In 1978, Esquire magazine published an article by Aaron Latham entitled The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy: America's Search for True Grit, the true story of a young man who spent his days working at an oil refinery in Houston and his nights hanging out and riding a mechanical bull at Gilley's, the biggest honky-tonk in the world. This "urban cowboy" met his wife at Gilley's, had their wedding reception there, fought over whether or not she should ride the mechanical bull, and after they broke up he met his next girlfriend at Gilley's as well. Director James Bridges was so enamored with this 17 page article, he teamed up with Latham to write a screenplay based on it and brought the world Urban Cowboy. Many of the names were changed along the way, and things don't turn out the same way in the film as they did in real life, but if you go back and look at that article you can see most of Urban Cowboy right there on the page.
The film stars John Travolta as Bud Davis, a young man who leaves his tiny hometown of Spur, Texas to get a job at an oil refinery in Houston, where he'll be working alongside his Uncle Bob (Barry Corbin). His first night in Houston, Uncle Bob and Aunt Corene (Brooke Alderson) take Bud to Gilley's, which gives people the opportunity to enjoy alcohol, dancing, and live country music on "three and a half acres of concrete prairie". This instantly becomes Bud's favorite place, and it doesn't hurt that he ends the night by having a threesome with a pair of "sexy sisters", played by Jerry Hall and her sister Cyndy Hall. Bud continues going to Gilley's, befriending a fellow refinery worker named Marshall (Cooper Huckabee of The Funhouse) and meeting a guy named Steve Strange (James Gammon), which is a name that was not changed from the source article.
Before long, he's dancing with a cowgirl named Sissy (Debra Winger). So begins a whirlwind romance - Bud and Sissy get married very soon after their first encounter. And then things get complicated. Before you know it, Bud is dating a rich girl named Pam (Madolyn Smith) and Sissy is fooling around with, and being abused by, Wes Hightower (Scott Glenn), a bull-riding convict who has just been released from prison after serving a sentence for robbing a bank.
Sissy meets Wes because he controls the mechanical bull that was installed at Gilley's soon after she and Bud got together. Like the former couple in the article, Bud and Sissy argue over whether or not Sissy should ride the bull. She wants to, he doesn't think it's proper. But she gets jealous watching him having so much fun riding in the bull, so she decides to ride it anyway. That doesn't turn out well for them. But Wes lets her ride the bull.
Now, if I were one of the real people whose life story inspired the cinematic story of Bud and Sissy, I wouldn't want to admit to it, because these two are not portrayed as being very bright characters. Most of the time they come off as being downright dumb, and they are heavily flawed even beyond that. But even with these shortcomings, their story is eminently watchable. There is just something about Urban Cowboy that makes this movie absolutely captivating to me. I love watching it and getting wrapped up in its atmosphere, and the fact that it is packed with some really catchy late '70s country music is definitely a bonus.
While music from the likes of Johnny Lee, The Charlie Daniels Band, JD Souther, Linda Ronstadt, Boz Scaggs, Bonnie Raitt, Kenny Rogers, Eagles, Anne Murray, Bob Seger, Joe Walsh, Jimmy Buffett, Mack Vickery, and of course Mickey Gilley plays, we watching the rise and fall and potential rekindling of Bud and Sissy's relationship, and it all builds up to a mechanical bull-riding contest that comes down to Bud vs. Wes.
Urban Cowboy is a movie I first caught on one of the premium movie channels in the mid-1990s, and much like Bud and Sissy instantly fall for each other, I fell in love with this movie on first viewing. I would watch it any time it happened to air, which seemed to be quite frequently around that time, and since we had satellite TV I was able to watch both the Eastern time zone and Pacific time zone versions of channels. So I would watch Urban Cowboy when it aired on the Eastern version of the channel, wait 45 minutes, and dive right into watching the Pacific broadcast of the movie.
That's right, Urban Cowboy may have been based on an article that was just 17 pages, but the movie is 135 minutes long. Normally I would think that was excessive for something like this, but 135 minutes doesn't seem excessive to me when it comes to his specific movie, because I'll take as much Urban Cowboy as I can get. I don't spend days watching the movie twice in a row anymore, but whenever I do watch it I always get wrapped up in it all over again and have fun listening to the music and watching these dimwitted characters that are excellently played by Travolta and Winger.
I don't like going to bars, honky-tonks, or anything of the sort, but I enjoy Urban Cowboy enough that I would have gone to Gilley's just to visit the filming location. Unfortunately, the Gilley's featured in this movie had closed by the end of the '80s and burned down soon after.
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