Yet ''Urban Cowboy'' has the energy and narrative simplicity that once made low-budget movies about telephone linemen, tuna fishermen and long-distance truckers so satisfying. Travolta, as a Texas farmer named Bud who comes to Houston to work in a refinery and to learn about life at Gilley's, softens the film's B-picture edges. ''Urban Cowboy'' is far too elaborate and too self-aware - and sometimes too overstuffed with nonessential details - ever to be mistaken for a B-picture. ''Urban Cowboy,'' which opens today at Loews State 1 and other theaters, uses the manners, methods and even some of the dialogue of the old Hollywood B-movie to create a startlingly accurate picture of a contemporary America whose esthetics come wrapped in clear plastic and are, of course, immediately disposable. There is also dancing in ''Urban Cowboy,'' mostly the Texas two-step (which looks a lot like the java danced in the dance halls of Paris) and there is a lot of good country-and-western music, but these things are subsidiary to the rest of the film. Travolta's disco dancing and the movie's driving, witty Bee Gees score than by anything else. ''Saturday Night Fever'' was powered more by Mr. Like ''Saturday Night Fever,'' the new movie also focuses on the particular hang-out of people with names like Bud and Sissy and Wes and Pam (surnames are never very important in such movies), though instead of being a Brooklyn disco it's now a quite extraordinary, real-life Houston roadhouse known as Gilley's, a 3 1/2-acre honkytonk where (this being Texas) occupancy has to exceed 7,000 people before the situation is considered both dangerous and illegal.Ĭomparisons between the two films should end at that, however, if audiences are not to be disappointed. Travolta into the pop icon of the dying 1970's and was also about the class Evelyn Waugh called the Lower Orders, and about what the Lower Orders do when they hang out. The film, which stars John Travolta in a fine recovery from his disastrous liaison with Lily Tomlin in ''Moment by Moment,'' will inevitably be compared with ''Saturday Night Fever,'' which transformed Mr. Here is a tough-talking, softhearted romantic melodrama that sees a world that is far more bleak than the movie, or the characters in it, ever have time to acknowledge. UNTIL something better comes along, James Bridges's ''Urban Cowboy'' is the most entertaining, most perceptive commercial American movie of the year to date.
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