Lonesome Cowboys (1968)

User Rating:

5.6/10   

Director:

Andy Warhol

Writer:

Paul Morrissey (writer)

Release Date:

17 May 1974 (West Germany)

Genre:

Western

Plot:

Five lonesome cowboys get all hot & bothered at home en the range after confronting Ramona Alvarez and her nurse.

Plot Keywords:

Cowboy | Sheriff | Suicide Pact | Rape | Home On The Range

Cast

Julian Burrough	...	Brother
Joe Dallesandro	...	Little Joe
Eric Emerson	...	Eric
Frankie Francine
Tom Hompertz	...	Julian
Taylor Mead	...	Nurse
Allen Midgette
Viva	...	Ramona D'Alvarez
Louis Waldon	...	Mickey

Also Known As:

Andy Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys
Horse
Ramona and Julian (USA) (alternative title)

Runtime:

109 min | France:95 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

France:-12 | Norway:18 | USA:X | UK:18

Filming Locations:

Arizona, USA

Company:

Andy Warhol Films

Trivia:

The film was originally conceived as a western version of William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," to be called "Ramona and Julian". In the fall of 1967, while on a lecture tour in Tucson with Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey had mentioned to the press that their next film would be a western filmed on location in Tucson and would be called "The Unwanted Cowboy."

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Warhol's Cinema 1963-1968: Mirror for the Sixties (1989) (TV)

The most unconventional western ever made.

An outrageously funny spoof on the Western film, Lonesome Cowboys is a synthesis of Warhol's sorties into the New York underworld, but much more humorous and with closer adherence to a nonsensical plot. The film was photographed in Arizona, in a ghost town where (somehow) two of Warhol's superstars are discovered. The incongruous montebanks happen to be Viva, as chic and sarcastic as she was in Bike Boy and resembling a displaced model for Hound and Horn, and Taylor Mead. Mr. Mead is the zany of our time, and when five mysterious cowhands saunter into town, the hilarity commences. The cowboys are an odd assortment, a bit androgynous and city-wise, and they interact with the two in varying attitudes of lust and indifference in set-pieces of inspired film comedy. Often, Lonesome Cowboys reaches the ultimate in surrealist imagery: cowboy-deputy Mead performing the Lupe Velez Twist, his own choreographic distortion; or one of the cowboys performing ballet exercises at the hitching post. Viva's langorous seduction of the most innocent-looking among the cowboys is actually a satirical comment on sexual artifice. This erotic, sagebrush comedy has its cruel edge, and one feels that Andy Warhol attempts to make some statement about the nature of brotherly love and the impossibility of virtue rewarded in these times of fallen idols. Select just about any Warhol film from the mid-sixties and you'll find a scandal tucked away. Lonesome Cowboys's most notable run-in with the law was in Atlanta where it was seized after replacing Gone with the Wind in a mall theater. Lonesome Cowboys is filled with wildly comic setpieces, including a cowboy practising ballet moves at the hitching post and a peevish lecture on the misuse of mascara. These desperadoes are real trailblazers when it comes to libidinous appetites and it is here that Lonesome Cowboys distinguishes itself from the herd. Unflinchingly, Warhol shoots down the myth of the de-sexed cowhand.