cult film freak: JOHN TRAVOLTA RIDES 'URBAN COWBOY' VERSES SCOTT GLENN

John Travolta in Urban Cowboy YEAR: 1980

Another soundtrack film with John Travolta after disco and 1950's rock paid off, James Bridges' URBAN COWBOY is a character-driven, intentionally plotless melodrama with a ripped-muscular Scott Glenn as an ex-con who winds up Travolta’s rival: adding Pseudo-Sport to the genre involving a mechanical bull, bumping and grinding inside an immense Texas barroom where the title's first half derives throughout a beer-soaked, Country Music blaring, wooden-neon interior...

Before the opening credits, Travolta’s a small town guy with a nice suburban family, a cowboy hat, an unfitting beard: And thanks to his uncle, after landing a Houston-set tough guy oil rig gig and bedding down two models at the hot-spot, Gilley's, he’s quickly married to pretty barfly Debra Winger who's really more a bickering best friend, providing the two affable leads an old fashion chemistry that’s bound to fall apart at the seams...

Scott Glenn knocks a trailer's door in Urban Cowboy Rating: ***1/2

And things really begin as their relationship sours: When she learns from Glenn how to ride the bull, and he (Travolta) finds selfish solace with poor little rich girl, Madelyn Smith (she's actually a much better fit), the movie finds its groove...

With non-stop tunes readymade to both backup the story and serve a roman chorus to the inevitable, predictable conclusion, this is a country music soap opera celebrating city/country life with greasy fingers: Only Travolta doesn't exactly look like a bonafide Texan (Dennis Quaid was originally considered); and his sexist, wife-slapping jerk seems contrived to fit the usual good-old-boy cliché. But he puts his whole shallow heart into the matter, which is exactly enough here.