Texas Movies: Hollywood, TX
Why it’s not our Texas.
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With the possible exception of the Japanese (following the passions aroused by Pearl Harbor), no ethnic group has been more maligned by Hollywood than the American Indian; a high percentage of savage capers have occurred in films of the mythical Texas. What is remarkable is that for so many years and reels, the right of frontiersmen or settlers to push out or even to exterminate an established people and culture was so universally assumed: Manifest destiny rides again! Indians were depicted as stubborn spoilsports who refused to see the benefits of the white man’s “civilization”; for a group allegedly so savage, they made terrible fighters and could win only by sneak attacks upon small wagon trains, isolated settlers, or Army scouting patrols whom they hugely outnumbered. Even then, a single heroic John Wayne was likely to kill less-skilled redskins by the boatload; as soon as surviving Indians heard the bugles of cavalrymen riding to the rescue, they turned tail. So heartless, painted, and howling were Hollywood Indians that my most recurring nocturnal fear as a boy was of my family being scalped in their beds. I, of course, would be taken into hellish captivity. The horrid fate of women and children kidnapped into a brutal, pagan way of life became a Hollywood staple.
If you took movies at face value, you would hardly know that black Texans exist. They have been pictured largely as camp cooks, farm workers, or domestics; you learned nothing of their lives. Movie blacks from Texas apparently had no families or dreams, existing only to work or to become the target of lynch mobs. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) carefully cast one black prostitute and then just as carefully matched her with a lone black Texas Aggie when the celluloid Aggies visited the Chicken Ranch bordello. Black Like Me (1964), the film version of John Howard Griffin’s fine nonfiction book about passing as black so as to experience typical racial humiliations firsthand, was a clichéd mess with few identifying Texas marks; it seemed to be set in some ill-defined generic South.
Outside of the cowboy legend, the most-persistent Texans have been ugly Texans and obnoxious oilmen. Dr. Strangelove (1964) presented a “threefer” ugly Texan in Slim Pickens: military nut, rightist, and cowboy rolled into one; Pickens happily rides a bomb down to Russian soil, waving his hat and hoo-hawing like a rodeo cowboy.
The first oil picture I recall—Boom Town (1940)—was sympathetic to wildcatters Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy; it depicted Burkburnett in 1918. From what my father related of the Ranger boom, Boom Town faithfully reproduced the muddy streets, crowded hotels, high prices, feverish ambitions, street whores, tough wildcatters, and “oil-field trash” of boomtown strikes. I now know, however, that Gable’s argument to a jury (when charged with anti-trust sins) that wildcatters deserved credit for settling and developing the West not only begged the legal question but also was a distortion of history.
If Boom Town glorified wildcatters and oil, sixteen years later, Giant spit in oil’s eye. Texas oilmen were particularly incensed by one scene in which the then-sacred 27.5 percent oil-depletion allowance was bad-mouthed at length; the Texas congressman for whom I worked got letters suggesting some Hollywood-sponsored communist plot! Hud was also publicly attacked, by pro-oil Texas congressmen, but like Giant, was popular with the Texas masses. Hollywood has so conditioned its audience that the Texas oilman never stands a chance against the Texas cowboy in a showdown.
The most pro-oil film I have seen—Waltz Across Texas (1982)—fittingly filmed in and around Midland with oil money, made an honest try at presenting the case for risk-taking independents who must compete with the majors. But it was so obviously preachy and so slowed by an old-fashioned professional-feud-turns-into-personal-romance between a Texas wildcatter who drilled by eyeball and instinct (Terry Jastrow) and a beautiful Ivy League by-the-book geologist (Anne Archer) that it defied any but oil fanatics to hang on until the interminable end.
Perhaps what ultimately stands out, in any reckoning of Texas films, is what has not been done or has been handled once-over-lightly. Urban Cowboy (1980) effectively treated the lives of petrochemical workers removed to Houston and the efforts of such house-trailer waddies and their gals to recapture the Texas myth. The very real ills of urbanized Texas, however—homeless people, crowded slums, pollution, illegal or unlettered Latin immigrants living below poverty level, the disorientation that results from massive relocations, the shortage of money to deal with urban problems—has hardly been touched on film.
Texas since the big oil bust of the mid-eighties has been all but ignored, though there is rich material in the careless lending policies of failed financial institutions and the inattentive politicians who neglected to police them. Behind those policies, which led to a domino effect of business tumble downs, personal bankruptcies, and massive unemployment, were interlocking factors of traditional wheeler-dealer values, political cronyism, unbridled greed in the boardrooms, and that mindless expansion always urged by “a bigger and better Texas” boosterism. You’d never know the bust happened.
Likewise, Texas minorities—and that includes career women—have been ignored as to their more subtle exclusions, their changing roles, their accomplishments despite a playing field tilted against them. How rough the frontier women had it has been shown by Hollywood, yes, and even rural and small-town Texas women of a later time have been depicted; Bill Wittliff’s Raggedy Man (1981) was on the mark as to World War II social attitudes and exploitations of women; Places in the Heart (1984) gave us Sally Field as a young widowed farm woman struggling to survive during the Great Depression. But of their descendants—city women struggling for even footing in what still remains too much a man’s world—we have seen nothing. If one depended on the Hollywood view, Texas has been frozen in a time warp.
What seems passing strange, considering the importance of football in the Texas culture and even in its literature, is that only one good, honest football film has been produced: Peter Gent’s North Dallas Forty (1979), which treated the brutal hypocrisies of professional football. Some good books have come out on Texas high school football—I can think of half a dozen—but nary a good film.
What has been done well on occasion is the Texas small-town story. I suppose the classic is Larry McMurtry’s Last Picture Show (1971), which perfectly captured the fifties, high school rituals, restless hometown souls imprisoned in the wide-open spaces, the encroachment of oil on the older horse culture. What perhaps set the movie apart is that it took into account the good and the sensitive of small-town life as well as the bad and the dumb.
Tender Mercies (1983) and The Trip to Bountiful (1985) were both written by Horton Foote, for my money the best playwright and screenwriter Texas has produced when it comes to nonsensational human stories of Texas people. His Tender Mercies is an excellent film about attrition and change, as applied to both people and places.
As one who had a bit to do with The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, I should beware naming the worst Texas film of my experience. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to nominate Lovin’ Molly, the 1974 perversion of Larry McMurtry’s early novel Leaving Cheyenne. Hastily shot by director Sidney Lumet as if he were wearing track shoes, it made every error possible. In Lumet’s Texas, ranchers wore overalls and clodhopper brogans; they sowed and reaped like Delta dirt farmers; West Texas became a land of lush green growth that—in McMurtry’s words—“might be Missouri, might be Vietnam.” How bad was this film? Well, consider that during an early screening, McMurtry heard a woman behind him sobbing throughout; finally turning to see what sort of person might be moved to tears by such a mishmash film, McMurtry found—appropriately enough—that the crying lady was his own agent. God knows, in that case Hollywood had given the lady reason enough to cry.
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