City cowboy

• “Hard hat days and honky-tonk nights” - “Days at the construction site, evenings - in the music bar”.

The main character of the film is Bufford One Davis, nicknamed Bud ( John Travolta ), a young American from the small Texas town of Sper, who went to Pasadena, located near the industrial eastern part of Houston in search of a better paid job in order to save enough money to buy his own house in Spore ^[2] . Here he stops with his uncle Bob (Barry Corbin) and Aunt Korin (Brooke Anderson) and with the help of Bob, he works as a handyman at an oil refinery.

The very first evening after his arrival, he, along with Bob and Korin, goes to the local honky-tonk- bar Gilley's , owned by country singer Mickey Gilly. Bad is quickly drawn into the local atmosphere and becomes a regular.

In the bar, he meets Sissy ( Debra Winger ), with whom he immediately begins an affair. Bud and Sissy are constantly quarreling, usually because of jealousy and different views on the place of men and women in society. Sissy is an independent girl with a strong belief in what a man can do, she too can do. Bud has more conservative ideas about gender roles, and he believes that there are things that girls can’t handle. After one of these quarrels, Sissy leaves the bar in the middle of the night and is going to hitchhike at home. Bad tries to stop her and toss her up in his car. He takes her in his arms and drags her into a car, but slides, and they both fall into a puddle. Immediately after that, he makes an offer, and she agrees. As a wedding present, Bud buys a trailer in which they will live. A young couple sets off for a rodeo and after some time a mechanical bull is installed in Gilley's. Bad immediately decides to try the new product and becomes the best rider. Sissy also wants to ride, but Bad forbids her, citing danger and claiming that this is not a woman’s business.

Soon, bar manager Steve ( James Gammon ) hires bull adjuster Wes Hightower ( Scott Glenn ), a gloomy and dangerous stranger recently released from prison who had his eyes on Sissy. Badly drunk, Bad got into a fight with Wes. The next day, he almost crashed, falling to work from the woods and miraculously caught his foot. Meanwhile, Sissy decided in the absence of her husband to ride a mechanical bull, saying that she was walking with her friend. Bud asks her to go to a bar in the evening, where she does not stand up and shows her husband what she is capable of. One of his friends jokingly said that Sissy outdid him in this matter. However, this does not cause him to be proud of his wife, but rather, it affects pride. In an attempt to hold on to the bull even better, he falls and breaks his arm, and Wes controls the bull from the remote control, and he beats Bud. Upon returning to the trailer, Bad accuses his wife of lying and cheating with Wes, after which he beats and kicks him out of the house at night.

The next evening, Bud openly flirts with a girl at the bar ( Mandolin Smith ), with whom she first dances openly and then drives off in her car. Sissy in revenge begins to do the same with Wes. The girl, whose name is Pam and she is a rich heiress, understands that Bud does all this, only to annoy his wife, but invites him to his place where they spend the night. Sissy at Wes's house hesitates to cheat and returns home.

In the morning, Bad finds Sissy at home, but does not want to put up, and she moves to Wes. Pam finds Bud's house and comes to him, at this time a bell rings from Uncle Bob with an invitation to dinner. Bud introduces Pam's uncle's family and offers her to live together.

During a visit to the bar, the owner announces the imminent competition of riders, in which the prize will be 5 thousand dollars. Bud decides to participate and, despite a sore arm, starts training under the guidance of Uncle Bob, who in the past was the winner of a real rodeo.

Sissy, hoping to make peace, returns home during the day, but does not find her husband. She carefully cleans up and leaves a note asking him to call, at that moment Pam arrives, and she leaves. Returning from work, Bud praises Pam for cleaning, and she decides to break the note. When Sissy arrives in Wes' trailer, she finds him in bed with her friend, to which Wes replies that loyalty cannot be expected from someone like him. He orders her to cook dinner, and on the refusal she hits the girl.

Bad works on a night shift for a higher fee, since he has not accumulated anything during his stay in Pasadena, and because he is training hard during the day. During one of these shifts, Uncle Bob dies due to an accident, which depresses Bud and wants to refuse to participate in the contest. His aunt asks not to refuse for the sake of the memory of Bob, who only after the arrival of his nephew began to rejoice again and talk about past feats. She gives him an uncle the buckle of a rodeo winner.

Bud wins the riders competition by beating several points of his main rival - Wes. Sissy rejoices in her husband’s victory, but Wes drags her away with him, forcing her to go to Mexico with her in her car. Bud cannot find his eyes in the crowd of Sissy, Pam notices this and tells him that it was Sissy who cleaned the house then and that he should not miss her. Bud runs into Wes's trailer, but it's too late.

Wes leaves Sissy to wait for him in the car near the bar, and he goes inside and steals the prize money. Bud asks Sissy for forgiveness and confesses his love. Seeing the traces of the assault on her face, he gets wild and enters the bar to deal with Wes. He beats Hightower, from whom all the looted bills fall out, receives gratitude from the founders of the contest and leaves with Sissy.

• Gilley's bar, in which the main action of the film was set, really exists and is still operating (albeit in a different place). It was opened in 1971 by country singer Mickey Gilly with Sherwood Cryer in Pasadena, Texas , and is the largest indoor bar in the world.
• The screenplay was adapted by Aaron Latham and James Bridges from Latham's article, “The Ballad of America's Urban Cowboy in Search of True Courage,” about Gilley's visitors nightlife for the Esquire men's magazine in September 1978.
• Some critics dubbed the film a country version of Saturday Night Fever .
• The film raised almost $ 54 million in the United States alone (more than Saturday Night Fever), plus $ 24 million in sales of video cassettes, and was John Travolta’s last major work before a series of failures in the following years of the decade.

• Urban Cowboy on the Internet Movie Database
• Urban Cowboy in the Internet Broadway Database Encyclopedia
• Urban Cowboy on Rotten Tomatoes
• Production: Urban Cowboy - Working in the Theater Seminar video at American Theater Wing.org , April 2003