Tex (film)

Plot

A coming-of-age adventure about two brothers (Matt Dillon and Jim Metzler) struggling to make it on their own when their mother dies and their father leaves them in their Oklahoma home.

Cast

Production

The film was rated "PG" rather than the "G" then customarily earned by Walt Disney Studios productions, and was noted as an early effort by Disney to incorporate more mature subject matter into its films. Tim Hunter, who had previously co-written the 1979 film Over the Edge with Charles Haas, brought the project to Disney and asked for the opportunity to direct it himself. The film was shot entirely on location in and around Tulsa, Oklahoma and its suburbs, the setting of the S. E. Hinton novel on which it is based.

Reception

Tex received mainly positive reviews from critics, and has an 83% "fresh" rating from the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Janet Maslin of The New York Times lauded the picture 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." 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." 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."

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."