Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/760821
DGA QUARTERLY 77 where to cut in, or what to take out," Ford says. A prime example comes in The Last Picture Show. Sam says good- bye to Sonny and Duane as they depart for an evening 's carouse in Mexico. "It's just a beat," notes Ford: "Right … there. And there: Sonny doesn't know it yet, but he's never going to see Sam again." The subtle interplays, as Bogdanovich cuts face-to-face, "tell us something is about to happen. When Sam dies, we can look back with Sonny and think, ' That was my last memory of him.'" An antiphonal effect comes at the end of the film, when Sonny and Duane meet in fragile truce after a blackout in their friendship•Duane having blinded Sonny in one eye during a jealous brawl over Jacy. Again, a back-and-forth of uneasy silences•mixed with guarded affection•communicates a well-timed sense, weighted by our memories of the halting scene be- fore Sam's death, that these two old friends will likely never see each other again, even if Duane survives the war in Korea. "That is so much how it is for all of us in life," says Ford: "Which, again, is a choice by the director, drawing on life." Sam the Lion's funeral is an elegant tableau of wide open sky and silhouettes. "I love that the coffin is white. Sam was a good man. This is a Western. Of course his coffin would be white!" The mourners are in black, Ford points out, with one exception: Lois. "She's in white• and crying over Sam's casket. We now realize exactly who it was that he'd taken swimming long ago." Sonny appears to have a dim inkling of this. A sequence or two later, after the brawl with Duane; after he elopes with Jacy, who professes to love him but has her own sly agenda; after the paren- tal posse heads off this doomed, afternoon-long marriage before it can be consummated, and Jacy is bundled off to finally wed her rich boy (as she'd planned all along)•Sonny and Lois have their only scene together. By force of narrative gravity this is a richly earned moment of mutual, peaceful recognition. "I get sad if I think of Sam for long," she tells him. "I loved him. He loved me, too." Close-up of Sonny: says Ford, "Now he gets it." "This scene pulls the whole film together," says Ford. "At long last we have a sustained mo- ment of truthful, emotional connection. She finally opens up and Sonny learns a bottom-line truth about Sam, on his way to becoming Sam. He's after all 'the good one,' he runs the pool hall, he takes care of everybody. When she tells him, 'I can kind of see what he saw in you, too,' it's clear she sees that. They're both satisfied." ® S H O W P E O P L E : (Opposite, top), the sunglasses worn by Lois (Ellen Burstyn) are a subtle nod to Lolita; (opposite, bottom), Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Ruth (Cloris Leachman) embark on an affair. (Above), Sam recounts his youthful indiscretions to Sonny; (below) Lois reveals her love for Sam following his death.