Various Artists: The Last Picture Show OST, CD

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…