TEXASVILLE
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich; with Jeff Bridges, Annie Potts, Cybill Shepherd, Randy Quaid, Timothy Bottoms, Cloris Leachman, Earl Poole Ball, William McNamara, and Sharon Ullrick.
1991

Well it's 30 years later -- the picture show is long since gone from Anarene, and Sam the Lion is dead -- but our principles are still kicking. Duane Jackson is head of a turbulent family and owns an oil business that's $12 million in debt; Sonny may be mayor but he's seeing movies in the sky and increasingly can't recall where he left his car; and the high school homecoming queen, Jacy Farrow, is back from Hollywood to mourn a dead son. As morose as this all sounds, Texasville is quite funny. The follow-up to the quintessential Texas film has been criticized for turning McMurtry's characters into stereotypes and it does, a little. But considering no sequel could have lived up to The Last Picture Show, at least we can be entertained by the all-out mischief that provides these folks a much-deserved break from existential dread. Director Bogdanovich may have replaced the Royal Theater with a cheesy façade of old-time Texasville (put up in the town square for the Centennial celebration), and traded the desolate black and white landscapes of the original for dirt roads littered with Dairy Queens, but it's still all about the timeless desires that drive a simple Texas town.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Texasville

Urban Cowboy