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The 25 best Texas films on DVD.
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Written On the Wind (1956)
Douglas Sirk’s dark soap opera about how oil wealth corrupts the soul seems made for Texas, but the original novel, by Robert Wilder, was really set among North Carolina tobacco fortunes. The relentlessly downbeat noir feel of the film is redeemed by the over-the-top Oscar-winning performance of Southern Methodist University grad Dorothy Malone as the town floozy who loves the only man who won’t marry her (Rock Hudson, in his “other” Texas role of 1956). Although the fictional Texas city is called Hadley, it is almost certainly some combination of Midland and Odessa, the only West Texas places that paired vast oil wealth with these kinds of small-town theatrics. As in many family dramas of the fifties, most of the principals are alcoholics, if not degenerates. Call it the Peyton Place of the Southwest.
Old Yeller (1957)
The movie everyone is embarrassed to love was in fact Texas novelist Fred Gipson’s second try at Hollywood. His book The Home Place, filmed in 1952 by Twentieth Century Fox as Return of the Texan, was a bomb, but Walt Disney himself saw in Old Yeller just the kind of coming-of-age story that he’d made his trademark. It’s probably the finest performance of Disney regular Tommy Kirk, as the young boy who hates the yellow cur when he shows up on the farm one day, then starts to admire the dog’s fighting ability, and ultimately becomes a man by deciding to put him down himself after the dog fights off a wolf and gets rabies in the process. Often passed over as a “guilty pleasure,” the film is extremely well directed by veteran Robert Stevenson, who became a Disney star with this movie and would go on to direct The Absent-Minded Professor, Mary Poppins, and The Love Bug.
Rio Bravo (1959)
Howard Hawks claims he made this western as an antidote to the soft, simpering liberalism of High Noon. John Wayne is the small-town Texas sheriff who knows a killer gang is coming to do away with him and spring Claude Akins out of jail. But he turns down the help of his trail-boss friend and his teamsters, assembling a motley crew of misfits instead: a town drunk (Dean Martin), a smart-mouthed young hired gun (Ricky Nelson), a crippled old deputy (Walter Brennan), and a saloon girl turned love interest (Angie Dickinson). It takes two hours to build up to the violent climax, but the time is well spent, as each character seeks redemption and courage (Martin’s pouring a shot of whiskey back into the bottle is perhaps that actor’s finest moment). Hawks seems to be saying that in Texas, strength is discovered from within and that the people who appear to be weak turn out to be stronger than you think.
State Fair (1962)
Rodgers and Hammerstein loved to set stories in exotic locales, and so Texas’s getting the Broadway musical treatment was inevitable. We fared better than Oklahoma (despite the continuing popularity of Oklahoma! among high school dramatists), as this goofy, exuberant tour of the State Fair of Texas never fails to amuse, in part because of the sheer energy of Ann-Margret. The whole film—episodic adventures of a family traveling to Dallas for mincemeat judging, car racing, and pig showing—is silly in the extreme, but the music is lively and hummable, and the only false note is plain-vanilla Pat Boone as the romantic lead. None of the actors pass muster as authentic Texans—Bobby Darin (!) plays the foil to Boone—but the closest is the great Tom Ewell as the wacky family patriarch who spikes the mincemeat.
Hud (1963)
This is the first fully authentic Texas movie—filmed on location on the bleak Panhandle Plains of Armstrong County, based on Larry McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By, and free of the usual claptrap of Texas clichés and stereotypes. Paul Newman plays the title character, a man so morally irredeemable that it’s hard in retrospect to know just what audiences liked so much about him. (The film was a huge box-office hit and won three Oscars.) Melvyn Douglas is Hud’s father, a rancher who clings sternly to the principles of a vanished age, and yet he seems less appealing than Hud, who spends his life lying, cheating, womanizing, speeding through the prairie in a Cadillac, and squandering the family birthright. The cinematography of James Wong Howe brings out the lifelessness of people tied to the land when the land is unclean and unforgiving, and the scene in which an entire herd of diseased cattle is destroyed goes on for well over a minute and is virtually dialogue free; never have gunshots been used so effectively in a western.
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Great directors have always been attracted to the story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow—see Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway or Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us—but nobody got the whole myth as completely as Arthur Penn. A near-perfect film that’s alternately comedy, action, gangster, horror, and romance, it was also one of the most controversial pictures of the decade, with critics unloading on Penn for the lavish use of blood squibs and the casting of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as leads so attractive and winning that, when their crimes turn their blackest, we feel complicit and dirty but still want them to get away. The film was shot entirely in North Texas, making use of old buildings and lonely roads to evoke Depression-era Texas and Oklahoma, and it was a sensation both stylistically (adapting the French New Wave to American films for the first time) as well as politically (these were anti-war hippies destroying everything created by an older generation).
