From the earliest days of film, Texas and its colorful history offered promising story lines comprised of heroes, images, lore, and legend that filmmakers could return to again and again. And so they did in films about the Alamo, the Texas Rangers, the ubiquitous cowboy and the trail drives, big ranchers, and bigger wildcatters. With the advent of the Talkies, Texas movies continued to be a staple of Hollywood backlot productions, mainly in the form of B Westerns.
In the golden age of Texas cinema—dating from the end of World War II to the assassination of JFK—the Western continued to be the predominant genre. A roll call of the most notable Texas movies would include
Red River, Giant
(probably the single most influential Texas movie of all),
The Searchers, Hud
and
The Last Picture Show
.
The reader is invited to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear as well as to consider the most recent cinematic efforts to capture one of the nation’s most mythologized places. After a brief overview of Texas in the movies, the book offers detailed commentary on the most important, the most interesting, or, in a few cases, the most wretched films about the Lone Star State.