The Last Picture Show - Plot

Plot

In 1951, Sonny Crawford (Bottoms) and Duane Jackson (Bridges) are small-town Texas high-school seniors. They are friends and co-captains of Anarene High School's football team and share a rooming house home and a battered old pickup truck. Duane is good-looking, amusing and popular, and dates Jacy Farrow (Shepherd), the prettiest (and wealthiest) girl in town. Sonny is sensitive and caring, with a dumpy, unpleasant girlfriend, Charlene Duggs (Sharon Taggart), whom he does not love; she shares his indifference, and they decide to call it quits.

At Christmastime, Sonny stumbles into an affair with Ruth Popper (Leachman), the depressed, middle-aged wife of his high-school coach, Coach Popper (Bill Thurman). At the sad little town Christmas dance, Jacy is invited by unsavory Lester Marlow (Quaid) to a naked indoor pool party at the home of Bobby Sheen (Gary Brockette), a wealthy boy who seems to offer better prospects than Duane. Since Bobby is not interested in her as long as she is a virgin, she must get someone to have sex with her first.

Duane and Sonny go on a road trip to Mexico — which happens entirely off-screen — and return to discover that Sam the Lion (Johnson), their mentor and father-figure in town, has died of a stroke, leaving a will that bequeaths the town's movie theater to the woman who ran the concession stand, the café to its waitress, Genevieve (Brennan), and the pool hall to Sonny.

Jacy invites Duane to a motel for sex, but he is unable to perform; it takes a second attempt to alter her virginity status. Having got what she wants from Duane, she breaks up with him by phone, and he eventually joins the Army. When Bobby elopes with another girl, Jacy is alone again, and out of boredom has sex with Abilene (Gulager), her mother's lover. When Jacy hears of Sonny's affair with Ruth, she sets her sights on him and Ruth gets nudged out very quickly. Sonny gets injured with a broken bottle in a fight with Duane, who still considers Jacy "his" girl. Jacy pretends to be impressed that Sonny would fight over her and suggests they elope. On their way to their honeymoon, they are stopped by an Oklahoma state trooper — apparently Jacy left a note telling her parents all about their plan. The couple is fetched back to Anarene by her father and mother in separate automobiles. On the trip back, Jacy's mother Lois (Burstyn) admits to Sonny she was Sam the Lion's erstwhile paramour and tells him he was much better off with Ruth Popper than with Jacy.

Duane returns to town for a visit before shipping out for Korea. He and Sonny are among the meager group attending the final screening at Sam's old movie house, which is no longer a viable business. The next morning, after Sonny sees Duane off on the Trailways bus, young Billy (Sam Bottoms), another of the town's innocents protected over the years by Sam the Lion, is run over and killed as he sweeps the street. Sonny flees back to Ruth, whom he has been ignoring since Jacy stole him away months earlier. Her first reaction is to show her hurt and anger, then the two slip into a haunting, beatific calm in her familiar kitchen.