State Fare: An Irreverent Guide to Texas Movies

Texas Small Books

by Don Graham

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.

96 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2008

About the author

Don Graham was the J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor of American and English Literature at The University of Texas at Austin. He was the author or editor of numerous books and articles, including Kings of Texas: The 150-Year Saga of an American Ranching Empire (2003), which won the Carr P. Collins Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters as best nonfiction book of the year, No Name on the Bullet: A Biography of Audie Murphy and Lone Star Literature: A Texas Anthology (2006). He was a past president of the Texas Institute of Letters and a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly.

Reviews

[Jane]

Well, I'm not much of a movie goer, but I liked reading about old Westerns, which my parents grew up watching, as well as some of the more recent Texas movies.