Honkytonk Man (1982)

User Rating:

6.3/10   

Director:

Clint Eastwood

Writers:

Clancy Carlile (novel)
Clancy Carlile (screenplay)

Release Date:

15 December 1982 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy | Drama | Music

Tagline:

The boy is on his way to becoming a man. The man is on his way to becoming a legend.

Plot:

As the film opens on an Oklahoma farm during the depression, two simultaneous visitors literally hit...

Plot Keywords:

Tuberculosis | Coughing | Bus | Doctor | Whiskey

Awards:

1 nomination

Cast

Clint Eastwood	...	Red Stovall
Kyle Eastwood	...	Whit
John McIntire	...	Grandpa
Alexa Kenin	...	Marlene
Verna Bloom	...	Emmy
Matt Clark	...	Virgil
Barry Corbin	...	Arnspringer
Jerry Hardin	...	Snuffy
Tim Thomerson	...	Highway Patrolman
Macon McCalman	...	Dr. Hines
Joe Regalbuto	...	Henry Axle
Gary Grubbs	...	Jim Bob
Rebecca Clemons	...	Belle
Johnny Gimble	...	Bob Wills
Linda Hopkins	...	Blues Singer

Runtime:

122 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby

Certification:

Finland:K-8 | Australia:PG (video rating) | Spain:T | Argentina:13 | Canada:14A (Ontario) | South Korea:12 | Australia:M | Norway:12 | UK:15 | USA:PG | West Germany:12 | Singapore:PG

Filming Locations:

Birds Landing, California, USA

Company:

Malpaso Company, The

Trivia:

The script originally called for Kyle Eastwood's character to get high from smoking marijuana, but Clint Eastwood, who is very anti-drug, refused, even with Kyle even using a prop cigarette. Eastwood finally relented to his son's character getting high from a contact buzz.

Quotes:

Red Stovall: Mary was right to go back to her husband. What the hell did I have to offer a kid? Just honky-tonks and flop-houses. That's the life of a country singer, Hoss. Sound good to you?
Whit: It don't sound too hot when you put it like that, but it sure beats picking cotton and living in a sharecropper's shack.

Movie Connections:

Featured in "The Blues" (2003)

Soundtrack:

When I Sing About You

Verismo!

The critics didn't like this film, but I beg to differ. Perhaps I'm naive and gullible, but to me it rings true in its local color and the coping of poor people in the Depression amidst the aspirations of young and old alike.

My father, a published author in a small way, once mused to me that if he were to write a novel, it would be about someone trying to come to terms with his own mediocrity. Such is the theme of this movie, and hardly typical a consideration it is in a time when the media bombard us coast to coast, for our adulation, with the glamorous images of a mere handful of individuals who happen to have landed vast fame and fortune. What does any of this have to do with most of us? On the one hand, we live day to day. On the other, a recurring dream whispers "maybe..."

Knowing that he is living on borrowed time, Red, humble and hand-to-mouth but respected more than he knows by a few somewhat more successful colleagues (and an unusually fallible and vulnerable character for Eastwood, which he plays well) is granted, in extremis, an apparent opportunity to reach for the stars. More down-to-earth, he is also fortuitously blessed/burdened with not just one but two young proteges: first his nephew, then also a girl at loose ends. Perhaps neither is particularly talented; nevertheless both have a claim on his attention which he reluctantly fulfills in his own unassuming way, while making no exalted pretenses as to their prospects. When on his deathbed he can do no more for them, he commends them to each other. "You take care of her, now" he rasps to Whit. "She's okay. Help her with her singing." While they may never reach celebrity, the texture of life can sustain them if they face it together.

As, dying and perhaps delirious, he gazes up into Marlene's face, he sees the "raw-boned Okie woman" he had loved for several years as a mistress, and whom he later had regretted leaving. She had borne a girl whom he had never met. Marlene was a fatherless waif of about the right age. Did he recognize at the last moment his long-lost daughter? It is a question which the film leaves hanging in the air. Does genealogy matter? In practical terms, that is what she became almost too late.

For my money, it's a raw-boned, American Okie "La Boheme."