1980 Week: Urban Cowboy

          Part character study, part cultural exploration, part epic romance, and part musical, Urban Cowboy is s strange movie. On some levels, it’s as serious and thoughtful as any of the other fine films that James Bridges directed. And yet on other levels, it’s very much a corporate product—one can feel the hand of producer Irving Azoff, the manager of the Eagles, in the way the film stretches out during musical sequences, the better to showcase tunes featured on the picture’s soundtrack album. Even the presence of star John Travolta in the leading role reflects the film’s identity crisis. He plays a good-ol’-boy type from Texas, even though Travolta is unquestionably a product of his real-life New Jersey upbringing. This egregious miscasting makes sense whenever the movie drifts into a dance sequence, since audiences loved seeing Travolta move in Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978). Yet about halfway through its storyline, the movie shifts from domestic drama and dance scenes to a mano-a-mano duel involving two men testing their mettle while riding a mechanical bull. Why hire a dancer if dancing’s ultimately not that important to the role?

          Anyway, the convoluted story beings when Bud Davis (Travolta) relocates from his hometown to the city of Pasadena, Texas, near Houston. Bud’s kindly uncle, Bob (Barry Corbin), takes Bud to a gigantic honky-tonk called Gilley’s, where Bud meets the spirited Sissy (Debra Winger). The two commence a tumultuous relationship that culminates in marriage, estrangement, and separation while Bud starts his career working at a refinery alongside Bob. Concurrently, Gilley’s adds the mechanical bull, which becomes a metaphor representing the stages of the Bud/Sissy relationship. His initial mastery of the bull impresses Sissy, but his subsequent obsession with the machine causes friction. Later, when Sissy decides she wants to try the bull, Bud’s objections represent his inability to respect her. And when Bud squares off against Wes (Scott Glenn), an ex-con who conquers the bull and becomes Sissy’s lover while she’s separated from Bud, the mechanical bull becomes the stage for a climactic battle. Rest assured, the story feels exactly as disjointed and episodic as the preceding synopsis makes it sound, because there’s also a subplot about Bud’s affair with a pretty heiress, Pam (Madolyn Smith).

          The funny thing is that despite its unruly narrative, Urban Cowboy is quite watchable. Bridges and cinematographer Reynaldo Villalbos give the picture a moody look by borrowing from the Alan Pakula/Gordon Willis playbook. Glenn and Winger give impassioned performances, effectively illustrating the way id rules the decision-making of people with limited formal education. And Travolta tries his damndest to make his hodgepodge characterization work, using intensity to power through any scene that he can’t energize with skill alone. Furthermore, the honky-tonk atmosphere is intoxicating, at least for a while, because watching acts ranging from the Charlie Daniels Band to Bonnie Raitt rip it up on the Gilley’s stage is as fun as watching cowboys and cowgirls brawl and dance and drink. The movie also makes effective use of two theme songs that became pop hits, Johnny Lee’s “Lookin’ for Love” and Boz Scaggs’ “Look What You’ve Done to Me.”

          Most surprising of all, however, is the abundant ugliness in Urban Cowboy. Men treat women horribly in this picture, and women respond by using their wiles to drive men insane. Some of this gets to be a bit much (notably Winger’s eroticized calisthenics while riding the mechanical bull), but there’s something believable about the way the characters play out romantic drama that’s suited for the lyrics of a great country song.

Urban Cowboy: FUNKY

The Baby Maker (1970)

          James Bridges, the eclectic but sensitive filmmaker whose cinematic career peaked with The China Syndrome (1979), marked his directorial debut with this intimate drama about a hippie chick who becomes a surrogate mother for an affluent but childless couple. Even within the confines of its small story, the picture is a bit too ambitious for its own good, trying to situate the lead character within the zeitgeist of the ’60s/’70s counterculture. Nonetheless, nuanced performances and sincere curiosity about the emotional lives of the characters make the movie worthwhile. Plus, since a huge aspect of the counterculture involved people discarding old inhibitions about sexuality, the notion of a freespirited young woman exploring various dimensions of her reproductive identity represents a fresh approach to familiar subject matter. More specifically, The Baby Maker exists a world away from the myriad ’60s/’70s pictures about May-December romances between hippies and straights (Breezy, Petulia, etc.); this picture is tender instead of tawdry.

          Barbara Hershey stars as Tish, an upbeat flower-child type who lives with her stoner boyfriend, Tad (Scott Glenn). He makes handcrafted leather goods, but he’s prone to losing time on drugs and parties. Through a broker, Tish arranges to carry a child for Jay (Sam Groom) and Suzanne (Collin Wilcox-Horne). They’re a loving couple, but Suzanne is infertile. Some of the best scenes in The Baby Maker are the early ones, which have the feel of a procedural: the first meeting and initial negotiation, the dinnertime conversation during which Jay and Suzanne learn about Tish’s background, the laying out of concerns and expectations. (It’s worth noting that Bridges handles the actual conception scene with restraint.) Adding a layer of unspoken tension to these early scenes is the possibility of Tish falling in love with the unborn child and reneging on her promises. Another effective trope involves Tish’s steadily deteriorating home life with Tad. At first, he accepts her choice and even indulges himself with some of the money that she’s paid in advance. But later, jealousy and old-fashioned notions of gender roles make Tad bitter—a believable repercussion for men in Tad’s unique situation.

