The Pecan Park Eagle

With the Academy Awards coming up again for us movie fans tomorrow night, it’s interesting to note today that a number of movies and one TV series have been made over the past half century that either feature Houston as a setting or use its locales as the site for some anonymous or “other place” story. Unfortunately, only “Terms of Endearment” with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson survive as first-rate films. The others, unless we give Hollywood fame walks to John Wayne for playing himself again in “Hellfighters” – and to Goldie Hawn, for doing a pretty good job in “The Sugarland Express”, are all pretty much garbage can liners and bird-cage catchers.

OK, maybe, “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” also belongs on our short list of acceptable effort, But this is Houston, not LaGrange.

Annotation: “The Sugarland Express” was made in 1974. Since that time, the good people on the City Council of that booming Houston suburb had separated their town’s name into the two words: “Sugar Land”. If anyone out there knows when and why they took this step, please leave a comment on this column to explain it, or else, e-mail me at houston.buff37@gmail.com. – Inquiring minds want to know.

Here’s the a link to the probably incomplete list of Houston-based or connected films compiled on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_set_in_Houston

Here are the VHS covers to a few of the few Houston efforts and some brief comment:

1983

They used a nice neighborhood near Rice to film this story of a middle-aged mother, her relationship with her coming of age daughter, and her flirtation with the astronaut bachelor neighbor,

1968

Who can pass on “The Duke”? I never said I didn’t like to watch John Wayne playing Red Adair, if he were really John Wayne?

1987-88

Houston Knights Cast

What a stinker of a show! – The only aspect that “HK” got right were those spot on puffy 80s doos!

1977

They should have re-made this movie after the 2005 World Series and re-cast the murder victims.

1974

One more time: Why and when did this city change its name from “Sugarland” to Sugar Land”???

1956

How could a production team that had the common sense to cast veteran character actor Edward Arnold as a villain actually boil this movie into the exploding rotten egg it came to be? I don’t know, but they did it. I say I don’t know, but that’s just my nicer side as a critic oozing out. We all know how they did it: Single scene takes on a badly written and barely acted script were a good start. Then they went to every cliché about Houston as an overgrown hick, cowboy town and quickly found the shallow water in the pool of deep thought among criminal minds. If we are going to make a movie about Houston, it needs to be about a bunch of bumpkins trying to steal billions of barrels of oil. Right?

Oh well, if you find that Wikipedia left out your favorite Houston movie, let us hear from you. And if you have written a good script about the Houston we really are, please contact Martin Scorsese, or the Cohen Brothers, at your agent’s earliest convenience. We need to upgrade our city’s movie resume’.