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The 25 best Texas films on DVD.
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The Buddy Holly Story (1978)
The only thing that makes this routine biopic worth watching is Gary Busey in the oversized glasses and pompadour, singing the Crickets canon and playing his own instruments without any overdubbing. But that performance alone drives the movie, much as Jamie Foxx drove the flawed Ray (and yet Foxx lip-synched all the songs, using Ray Charles’s real voice). Only someone as manic and obsessive as Busey could have pulled this off, but pull it off he did, despite a lackluster script that follows Holly from his roller-rink gigs in Lubbock to his big break at a Buffalo radio station to The Ed Sullivan Show, hit songs, touring, a love affair ending in marriage, and a triumphant concert in Clear Lake, Iowa, featuring a medley of Holly hits followed by a freeze-frame, so as not to show the downer of the plane flight out.
Days of Heaven (1978)
The career of Waco native Terrence Malick is one of the oddest in film history. Raised on a Central Texas farm, he went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, dropped out after a quarrel with his thesis adviser, then taught philosophy at MIT, freelanced as a journalist, and wrote and directed two of the most stunning movies of the seventies—Badlands and Days of Heaven, a poetic noir thriller set in the Panhandle (actually Alberta, Canada, doubling for the Panhandle). Malick then promptly disappeared for twenty years before directing another film. Days of Heaven features Richard Gere and Brooke Adams as a pair of migrant farmhands who turn grifters to take advantage of a young farmer (Sam Shepard) who they think is dying, and in the age-old formula popularized by novelist James M. Cain, they take matters into their own hands when he doesn’t die soon enough. It’s Malick’s moody masterwork; especially memorable is the plague of grasshoppers, which is both surreal and timeless in its evocation of the Great Plains as a place that, even after settlement, can’t be wrested from God’s control.
North Dallas Forty (1979)
Of the three notable Texas football movies (Semi-Tough and Friday Night Lights are the other two), this blackest of comedies is hands down the best. Based on Dallas Cowboy Pete Gent’s roman à clef about the Tom Landry years, it’s an early indictment of the corporate takeover of sports franchises, a cliché today but not always understood in the seventies. Nick Nolte steals the movie as the creaky, used-up, battle-scarred wide receiver, with Mac Davis as his amiable quarterback friend (whose character is obviously based on Dandy Don Meredith). Against a backdrop of painkillers, alcohol, smoking in the locker room, and constant womanizing, America’s Team sallies forth each Sunday, offering its flesh in the service of mammon. The movie seems dated by the seventies hair- and clothing styles, but otherwise it still rings true.
Tender Mercies (1983)
The joke among New York actors is that Horton Foote has been writing plays for sixty years and we’re still waiting on his first plot twist. But this Oscar-winning film indicates both the truth and the inanity of the joke. From the thinnest of plots—has-been country singer beats the bottle with the help of a good woman, then starts to live again despite shards of his life that can never be repaired—Foote shows magnificently what simplicity can accomplish. Australian Bruce Beresford directed this minimalist classic, shot mostly on the scrubland around Waxahachie. The sensibility of the film is contained entirely within the performance of Robert Duvall, who tape-recorded an elderly East Texan and replayed the tapes endlessly so he could strike the perfect accent and pronunciation of the type of elegant but unlettered Texas Everyman who has all but vanished. It’s a movie about grace and spirit and mystery, and it’s religious without being preachy or maudlin. It’s that rarest of film experiences, a movie that works deeply into your soul without your ever knowing how that happened.
Terms of Endearment (1983)
Brooklyn’s own James L. Brooks was still known primarily as the creator of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi when this sprawling, estrogen-drenched weeper came out in 1983 and swept the Oscars (including two for Brooks himself). Loosely based—some thought too loosely—on a Larry McMurtry novel, the story of mother-daughter warring, vapid men, middle-aged sex, and death by cancer seemed wildly uncommercial. At the last minute, Paramount slashed costs and forced Brooks to bring the picture in for $8 million and not a penny more, otherwise the plug would be pulled. Meanwhile, Brooks was tacking on an additional character (astronaut Garrett Breedlove, eventually played by Jack Nicholson after Burt Reynolds passed on it to make Cannonball Run II) and casting screen legend Shirley MacLaine as the mother opposite rising star Debra Winger, as her daughter. The result is what would be recognized today as a Brooks-style movie: a sophisticated soap opera, loaded with one-liners, teetering right on the edge of bathos.