          Not everything works in the picture, with a jarring protest sequence and a too-long psychedelic lightshow scene contributing to the movie’s sluggish pacing. However, the pluses easily outweigh the minuses. Hershey has many luminous moments, conveying a sense of innocence tinged with sadness, and the supporting cast is excellent. (Glenn reteamed with Bridges years later to play a villain in the director’s 1980 movie Urban Cowboy.) More than anything, The Baby Maker strikes an effective balance between capturing the sociopolitical vibe of a historical moment and telling a specific story about individuals.

The Baby Maker: GROOVY

Angels Hard as They Come (1971)

          Long before he made humanistic dramas and thrillers for major studios, Jonathan Demme paid his dues by generating exploitation films for Roger Corman’s B-movie factory. Demme’s tenure at New World Pictures began with this biker flick, which has some admirable moments but doesn’t make a lasting impression. Scott Glenn, at his most stoic and sullen, stars as Long John, leader of a small gang of drug-dealing cyclists. After escaping cops during an interrupted transaction, Long John and his pals encounter members of another biker gang at a gas station. The second gang has taken up residence in an Old West ghost town, where they’re partying with a group of hippies, so Long John and his buddies are invited to join the fun. Soon after the various factions converge, Long John gets into a heavy rap session with hippie chick Astrid (Gilda Texter). She pushes him to explain why bikers are so violent, and he replies that anyone who flouts society’s rules invites conflict. “Yeah, I dig your problem,” Astrid says, “but I don’t think your solution is right.” “Shit,” Long John says, “What works is what’s right.” In fleeting moments like this one, Angels Hard as They Come almost becomes a thoughtful referendum on the counterculture.

          Alas, Demme (who cowrote and produced the picture) and Joe Viola (who cowrote and directed) can’t linger too long on philosophy. This being a biker flick, the main items on the menu are debauchery and violence. Accordingly, Demme and Viola contrive an iffy plot revolving around the rape and murder of a hippie chick. Eventually, Long John is accused of the killing and subjected to kangaroo-court justice at the hands of General (Charles Dierkop), the demented leader of the opposing biker gang. None of this quite works, since it’s never clear why the bikers are so upset a stranger was killed, or what the General hopes to achieve by incriminating Long John. Plus, the story simply runs out of gas at some point, looping through repetitive scenes of boozing and brawling. That said, Angels Hard as They Come delivers most of the favorite tropes associated with its genre—crazies referring to each other by colorful nicknames (“Axe,” “Juicer,” “Lucifer,” etc.), nasty fight scenes involving broken bottles and other found-object weapons, zonked-out chicks dancing topless on bars, and so on. A young Gary Busey is the mix, too, though he’s rather improbably cast as a pacifist hippie instead of a scary biker.

Angels Hard as They Come: FUNKY

Fighting Mad (1976)

          Filmmaker Jonathan Demme completed his productive tenure in Roger Corman’s B-movie operation with this uneven but watchable action picture about a principled redneck standing up to greedy developers. There’s nothing even slightly original about the plot, but as writer and director, Demme fills the picture with just enough idiosyncratic flourishes to keep things interesting during the beginning and middle of the story. Then, during the climax, Demme unleashes an exciting nighttime showdown replete with not only gunplay but also, for novelty’s sake, death by bow and arrow. Peter Fonda (of course) stars as Tom Hunter, a young man who returns to his family’s home in Arkansas only to discover that every private landowner in the immediate vicinity is under pressure from operatives of real-estate mogul Pierce Crabtree (Philip Carey). Crabtree wants to raze low-income homes to make way for a shopping mall, and he won’t take no for an answer, so his goons use lethal force to frighten citizens into selling. Among those who fall victim to Crabtree’s thugs are Tom’s brother, Charlie (Scott Glenn), and his wife. This pushes Tom into ass-kicking mode. Meanwhile, Tom manages his relationships with his young son, Dylan (Gina Franco); his on-again/off-again girlfriend, Lorene (Lynn Lowry); and his salt-of-the-earth father, Jeff (John Doucette), whose property is in Crabtree’s crosshairs.

