Urban Cowboy
1980
John Travolta and Debra Winger star in this cowboy version of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, in which all the action takes place at Gilley's country-western bar, a rough-and-tumble honky-tonk in the heart of Houston. Travolta plays Bud, a young country farmer who moves to the city to find work at an oil refinery and finds love with .. Read more
| Starring | John Travolta, Debra Winger, Scott Glenn, Madolyn Smith |
|---|---|
| Director | James Bridges |
| Genres | Drama |
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Urban Cowboy
John Travolta and Debra Winger star in this cowboy version of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, in which all the action takes place at Gilley's country-western bar, a rough-and-tumble honky-tonk in the heart of Houston. Travolta plays Bud, a young country farmer who moves to the city to find work at an oil refinery and finds love with Sissy (Winger), a cowgirl of easy virtue and spirit. The two country-western singles fall in love on the dance floor of Gilley's and quickly marry only to discover that their workaday life is harder to cope with than they imagined, lightened only by hard-drinking weekends of glory at Gilley's, where they're both local heroes, line-dancin' and struttin' their stuff until dawn. In between crowd-pleasing rides on the club's mechanical bull, Bud and Sissy struggle to keep their new romance alive despite the competitive attentions of a new cowboy in town, a bull-riding ex-convict (Scott Glenn) who has his eye on Sissy. James Bridges's hard-driving drama glimmers with the intensity of the super saloon, capturing the wild and rough life of the modern cowboy. The soundtrack features musical performances from such greats as Bonnie Raitt, Mickey Gilley, Boz Scaggs, Kenny Rogers, and the Charlie Daniels Band.
| Starring | John Travolta, Debra Winger, Scott Glenn, Madolyn Smith |
|---|---|
| Director | James Bridges |
| Studio | PARAMOUNT HOME ENTERTAINMENT |
| Run time | DVD: 2 hrs 9 mins |
| Certificate | |
| Genres | Drama |
| Language | DVD: English |
| Dubbed | French, German, Italian, Spanish |
| Hearing-impaired | English |
| Subtitles | DVD: Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish |
| Released | DVD: 02 Dec 2002 Production year: 1980 |
| Format | DVD |
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Critics' reviews (5)
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A steamy romance between Texas oil worker John Travolta and strong-willed Debra Winger is played out against the backdrop of honky-tonk dancing and mechanical rodeos in an uneven country-and-western soap opera. Packed with music from the likes of the Eagles, the Charlie Daniels Band and Linda Ronstadt, director James Bridges's overlong portrait of American manhood in the early eighties was an effort to re-promote Travolta as the nightclub macho man of Saturday Night Fever fame after the dismal failure of Moment by Moment. In a Tammy Wynette way, it sort of works.
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Unpleasant and uninteresting star melodrama with a plot vaguely reminiscent of the first part of An American Tragedy.
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Most helpful member's review
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1 out of 1 person found this review helpful
Hard Hat Days And Honky-Tonk Nights.
Hollywood has a fascinating way of belittling the inhabitants of everywhere between the coastal states of the USA. Here we have their take on the people of Houston: blue collar oil workers who live to ride a bucking bronco and swig on bottles of Lone Star beer, when they are not fighting one another.
Bud (John Travolta) moves to the big city (Houston) from Hicksville and gets married after going to a nightspot for local people called Gilley's. The narrative plays out with Bud nearly falling off a large tower at the oil refinery and sparring over his wife with bull-riding ex-con Wes Hightower (Scott Glen). Like most of the cast, Glen out-performs Travolta in most of their scenes. Maybe I am just hypercritical of Travolta because he has an airport in his garden and believes in Scientology, but ?Urban Cowboy? goes a long way to establishing the limitations of his acting range.
Somewhere in this movie is a kitchen-sink drama, albeit in a trailer park with rusty cars setting the scene for urban and moral decay. The problem is that the domestic relations depicted are shallowly realized. Bud?s wife Sissy (Debra Winger) complains about his physical abuse but he is redeemed when evil Wes Hightower hits her harder. You may champion this foregrounding of issues that are still pertinent today, but this movie seems unsure how far to take its critique of human behaviour.
As a Travolta vehicle I was expecting to see some dancing, and was not disappointed, although he is increasingly drawn to the mechanical bull rather than the dance-floor. The prominence of country music on the soundtrack may jar with some people, and it informs the spirit of Urban Cowboy: Apparently there only white people in Texas. For a more faithful depiction of the diversity of Texan people you would be better served with John Sayles? brilliant ?Lone Star?.
The key themes of ?Urban Cowboy? would seem to be: Oil fields are dangerous places to work, cowboys like to hit women, and urban cowboys were the chavs of 1980s Texas. I enjoyed watching this movie, and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in mechanized bulls. -
Most recent members' review
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A recommendation from Tarantino
After hearing Tarantino gave John Travolta the part of Vincent in Pulp Fiction from this performance i immediately thought I had to give this a watch. It's a hillbilly barn dance with a buckeroo for 2 1/2 hours also Bud aka Travolta cheats on his new wife and his new wife cheats on him in the first week of their marriage which is rather amusing also, but all in all a rather good movie with a cracking soundtrack, defintely worthy of a rental.
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Urban Cowboy
John Travolta and Debra Winger star in this cowboy version of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, in which all the action takes place at Gilley's country-western bar, a rough-and-tumble honky-tonk in the heart of Houston. Travolta plays Bud, a young country farmer who moves to the city to find work at an oil ...
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