* You Can’t Go Home Again- The Midlife Crisis Of One Duane Jackson- Larry McMurtry’s "Texasville"- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the movie trailer for Texasville.

DVD Review

Texasville, Jeff Bridges, Cybil Sheppard, Timothy Bottoms, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, 1990

There is no question in my mind, at least, that Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show is a great post-World War II (about 1952), boom/bust oil patch Texas, but could have been a lot of places, 1950s places, coming-of-age story. Director Peter Bogdanovitch 1971 production, (with McMurtry writing the screenplay) stayed fairly close to the story line of the book and produced a great film out of the tangled teen relationships of three dust-blown, one-horse (and one movie theater), small-town Texas youngsters, Duane, Sonny and Jacy. I have watched that film several times over the last forty years and have not changed my mind in that regard; if anything I like it better these days.

Fast forward thirty years (thirty story-line years that is, about 1984) and take the same characters, the same writer, the same producer and the same actors (mainly) and make it a film about mid-life crisis (or crises) and the premises fall somewhat flat. It is not the acting. Jeff Bridges is well, Jeff Bridges, born for these Texas-type roles (witness Oscar-winning Bad Blake- Duane Jackson at 57). Cybil Sheppard (Jacy), although showing her age a bit and not the "hot" femme fatale teen of Last Picture is still okay. Timothy Bottom (Sonny) has definitely wilted. But like I say it is not the acting. Nor is it the writing, this is still based on good McMurtry material (unlike the seemingly endlessly contrived later parts of the Duane saga). Nor is it Bogdanovich who evokes 1980s boom-bust (some things don’t change) Texas well enough. Let’s just chalk it up to a preference for the black-and-white, dust bowl grit film footage of small-town Texas over color; a preference for the bite of original stories over sequels; and, most importantly, for distant coming-of-age stories over nearer mid-life crisis. If you can believe this I would rather now watch distant teen trauma (although I would not want to relive it, most of it anyhow) over more recent and symptomatic mid-life crisis. That story is “old.”