Day 30 Silverado (1985)

This selection is maybe the film I have seen the most from the list of movies from this project. It is an attempt to make the western genre more appealing to an audience with Indiana Jones as their action touchstone. It comes from Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote Raiders and made “Body Heat” which I covered a couple of weeks ago. So it may be a little different than a traditional western, but it still has most of the tropes of the genre. There are saloon fights, ranchers being run off by bigger fish, shootouts in the street, there is a jail break and an encounter with robbers. It all the stuff that these sorts of films are remembered for.

What makes this film so much fun, besides the cast we will talk about in a minute, is the razor sharp dialogue and clever moments in the story.  Most of the wise guy lines come from Kevin Kline’s mouth. His character Paden is a drifter who has been robbed and left abandoned in the desert.  He is rescued by Emmett played by Scott Glenn in another Cowboy role, quite different from his turn in “Urban Cowboy “. Here he is one of the good guys.  Along the way they pick up Jake, Emmett’s brother, played by Kevin Costner in a star making turn. Costner’ s introduction is all nervous energy and bravado.  He’s like a kid with ADD in a jail cell.  They are shortly joined by Danny Glover’s Mal, who is ill treated as a black man in the West. Mal has a line of dialogue we have quoted in this house at least weekly since 1985, “That ain’t right,  I’ve had enough  of what ain’t right.”

What follows are a series of adventures and confrontations that come fast and furious.  Each new wrinkle is usually accompanied by a new actor who brings something different to the story.  John Cleese joins Kleine a couple of years before they team on “A Fish Called Wanda”, he is a misplaced Englishmen who is a sheriff. Diminutive Linda Hunt is an unlikely bar keeper, Jeff Goldblum is a gambler, and Brian Denehey is the crooked lawman who links everyone together.  Richard Jenkins has a blink and you’ll miss him part, it was his first. 

The plot isn’t really important,  let’s just say, the four new friends,  collectively face off against the bad guys. Some of our heroes are bushwacked,  there are quirky background stories and motivations, the bad guys get revealed, and the mayhem gets upped. There are fires and jailbreak, some double crosses, a stampede and gunfight in the street.

One other feature that makes this film terrific is the score. There is a wonderful theme and it is used in just the right places. The incidental music is also solid. The score has a sense of Americana to it that ,makes it feel authentically western despite contemporary technique.  This is Amanda’s second favorite film,  “Paden” is the name she gave her dog.

Day 23 Urban Cowboy (1980)

John Travolta shot to stardom in “Saturday Night Fever”. He followed that up by starring in “Grease”, which was a huge it. Here he goes for the trifecta, and lo and behold he hits again. This film launched another craze of Country dancing, honkey tonks, and domestic abuse as romance. Yea, as solid as the movie is, there are aspects to it that are highly objectionable in today’s climate, and really were problematic in 1980 as well.

Bud, Travolta’s character, is a country boy who comes to the big city to work in the oil fields. Now, it is a pretty good debut in the new surroundings when you end up in a ménage à trois on your first night. Bud wakes up hung over, embarrassed and a bit out of his depth. A couple of nights later, he meets Sissy, a headstrong young woman played by Debra Winger. After slapping each other around for a couple of hours, they decide to get married. The two actors do have some nice chemistry together, but she should have paid attention to his chauvinistic attitude, and he needed to be aware of her shallow attraction to cowboys.

Inevitably, they clash and try to hurt each other by finding other partners and showing off in the Gilley’s Nightclub, for which this movie serves as a two hour commercial. The romantic rivals are Madolyn Smith and Scott Glenn. I think this was the first time I took notice of Glenn who would become a favorite of mine over the next few years. Barry Corbin who plays Bush’s uncle is a familiar face in his first movie, I think I have confused him with character actor Trey Wilson on more than one occasion.

Both of the substitute romantic interests have the same problems as the relationship between Bud and Sissy. Wes, the Scott Glenn character, is an abusive misogynist and Pam, Smith’s character is narcissistic. It takes an act of God to get the two leads to see how much they screwed up. I’m not sure why we would care about these two irritating people but in the long run, we hope things work out.

The film has a song score that provides almost continuous background for every scene. Just as with the prior two films, the soundtrack album was a big seller and was loaded with singles that filled the airwaves. There were plenty of original songs but also, a whole bunch of previous hits were featured. “The Devil went Down to Georgia ” gets a featured spot to set up the climax of the film. Apparently a number of other nightclubs added the mechanical bull as a feature, another reminder of how movies reflect and influence the culture.

The movie opened two months before I got married and a week before my future bride served as best man and maid of honor to our friends Art and Kathy. After seeing this , it’s a wonder any of us went ahead and got Married, but maybe it was the Johnny Lee song, “Looking for Love”.