Blood Simple (1984)
“Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That’s the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, and down here . . . you’re on your own.” Hence the great character actor M. Emmet Walsh, as sleazy private detective Loren Visser, explaining in the prologue why the Minnesota-born Coen brothers set their debut film in Texas: It was the most lawless place they could imagine. This horror film noir introduced the world to the Coens’ quirky, mannered universe that would later be worked out in Raising Arizona, Fargo, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? among others. Dan Hedaya is the nastiest bar owner in the history of Texas roadhouses. Walsh is the definitive sociopathic private eye, a man so soiled with corruption that flies light on his face in the middle of scenes. John Getz and Frances McDormand (who would later become Mrs. Joel Coen) are mesmerizing as the sweaty lovers. Because it was done on a shoestring, this film lacks some of the more elaborate stylistic devices of the Coens’ later films, but it’s a better film without them. In Texas, we’re on our own.
Lonesome Dove (1989)
This miniseries for people who despise the miniseries is six hours of unadulterated brilliance, thanks to director Simon Wincer, another Australian who seems to “get” Texas better than some natives. Staying extremely faithful to the Larry McMurtry novel, the Bill Wittliff script combines three western genres—the wagon train movie, the cattle drive movie, and the aged-cowboys-in-the-dying-West movie—into one epic buddy film led by Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones as retired Texas Rangers trying to shake up their pallid lives with a drover’s odyssey to Montana. The Ship of Fools structure includes outstanding performances by Anjelica Huston as the woman Duvall still carries a flame for, Steve Buscemi as a buffalo-skin trader, Diane Lane as the town prostitute, Danny Glover as the scout, and Robert Urich as a morally compromised Texas Ranger fleeing a murder rap in Arkansas. All the usual obstacles get in the way of getting the cattle to the northern pastures, including flooding rivers, Indian attacks, snakes, and rustlers, but the plot always resolves back to the interplay between the wry Duvall (“If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s dawdlin’ service”) and the stern, silent Jones, who both give performances of a lifetime.
JFK (1991)
When Oliver Stone showed up in Dealey Plaza in 1990 with his top-secret script, we all safely assumed that his plan was not to reinforce the lone-gunman theory. This is what happens when you have a genius filmmaker in the service of agitprop: a highly entertaining movie—remarkable for its mixed-format editing and spot-on performances by a cast of hundreds—that has absolutely nothing to do with evidence about the Warren Commission or Lee Harvey Oswald (who is superbly and eerily channeled by Gary Oldman, by the way). Much to the horror of the law-enforcement types who were around in 1963, Stone made self-promoting New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison the hero, in the form of a more-convincing-than-usual Kevin Costner. He also used Donald Sutherland for a Deep Throat type referred to only as X. Is there anything creepier than Donald Sutherland alluding to dark secrets as he paces around the reflecting pool on the Washington Mall? Scenes like that make for bad history—and great cinema! In the final, thrilling climactic sequence of a three-hour, nine-minute film, we have to assume that Stone is making his best surmise as to what he thinks happened on November 22, 1963, yet the images are so complex that his theory eventually dissolves into a version as fuzzy as the unreleased files of the Warren Commission. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Joe Pesci did it.
Dazed and Confused (1993)
Austin-based Richard Linklater has made a whole career out of plotless behavioral comedies, in the process bringing narrative film ever closer to the reality show or, truth be told, the satirical sketch revue. After an auspicious debut with Slacker, he scored again with this American Graffiti for the nineties, set on the last day of school in 1976 at a rural Texas high school, where keg parties in the woods, pool-hall hanging, toking, hazing, and the finer points of squeezing into tight jeans are endlessly expurgated in side-splittingly funny dialogue and gags. This is one of those movies that, in satirizing the party, becomes the party, as successive generations of high school initiates rediscover it. The interesting thing about this movie, for the history of Texas film, is that although it’s set in a small Texas town, its ethos is no longer alien to the rest of the country. Even jaded Manhattan high schoolers can identify with it.
Rushmore (1998)
It’s a plot only Wes Anderson could concoct: Prep school geek Jason Schwartzman and middle-aged millionaire Bill Murray fall in love with the same first-grade teacher (Olivia Williams), and heart-wrenching complications ensue. Anderson and his co-writer, Owen Wilson, indifferent college students who met in a playwriting class at the University of Texas, set this winning, whimsical comedy in an alternate universe of excessive privilege and equally excessive neurosis. Schwartzman is especially charming as the flunking king of extracurricular activities who becomes a dynamo of never-say-quit love stratagems. Wilson and Anderson are fine writers of dialogue. Their characters speak in a kind of stilted slang that seems at once a parody of itself and emotionally true, the sort of sophisticated comic repartee we haven’t really had in film since the days of Kaufman and Hart.
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