Lonesome Cowboys

I thought it was pretty funny, a little dirty, but funny. Taylor Mead's so giddy and girlish, he really makes the movie worth watching. Joe Dallesandro has a small role, but does a hilarious dance scene with Mead! The songs are good too! Who knew Eric Emerson could sing?

Andy Warhol proves he was a head of his time and a genius! For those who are unaware of the genius that is Warhol, you may not like this film because you come from a place of ignorance.

It's a great film. Cinema Verite at its best.

All the sound track pops and whistles are intentional.

hey are part of the art.

As is the loose acting and rough cuts.

This movie is mesmerising on so many levels.

It foreshadows every reality show of today. Just splendid.

Warhol convinced a bunch of rich brats to be in a grotty flick and mix it up with a seedy bunch of drug addicts and homosexuals -- pre aids days!

Brilliant

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.

Leather chaps, stetsons and tassled jackets never did it for me, so I have always been avoiding western bars, western movies and western clothes. Too alien, too rural, too American. Every time I have been to America - only twice for more than one night's stay - it has been a disappointing and depressing experience: I've encountered far more snobbery and contempt for the way I looked, dressed or talked in the USA than at any time in so-called class-ridden, uptight and elitist Britain. And this was not in some forsaken prairie in Wyoming, but in "urbane bohemian" lower Manhattan and "the centre of the gay universe", the Castro. Wearing cameo gear and sporting a shaved head was not de rigueur there during the late 1980s - too subcultural, too fetishistic, whatever, it fitted in badly in those rigid beige compartments: the clone look, the western look, the preppy look. Unlike nowadays of course, when even women are starting to complain their men look gay: a Marine haircut, square-jawed and blockheaded. But despite all this invasion of gay looks, styles and sense (more queer eye - the Ivorean, Tongan or Uzbek editions, anyone?) into the cultural mainstream, radical gender or sex politics, as in wrestling with icons and meaning, is out, and "culture wars" and marriage aspirations are in.

Liberating male iconography from its perceived sexual orientation - as in all cowboys, soldiers, oil men and sports stars are straight and you mess with that at your own risk - has been Mark Simpson's major theme in his columns, books and commentary. So when he reviewed the latest Hollywood attempt to convince middle America there is a love that dares not speak its name on the prairie, I had to sit up and take notice. I don't think I will rush to my local cinema to watch Brokeback Mountain any time soon.

I think I will stick with that absolutely wonderfully funny Andy Warhol movie Lonesome Cowboys instead: after watching that one in my youth I have to admit I tried a tassled jacket on for size.

This is practically a vignette of the lives of some 'cowboys' in Nowhere, Arizona and a 'married' couple whom they met. In the arid weather, they talk and mess around and lives on.

I personally love this films. I think Trash and Flesh has a similar aesthetic in that it borders into incoherence. Its a free form narrative. Its like visual stream of consciousness. Morrissey happens to have his camera on, with the smallest inputs to their character. He just let his actors speak with almost no direction. The structure here is not what drives the film but MOMENTS. Its is a high risk , high reward film style that I can only described as a Abercrombie commercial meets Kenneth Anger.

And it works. The film's success is heavily lifted by the charms of it actors, led by Viva, Tom Hompertz (who out sleazed everyone even the latter) and Joe. They are not the best actors but they have natural magnetism and quirky disposition. With the aid by Morrisey's janky but weirdly effective editing style, they become stars you cannot just look away.

In my eyes, it just feels so alive. Its so uniquely different but it never bores me. I do get why people might hate it BUT I did it specifically for that. It moves when it needs to.

Morrisey clearly would shift towards more classical narrative in his later films BUT I always feel that this and the other films that precedes this are his masterpieces. Its a narrative style that I personally still think about everytime. I still think that it precursors Akerman's Je Tu Il Elle and the slow cinema movement of the coming years.