Rodeo movies

I’m probably missing some, but there have been darn few movies about rodeo. Taking them one at a time, I’ll share what I can about the ones I’ve seen.

J. W. Coop (1971)

This film was written and directed by Cliff Robertson, who also plays the title character, a rough stock rider just released from serving nine years in prison. Coop has not only missed a big chunk of what might have been a prize-winning career in rodeo. He missed the 1960s, too. Walking confidently from prison in a fresh pair of Lee jeans and a black Stetson, he finds himself in a different America than the one he left.

He’s not long on the road before a peace-and-love hippie girl befriends him, introducing him to soy nuts and talk about the environment. (He’s already been stopped by a patrolman for the gross polluting old Hudson he’s driving). Hitching rides with truckers, he gets an ear full of right-wing politics and devotion to big-ticket consumer products.

Worse yet, rodeo itself has changed. Riders now “specialize” in their events, and the high-flyers literally fly their private planes between rodeos, to take in two and three a day. It’s become a big-money business. Coop gives it a shot anyway, never daunted by the odds, and we follow him on the circuit all over the Southwest.

The film was shot at actual small and regional rodeos, winding up at the National Finals in Oklahoma City. (This was before the move to Las Vegas.) Robertson got real rodeo cowboys to play themselves in the film, including Larry Mahan, who was then a World All-Around Rodeo Champion. Also Myrtis Dightman who was a Champion Afro-American Bull Rider (see above).

The rapid, telephoto montages of cowboys riding and being thrown, with a spirited music track, make rodeo seem all non-stop excitement. In reality, there are often long waits between rides, which are themselves hard to see well from the grandstand. You find yourself restlessly drifting toward the beer tent.

The movie is very much a product of its time, with Vietnam-era social comment that we also get in Easy Rider (1969), Zabriskie Point (1970), and M.A.S.H. (1970). Robertson is enjoyable as the easy-going, indomitable, small-town Texas rodeo cowboy going for the brass ring – all the way until the last reel, where reality finally catches up with him.

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972)

Myth, reality, and Hollywood are fairly evenly matched in this film about the James-Younger gang’s failed attempt to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, in September 1876. Cliff Robertson as Cole Younger takes center stage from the more often romanticized Jesse James, played here by Robert Duvall. As a corrective to all that romance, Duvall’s Jesse is more than a little whacked out – and cold blooded.

The film correctly shows them all as Confederate guerillas still fighting the Yankees a decade after the Civil War had ended. In the film, their reputation as heroes results from resistance to the land-hungry railroads, robbing trains and sharing the proceeds with the poor. No less a figure than Alan Pinkerton himself is enlisted to bring a stop to them. The film gives him credit for paying off the right Missouri state legislators to prevent a populist effort to grant amnesty for the boys. While speculative and oversimplified, the film shows that writer-director Philip Kaufman had looked at some history books before writing his script.

Cliff Robertson’s pipe-smoking Cole Younger is a congenial outlaw. Intelligent and reflective, he’s fascinated by new technology. A steam tractor on the streets of town stops him in his tracks with wonder – or “wonderment,” his favorite word. However, he does not see the appeal of baseball when he happens upon a game. “Our national sport is shooting,” he says, “and always will be.”

History tells us that the gang rode into Northfield wearing long coats to hide their guns – and looking like cattlemen in this community of Scandinavian immigrants. But the robbery didn’t go as planned because of a time lock on the bank’s vault. A bank employee and a bystander in the street were shot dead, and two of the gang were killed as the citizens fired on them during their escape from town. The gang then split up and only the James brothers got back to Missouri. The Youngers were caught by a posse and sent to prison.