Word: cowboy
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...meetings with the Shah, recalling the monarch's piercing eyes staring suspiciously at him, refusing to believe that no country except Panama would accept him. He dealt covertly for months with the Iranians, and they had their own name for this American who might break the impasse: the Cowboy...
There all resemblance ends. The music, which is the heart of both phenomena, serves Cowboy mainly as a banal background, not as the dramatic center -the justification really-for the characters' lives. Director James Bridges, whose last film was the smooth, tight thriller The China Syndrome, does not bring to his realization of the C. and W. scene anything like the dynamic energy, the sheer stylistic force with which John Badham drove Fever. Finally, the electric charge that Travolta jolted into that film is missing here. If he keeps on this way, he will turn...
...trouble with Urban Cowboy is that Bridges and Latham have not devised a dramatic structure faithful to the reality Latham reported with spare detachment in his article in Esquire mag azine. Their story is at once too melodramatic, too romantic and sentimental to be believed...
...place and its habitues, which was a downer. He said it offered hardhats from the nearby refineries a chance to escape from their harsh, boring, workaday reality into a fantasy that was simultaneously readymade and hand-me-down. Duding up each night in western duds that no working cowboy would ever wear, the clock punchers also slip into a set of values that are as impractical for modern urban life as a pair of chaps. For a little while each night in Gilley's, they can play at being tough loners who like their whisky rough and their women...
...anxiety to soften that bleak mes sage, Urban Cowboy tries to create a structure and an optimistic mood in a tale about people whose existences have nei ther structure nor much hope. What could have been a hard crust of contemporary life has become a soggy piece of chain-store white bread...