The Wild Bunch (1969)
By the time Sam Peckinpah’s masterpiece was released, the buzz from test screenings and film festivals had already identified it as the bloodiest, most violent, and most sickening display of carnage ever made. Normally that kind of publicity would translate into a box-office hit, but the film was disturbing on so many levels that people either loved or hated it, were exhausted or mesmerized by it, and it was many years before it was recognized as perhaps the greatest western ever made. It begins in the fictitious South Texas town of San Rafael, where the men we’re supposed to identify with are terrorists who use a Main Street parade full of women and children as a human shield for their guns-blazing robbery. William Holden plays Pike Bishop, the broken-down, guilt-ridden boss of this gang of desperadoes trudging wearily toward their doom. Peckinpah created a world in which everyone is damned and the whole universe is full of killers. He then populated this landscape of burned-out houses and vicious villagers with some of the greatest western actors in the history of film. What kind of world are you living in when you see Ben Johnson naked in a wooden tub, fondling the breast of a hooker? Peckinpah would no doubt say that it’s the world we all live in.
The Last Picture Show (1971)
This iconic small-town Texas movie (filmed in author Larry McMurtry’s Archer City) was the launching pad for a lot of careers—Peter Bogdanovich, who instantly became a “class” director; Cybill Shepherd, who became a sex symbol after she appeared on the diving board performing a striptease; Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges, as best friends trying to figure out how to make a place for themselves in a dying town; and Randy Quaid, as the rich kid. But it was known among actors for the two supporting performances: Cloris Leachman, as the coach’s wife fighting her fading looks by having flings with students, and Ben Johnson, who finally got his Oscar, as Sam the Lion, the last vestige of Old Texas as it exists only in our dreams. Bogdanovich shot the dead-end story in black and white, and veteran cinematographer Robert Surtees delivered a beautiful, unsentimental portrait of rural Texas in the fifties that doesn’t have a single wasted shaft of light or shadow.
The Sugarland Express (1974)
Steven Spielberg’s first theatrical film raises the question, Why hasn’t Texas been used more often for road movies and chase scenes? An extended tragicomic chase involving a redneck mom who busts her hubbie out of a pre-release center so they can head to Sugar Land (with a kidnapped state trooper in tow) to liberate their son, Langston, from foster care, this wildly entertaining action farce was inspired by true events (in 1969 Robert and Ila Fae Dent kidnapped Texas state trooper Kenneth Crone). It’s the finest performance of Goldie Hawn, as the dense but feisty mom, and William Atherton, as the fugitive dad. (Atherton, constantly groomed for stardom in the seventies, never caught on with audiences until he played the prick EPA bureaucrat in 1984’s Ghostbusters.) This film makes better use of the back-road landscapes of Texas than any movie before or since.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
This collaboration of hippie slackers (the cast and crew) and Austin politicos (the financiers) is not just a great horror movie, Hitchcockian in its complexity, but the most successful independent horror movie in history. And not only was it directed by a graduate of the very first University of Texas film school class (Tobe Hooper), but it was guided through its early distribution by the head of the newly formed Texas Film Commission, Warren Skaaren, who would go on to become one of the top rewrite men in Hollywood. Billed as a docudrama—25 years before The Blair Witch Project used the same kind of misleading promotional materials—it was famously excoriated by the New York intelligentsia. But the movie established for all time the horror conventions of the “final girl” (in this case Marilyn Burns, perhaps the greatest screamer in film history) and the menace of illiterate people who live in the woods, essential elements in what would come to be known in the eighties as the slasher film.
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
The journey from Missouri to Texas has always been one of escape and rehabilitation, a way for flawed men to remake themselves by traveling from the last traces of Eastern law to a wild place where every man makes up his own rules. Stephen F. Austin made that trip. So did many Civil War rebels. When Missouri guerrilla fighter Clint Eastwood makes the journey, he does so as a condemned, bloodthirsty killer who feels that southwest Texas can somehow reform him—well, southwest Texas along with some savvy Indians, a prostitute, a gambler, and a pistol-packing Yankee grandmother whose relatives, just a little while before, he would have gunned down on sight. This movie has all the Eastwood themes going for it—the guilt-racked but essentially honest man, the killer who knows that every death takes part of his soul, the seeker of vengeance who’s so successful he sees the emptiness of the enterprise, and the man with a past he can’t escape—but it’s also perhaps the most subtle of all anti—Vietnam War films.
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