Sunbelt Saturday Night

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

URBAN COWBOY Directed by James Bridges Screenplay by James Bridges and Aaron Latham

Urban Cowboy is one of those movies that are all packaging and no execution. To put the matter more harshly, the elements that must have made it commercially attractive to its producers, and surely built up the public's anticipation of it, have been distorted and attenuated to the point of extinction as the picture developed.

What everyone obviously hoped for was a film that would do for country-and-western music what Saturday Night Fever did for the disco craze--make a lively, gritty comment on it and earn big bucks too. Like Fever, Urban Cowboy is based on a magazine article (by Co-Scenarist Aaron Latham). The same star, John Travolta, has been recruited to play the lead.

There all resemblance ends. The music, which is the heart of both phenomena, serves Cowboy mainly as a banal background, not as the dramatic center --the justification really--for the characters' lives. Director James Bridges, whose last film was the smooth, tight thriller The China Syndrome, does not bring to his realization of the C. and W. scene anything like the dynamic energy, the sheer stylistic force with which John Badham drove Fever. Finally, the electric charge that Travolta jolted into that film is missing here. If he keeps on this way, he will turn out to be not the Brando of the '80s but the Troy Donahue of the decade.

The trouble with Urban Cowboy is that Bridges and Latham have not devised a dramatic structure faithful to the reality Latham reported with spare detachment in his article in Esquire mag azine. Their story is at once too melodramatic, too romantic and sentimental to be believed.

The main location is Gilley's, a sprawling honky-tonk near Houston, which features country music in an allegedly volatile atmosphere. It provides the emotional center for the lives of some of the working-class population of that booming and still settling American city. Bridges' version of the action at Gilley's is strangely soft. What should be a jostling, raunchy, sexually charged atmosphere seems cool, dull and listless.

Also missing is Latham's original point about the place and its habitues, which was a downer. He said it offered hardhats from the nearby refineries a chance to escape from their harsh, boring, workaday reality into a fantasy that was simultaneously readymade and hand-me-down. Duding up each night in western duds that no working cowboy would ever wear, the clock punchers also slip into a set of values that are as impractical for modern urban life as a pair of chaps. For a little while each night in Gilley's, they can play at being tough loners who like their whisky rough and their women silent, pliable and indifferent to indifference.

At the heart of this weird scene stands a mechanical bull that bucks and cork screws in a very good approximation of a real rodeo bull. Riding it, the urban cow boy literally risks his manhood and, of course, gains the admiring attention of the urban cowgirls. Some of them also try their luck on this contraption and this threatens the males.

In the film a newcomer named Bud (Travolta) meets both the mechanical steer and Sissy (Debra Winger, who gives the picture's best performance), his bride-to-be, soon after he arrives in town. Before long they are acting out a parody of western drama. Restless and feisty, she wants to become a bull rider too. Bud disapproves, just as he does of her flirtation with an ex-con named Wes (Scott Glenn, who looks tough enough for the part but does not act it). Wes is extraordinarily adept at staying on the bucking machine, and soon enough Sissy has moved in with him. Bud immediately takes up with Pam (Madolyn Smith), a rich man's bored daughter who likes to slum in Gilley's. The destinies of these people, all of whom are about as articulate as the mechanical beast, are finally worked out in a riding contest -- a sit-out instead of a Shootout -- between Bud and Wes and in an even more melodramatic coda. This provides added opportunities for heroics and also a neat enough resolution. It is, however, a most improbable ending.

The point of these people's lives is that they contain no resolution, no escapes other than the temporary ones offered by a nightly dose of beer drinking and western fantasy. That mechanical animal is a peculiarly apt metaphor for their way of life: it endlessly repeats itself until, like all mechanized fantasies, it must madden anyone caught in its thrall. Nor can the contraption be broken -- any more than most people can be broken of the habits, routines and saving dreams of their cramped lives.

In its anxiety to soften that bleak mes sage, Urban Cowboy tries to create a structure and an optimistic mood in a tale about people whose existences have nei ther structure nor much hope. What could have been a hard crust of contemporary life has become a soggy piece of chain-store white bread.

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