1971 and hailed
as the most impressive work by a young American director since Citizen Kane,
Peter Bogdanovich’s Last Picture Show
is an elegiac study of life amid the dust and loneliness of a dying town. An account
of adolescents coming of age filmed 
under a vast, empty Texas sky.
         

The film has no
conventional score. All of the music is from the period between November 1951 and
October 1952 when the film is set and linked to each scene. It is played on
home radios, car radios, truck radios, 45 rpm players, jukeboxes, and at a
community Christmas dance. The Hank Williams song, heard on the radio in
Sonny’s old truck in the opening scene, ‘Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used
to Do)?’ sets the tone for the music as well as the movie. All of the songs
featured in the film are collected together in this edition.
         
Low-key, perceptive, bleak,
and melancholy, The Last Picture Show
shares with Welles’ Magnificent Ambersons, a heartache for a time and place
forever gone. The film boasts some superlative performances from the ensemble
cast which the Academy recognised in awarding Oscars to Cloris Leachman and the
monumental Ben Johnson. It is more than a great film, it is a supremely moving
work of art…
Press:-
“If your mood is right, this is a delight, with artists such as Frankie Laine, Eddy Arnold and Kay Starr showing us how it should be done, with charisma and effortless vocal performance that have rarely been bettered”. 4/5* (Record Collector August 2012)