          The best parts of Fighting Mad feature Tom sticking it to the man, because the tension between Fonda’s laconic persona and his character’s righteous passion is consistently interesting. The star is fun to watch whether he’s commandeering a tractor, planting explosives at a Crabtree work site, or shooting arrows into henchmen. Whenever the action hits a lull, however, so does the movie. Demme’s storytelling is choppy—every time it seems Fighting Mad has kicked into gear, Fonda’s character stops for a beer or a tumble with his girlfriend. Demme also lingers on pointless bits like musical performances, continuing his endearing/irritating career-long habit of losing the forest for the trees. Production values in Fighting Mad are fairly strong for a Corman production, since Demme focuses on real locations with loads of texture, and the performances get the job done; Doucette and Glenn in particular lend humanity to their small roles. However, the music score, by folk musician and frequent Fonda collaborator Bruce Langhorne, is all over the place—the old-timey bits with lots of banjo suit the milieu, while the electronic suspense stings hit their target but seem pulled from another movie.

Fighting Mad: FUNKY

Gargoyles (1972)

          Made-for-TV horror movies got awfully strange in the early ’70s, sometimes diving deeper down the supernatural-cinema rabbit hole than their big-screen counterparts. Gargoyles is a prime example. Depicting exactly what its title suggests, the picture features an anthropologist running afoul of a tribe of real-life gargoyles, flying human/lizard hybrids who look as if they just emerged from the stonework of old buildings. Yet while the concept promises scares and spectacle, the makers of Gargoyles employ a moronic storyline that not only gets mired in trite monster-movie gimmicks but also contradicts itself. For most of the picture, it seems the gargoyles are misunderstood monsters trying to steer clear of human interference, but then the lead critter (Bernie Casey) announces a master plan to hatch thousands of baby monsters and take over the world. This indecision about how to present the titular creatures is unfortunately but one of Gargoyles’ problems.

          Things get off to a bland start when macho scientist/author Dr. Mercer Boley (Cornel Wilde) recruits his grown daughter, Diana (Jennifer Salt), for an expedition through the American southwest. They travel to a novelty shop whose proprietor claims to have a gargoyle skeleton, and then the novelty shop is violently attacked by unseen creatures. After the requisite scenes of our heroes reporting the incident to disbelieving authorities, who blame the attack on a trio of dirt bikers led by James (Scott Glenn), Mercer and Diana get assaulted once more. This time, however, they see their assailants—who are played by stunt men running around in head-to-toe lizard suits complete with horns, devilish faces, and giant wings. And so it goes from there. As the first onscreen monsters created by legendary special-effects guy Stan Winston, the gargoyles have some geek-cinema historical importance, but they’re also thoroughly ridiculous, especially when Casey starts delivering dialogue from behind his goofy monster mask. It must have been trippy to stumble across this thing in 1972, but time has diminished whatever charm Gargoyles might once have possessed.

Gargoyles: LAME

Apocalypse Now (1979)

          One of the definitive cinematic statements of the ’70s, Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War drama is indulgent, pretentious, and undisciplined, but the film’s narrative excesses perfectly match its theme of men driven mad by an insane world. Famously adapted from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness by gonzo screenwriter John Milius, then rewritten by Coppola and sprinkled with evocative narration by Michael Herr, the harrowing movie follows the journey of military assassin Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), sent by his U.S. Army masters to take out a rogue Green Beret, Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has established an ultraviolent fiefdom in Cambodia. The irony of the Army condemning one of its own killing machines for being too bloodthirsty is just part of the film’s crazy-quilt statement about the obscenity of war in general and that of the Vietnam conflict in particular; even though the narrative wanders into many strange places along the way, it always returns to the maddening central idea that murder is acceptable as long as it’s done according to plan.
          Moving away from the classicism of his early-’70s triumphs and entering a vibrant period of expressionist experimentation, Coppola oversees a string of bold and inspired sequences, many of which have become iconic. The opening salvo, with hallucinatory intercutting of jungle imagery and a sweaty Saigon hotel room while the Doors’ menacing song “The End” plays on the soundtrack, goes beyond masterful and enters the realm of tweaked genius. And how many scenes in other movies match the audacity of the helicopter attack scored with Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries”? The film’s dialogue is just as vivid, from “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” to “The horror, the horror.” Sheen is extraordinary, channeling his intensity and remarkable speaking voice into a performance of perverse majesty, while supporting players Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper match him with crystalline personifications of two different brands of lunacy. Famously overpaid and uncooperative costar Brando gives Coppola fragments of brilliance that the director stitches into something weirdly affecting, and the fact that Brando’s performance works is a testament to the heroic efforts of a team of editors including longtime Coppola collaborator Walter Murch.
          Speaking of behind-the-camera participants, it would be criminal not to sing the praises of Vittorio Storaro’s luminous photography, which somehow captures not only the heat but also the suffocating humidity of the jungle. Actors Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Albert Hall, and G.D. Spradlin all contribute immeasurably as well, and Harrison Ford pops up for a bit part. After consuming the powerful 153-minute original version, consider exploring the fascinating (and even more indulgent) 202-minute extended cut titled Apocalypse Now Redux, and by all means seek out Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, possibly the most illuminating behind-the-scenes documentary ever made.

Apocalypse Now: OUTTA SIGHT