Tex is seen as one of the earliest efforts for Walt Disney Productions to put mature content in its movies and received positive reviews for its realism and its content.
Plot
Two brothers, Tex and Mason McCormick, struggle to make it on their own when their mother dies and their father leaves them in their Oklahoma home.
Fifteen-year-old Tex McCormick and his 17-year-old brother Mason are trying to make it on their own in the absence of their rodeo-riding father. Mason takes over running the household and, to make ends meet, sells Tex's beloved horse, Rowdy. Tex gets mad at Mason and heedlessly tumbles into scrape after scrape. When his Pop comes home, Tex is shocked to learn that he isn't his real father. But Tex realizes that Mason and Pop do love him, and it is time to start growing up.
The film was given a PG-rating by the Motion Picture Association rather than a G-rating traditionally earned by Walt Disney Studios productions. The film was an effort by Disney to incorporate more mature subject matter into its films, after several failures making wholesome family films. Disney's vice president in charge of production, Thomas L. Wilhite, wanted new talent. Aware of this initiative, director Tim Hunter, thought that the novel Tex by S. E. Hinton would be a good fit. Hunter discovered the novel, while doing research on his previous film Over The Edge (1979), which he co-written with his writing partner, Charlie Haas, the pair discovered the works of Hinton and realized that teenagers read her novels.[3]
Hunter brought the project to Disney and asked for the opportunity to direct it himself, but his sole directing credit was an independent film made ten years prior. Hunter said "I thought I had an honest shot to direct Tex. It was a small film, and I knew Matt Dillon was interested because I had met him on Over the Edge. I really felt it would be a long time before I found a piece of material that would present less risks for a studio if they wanted to let me direct.''[3]
The film was edgy for Disney at the time for its scenes that depicted marijuana and teen age sex, however they not conflict with the script, once the project was launched. Hunter also had to adapt to Disney's way of doing things and said "Disney's films have traditionally been made almost entirely with in-house people in all departments. On the other hand, I was more geared and I thought this material was more geared toward independent production. Eventually we put the film together with a mix of people from the outside and regular Disney people. That mixture ended up working really well, thanks largely to the producer, Tim Zinnemann.''[3]
Unlike other Disney films, it was shot entirely on location in Oklahoma, where the original setting of the novel,[3] both in the towns of Bixby and Tulsa.[4]
Initially, Hinton rejected the offer, as she had previously rejected all offers regarding film adaptation of her books. She said “When a Disney executive convinced me they weren’t going to make ‘Tex Meets the Seven Dwarfs,’ I got a little interested.”[4]
She explained that “when I turned the rights to ‘Tex’ down, the next thing I knew I had a Disney executive on my doorstep pleading their cause. After bargaining with him a while, I said ‘I have a horse that’s perfect for the horse part.’ He said, ‘He’s got the part.’ And I said, ‘You’ve got the book.’" Regarding her horse she said “my horse Toyota plays Rowdy, Tex’s horse, in the movie. I had raised him from a colt. He responded to voice commands, he was a champion jumper and he loved the limelight. He just knew all the lights, cameras and on-lookers were for him. And he loved Matt Dillon.” Hinton also explained that at the time Dillon was inexperienced in regards to riding horses, so she had to train him.[4]
Reception
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 85% of 13 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.8/10.[5]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 78 out of 100, based on 7 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[6]
Janet Maslin of The New York Times lauded Tex as "an utterly disarming, believable portrait of a small-town adolescent" that "captures Miss Hinton's novel perfectly" and that would "make a star out of Matt Dillon" and "forever alter the way moviegoers think about Walt Disney pictures." Maslin concluded her review by stating, "This is a film that accomplishes everything that it attempts, and does so expertly. On its own terms, it is a success through and through."[7]
Roger Ebert gave the film 4 stars out of 4 and noted that Hunter and Haas, as in their previous writing effort, the 1979 film Over the Edge, were "still remembering what it's like to be young, still getting the dialogue and the attitudes, the hang-ups and the dreams, exactly right."[8]David Sterritt of The Christian Science Monitor called it "probably the best picture turned out by the Disney studio since the heyday of the legendary Walt himself."[9] On the other hand, Variety wrote that "writers Charlie Haas and Tim Hunter (latter making his directing debut) seem intent on incorporating every conceivable adolescent and adult trauma into their script [from the novel by S.E. Hinton], thus leaving the film with a very overdone, contrived feeling."[10]
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