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Mickey (Louis Waldon) and his four "brothers" (Eric Emerson, Joe Dallesandro, Julian Burrough, Allen Midgette) ride into a two-horse town where there's really nothing do see but a whorehouse on the outskirts run by Ramona (Viva) and her sidekick Nurse (Taylor Mead) - which is really of little interest for Mickey's rather gay gang. Enter handsome drifter Julian (Tom Hompertz), who pretty much everybody falls in love with, most of all Mickey, which disrupts the balance of the gang. When Ramona spots Mickey and company camping on her land, she tries to run them off, but ultimately the cowboys gangrape her. She tries to report this to the local sheriff (Francis Francine), but he's only moderately interested - while some of Mickey's "brothers" try to pin the fault firmly on Julian, as a means to get rid of him. Nothing comes of this though, but in a bizarre twist, the sheriff becomes a crossdressing prostitute in Ramona's whorehouse. Ramona has (consensual) sex with Julian, then wants to commit suicide together with him - but while she dies he rides off into the sunset with one of the brothers ...

To put Lonesome Cowboys into some historic context: In 1968, spaghetti western was at its peak, with Sergio Leone releasing the seminal C'era una Volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West while Sergio Corbucci released two of his best movies, Il Grande Silenzio/The Great Silence and Il Mercenario/The Mercenary, while 1969 saw the release of two seminal westerns from the US, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Henry Hathaway's True Grit, arguably the best of John Wayne's late-in-life movies. Of course, Lonesome Cowboys wasn't designed to compete with any of these movies, it was shot for the (gay) underground and arthouse cycles, was only sporadically released even in its day, and owes its longevity probably more to Andy Warhol's name than anything else - which I don't say to put this film down in any way, as taken by itself, Lonesome Cowboys is a rather fascinating if highly experimental farce with highly sexual undercurrents - which by now of course don't feel nearly as offensive anymore as they must have back in 1968 - that shows a healthy disregard for standard cinematic language of the day. In fact, at times Lonesome Cowboys seems rather amateurish in approach, as it's oddly edited, some of the sound is horrible or clearly has car engines or planes flying by in the background, and not all the actors are up to the task - but that also gives the film a very unique, almost hypnitic feeling that manages to suck one right into the world of the movie. That said, the film is certainly not for everyone - but if you're in for something unusual, you'll very probably find this fascinating!

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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