Anarene, Texas, population 1131, is a no-account, dying township near Wichita Falls. The truck drivers don't slow down as they pass through it. A few old-timers live there, a few well-off employees of an oil company, a few wayward kids who've left home and gone into lodgings to get away from their folks, a few schoolteachers and their families, a young boy with a mental handicap - in short, the same kind of people who live everywhere else. This is Hicksville, Texas, and the year is 1951. It is solidly located in time and space, so real that we can almost smell it, feel the chill wind that sandblasts the buildings as it rips across the flat featureless West Texas plains, but the time and place don't matter because what the film deals with applies to all times and to all places.

Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) is Everyman. He wants to be a good person, to be able to like himself, but he is weak, corruptible, easily deflected onto what he knows is the lower path. When we first meet him he has an enormous amount still to learn. He has to learn that actions have consequences, that other people have feelings and that when you trample on them they (and ultimately you) get hurt, that relationships create expectations and responsibilities, that the demands of kindness outweigh those of immediate sexual gratification: in short, what it is to be human. As the film unfolds, we see him grow into a decent, considerate human being despite all the forces pulling him in other directions. The triumph of the film's ending is that he doesn't run away from the things that he has done, he turns the pick-up truck around and goes back to face Ruth (Cloris Leachman), and more importantly himself. The heart-rending, inarticulate confrontation between Sonny and Ruth that ends the film is one of the all-time high-points of American cinema. This is how a film that seems at times unrelentingly downbeat and pessimistic can actually uplift and send you from the theatre believing that better is possible of human beings, that all is not hopelessness.

This is a shocking film: not because of nudity, or anything to do with sexuality or violence, but because of honesty. Instead of glossing-over those parts of all our lives that we would prefer to deny and/or forget, "The Last Picture Show" selects them out as its subject matter and places them before us without compromise, without moralising, without means of escape.

Some commentators have been inclined to blame the town itself and the crushing boredom of existence there for the moral shortcomings of its citizens, to over-stress the importance of a particular way of life and a particular moment in the history of the United States, as if people would behave better if there was more to do, more to aspire to, a greater variety of potential partners. Personally I think that this misses the point. The details of people's "lives of quiet desperation" would of course be different in another situatiuon, but whether in Anarene or Beverley Hills, Barcelona or Bangkok people have much the same choices to make as to how they are going to treat one another, much the same needs and wants and much the same opportunities to behave decently and achieve self-respect or to behave wretchedly and forfeit it. The town simply supplies a stage for the unfolding of completely universal aspects of human behaviour. It is the universality of the material that gives it its bite, that makes it at times downright uncomfortable. Which one of us has not, at some time or another, acted shamefully and tried to cover it up afterwards? Which of us has not experienced the mind-numbing clumsiness and embarrassment of early sexual encounters and lied about them?

It would be time-consuming to summarise all of the plots and sub-plots of "The Last Picture Show" and really they are not crucial to the film: the two central aspects are character and atmosphere.

We are introduced to Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson), the grizzled old cowboy who has settled down in Anarene and lives a lot in his own romantic version of the past, while providing a father-figure and role-model for some of the town's rootless teenagers; Ruth Popper, the neglected and near-suicidal wife of the High School football coach, who longs for some kind of affection and adventure in her empty life before she grows too old to enjoy it; Jacey Farrow (Cybill Shepherd) the pretty but self-centred, manipulative and spiteful teenager who comes from a family where this is the norm; Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges) the aspiring High School football hero desperate to prove his manhood, full of pent-up violence and resentment which eventually find an outlet in signing-up to fight in Korea; and many, many more, each one of them a fully-rounded, believable human being without an ounce of carricature or exaggeration to mar their plausibility. Just look at the way the characters interact and spark off one another. Look at the relationship between Jacey and her mother, or between Sonny and his first lacklustre girlfriend Charlene Duggs (Sharon Taggart). Peter Bogdanovich must have made a pact with the Devil to extract performances of this level from all (yes, absolutely all) of his cast.

As well as the human actors and actresses the town itself is a major player in the drama. Bleak, windswept, tatty and dying it seems to stand for the emotional void in the characters' lives, and also for the end of an age of youth and innocence that has been outgrown, both in the individual lives of the protagonists and in America itself. The Royal Cinema presents flickering escapist fantasies, like "Father of the Bride" (the 1950 version) based on a sentimental and tacky representation of family life that bears no resemblance to anything in the real experience of the people watching it; and "Red River", a 1948 Howard Hawks cowboy movie in which John Wayne stands in for Sam the Lion in his particular fantasy of what Texas used to be. It is all myth and fairytale, it has nothing to do with what life is really like, and in the end it too is taken away - the cinema closes down: the time has come to stand on one's own two feet, the picture show is over.

If it is ever for a moment suggested that film is an inferior art-form to the novel or the play, "The Last Picture Show" provides all the counter-argument that one could possibly require.

I would recommend that you see this film first when you are about seventeen years old, again at about twenty-five, and then at intervals of about a decade for the rest of your life. On each occasion you will see a different film, an even better one than you saw the time before.